When we first start working with an organisation or a senior team, there’s something we pay attention to very quickly.

It’s not the strategy. Not the structure. Not even the capability of the people in the room.

It’s something more subtle than that.

We look for what the organisation has learned about effort.

That might sound slightly abstract, but it shapes the experience of almost everyone in your organisation. Because it determines whether people lean in, or quietly hold back.

For leaders operating at scale, this matters more than almost anything else, because it sits underneath the patterns you are trying to shift. It shows up in how consistently decisions translate into action, in whether initiatives sustain momentum or quietly lose it, and in how much ownership people take without being asked. Over time, these patterns reveal something deeper than performance. They reveal what people believe about whether their effort actually makes a difference.

There is a growing body of research that helps explain why this matters. In a recent Harvard Business Review article on high-agency leadership, Nir Eyal highlights that passivity is the brain’s default under sustained uncertainty. What has to be built, and continually reinforced, is the belief that effort changes outcomes. The article memorably calls it the “hope circuit,” the neural pathway that tells us our actions make a difference. When that belief is present, people act. When it isn’t, even highly capable teams begin to hold back.

What makes this difficult is that the shift rarely announces itself. It doesn’t show up as obvious resistance or failure. More often, it appears as a gradual loss of momentum. Work progresses, but more slowly than it should. Energy becomes uneven. Initiative narrows. The organisation continues to function, but not at the level it is capable of.

At that point, it is natural to interpret what you are seeing as a performance issue. To assume that expectations need to be clearer, or accountability stronger, or standards raised.

Sometimes that’s true.

But sometimes that explanation falls short and misses where the real leverage sits.

Because what looks like a performance problem is often something else entirely.

The Distinction: 

Performance follows belief.

What that means, in practice, is this. What people believe about effort determines how they perform. When that belief is strong, performance follows. When it weakens, performance fades.

This is why performance problems are often not performance problems at all, but belief problems.

In some cases, your team may well be underperforming. But very often, what sits underneath that is a loss of belief that it is worth performing.

At scale, that shows up as an organisation that has learned that effort doesn’t reliably change outcomes.

That learning doesn’t come from a single moment. It builds gradually, through experience. A decision that is made and then quietly revisited. A priority that shifts before work has had the chance to land. An idea that is encouraged, but never fully acted on. A leader who consistently overlooks the moment to acknowledge contribution or name what is working.

On their own, each of these is understandable. Together, they begin to teach the organisation something about how things really work.

And once that lesson takes hold, behaviour adjusts accordingly. People become more selective about where they invest energy. They contribute what is required, but are less inclined to go beyond it. From the outside, this can look like disengagement. From the inside, it is a coherent response to the environment.

And this matters more than it might first appear. It shapes the pace at which strategy turns into results, determines whether your best people stretch or slowly disengage, and influences how quickly your organisation can respond and adapt.

The power of this distinction is that the question shifts.

It is no longer how to extract more effort from the system, but how to restore the connection between effort and impact so that people can see and feel it again.

By doing so, your leaders can focus their attention where it has the most leverage.

Where, in your organisation today, do people experience that what they do actually changes something that matters?

Not eventually, or in principle. But directly, and in a way that is visible to them.

If people can’t see that clearly, they won’t invest their best effort—no matter how capable they are.

It’s not enough to say, as one senior leader said to me in a coaching session, “We pay them once a month. that’s thanks enough.”

In our work activating strategy and ownership, this is where the shift becomes real. We don’t start by asking people to try harder. We change the relationship they have to their own effort.

That begins with commitments.

Instead of vague alignment to priorities, leaders and teams make clear, public commitments to bold business outcomes. Not activity, but results they are willing to stand for - even when they don’t yet know exactly how they will be achieved.

Because once a commitment is made in that way, effort is no longer abstract. It is directly connected to something that matters. It becomes visible whether progress is being made, where it is stuck, and what is required next.

From there, the system starts to shift.

Requests become sharper.
Promises become clearer.
Progress becomes observable.

People can see, in real time, that what they do moves something.

In parallel, one of the simplest ways this begins to shift is through conversation.

If you want to change the culture, change what gets spoken about.

In many organisations, accomplishments are underplayed or skipped over entirely. People move quickly to what’s next, or assume that good work is simply expected. Over time, that creates an unintended signal: effort doesn’t really register.

Rebuilding belief often starts by reversing that.

By making it normal to name what has been achieved. To speak about where effort has made a difference. To remove the quiet hesitation that can come with calling out progress.

Not as self-promotion, but as clarity. Because when people can see that their effort leads to impact - and hear it reflected back - they begin to believe that what they do actually matters.

And this doesn’t happen by accident. Leaders have to create the space for it.

Space in meetings to pause and acknowledge progress.
Space in conversations to reflect on what has actually moved.

Space for people to connect their effort to real outcomes.

In many teams, it’s not that impact isn’t happening - it’s that it isn’t being captured.

And when it isn’t captured, it isn’t believed.

Over time, that combination, clear commitments and visible impact, rebuilds the belief that effort matters.

And when that belief returns, the behaviours leaders are often trying to drive start to appear without being forced.

You begin to see more ownership. More initiative. More momentum.

Not because you demanded it. But because it now makes sense to give it.

A question to sit with

What has your organisation learned about effort?

Not what you intend it to learn.

What it is currently learning, through the patterns people experience every day.

Because once you can see that clearly, you are in a position to reshape the belief that drives it and, in doing so, change how your organisation shows up without needing to push harder.