Most teams don’t fail because they lack talent.
They fail because responsibility never fully lands.
It drifts.
It blurs.
It gets shared until no one is truly holding it.
At first, this doesn’t look like a problem.
Work still happens. Meetings still fill the calendar. Deliverables still get checked off.
But momentum quietly disappears.
When responsibility floats, decisions slow.
When decisions slow, trust erodes.
When trust erodes, even the best teams start compensating instead of creating.
This isn’t a leadership issue.
It’s a systems issue.
Responsibility doesn’t live in titles or org charts.
It lives in clarity.
Someone has to hold the outcome — not manage it, not supervise it, but own it fully.
When no one does, the system reacts:
More process.
More alignment.
More explanation.
None of which restores forward motion.
Most teams feel this long before they can name it.
They sense the drag.
The hesitation.
The quiet exhaustion of work that should feel lighter than it does.
The solution isn’t speed.
It’s compression.
Fewer handoffs.
Fewer interpretations.
Fewer places for responsibility to dissolve.
When responsibility lands cleanly, things move —
not faster,
but truer.
