This is Why Your Team Stalls... And No One’s Talking About It
Many leaders are confused when their team seems to have everything it needs, and yet the team still stalls.
I see this all the time in my coaching. For example, one leader was working with an engineer that was clear on their goals for the project, was highly skilled, and the relationship was good.
And yet, this person kept missing important deadlines. Decisions took longer than they should. They kept hesitating to move forward on important actions. And when something didn’t go as planned, they abandoned the task.
He said to me,
“I don’t understand. They have everything they need and they’re still not moving fast enough.”
I agreed. It was confusing behaviour. But while he was focused on fixing the external system: goals, structure, process.
What he hadn’t considered was something far less visible, and far more powerful: The internal capacity of the person inside that system.
Which leads me to the most misunderstood thing about the study of positive psychology.
When people hear positive psychology, they tend to think of happiness and just making people feel good. And I understand why they make that connection. But that’s not what the science is really about.
What Positive Psychology Actually Studies
We don’t focus on making work easier because work is not getting easier. It’s getting waaaay harder.
Instead, we help people become stronger than the work.
And people need that these days.
So if you’re not building the psychological capacity of your people while you’re all working hard, people cannot perform the way they used to.
The economic and technological climate is just too complex these days. Which means your teams need to adapt as much as the climate or else you and your company will be left behind.
Here's What This Looks Like in Practice
Let me share a few other examples of things I have seen with my clients:
In one organization, a leader told me she felt like she had to be involved in every decision. Her team kept coming to her for answers, even when they were capable of figuring things out themselves.
In another, a team had strong technical expertise but struggled to move forward when their first plan didn’t work. They would pause, reassess, and often stall, waiting for certainty before acting again.
And in a third, a highly experienced executive team avoided challenging each other directly. Not because they didn’t have opinions, but because they weren’t confident those conversations would go well.
There's a Name for This
This is where the work of Dr. Fred Luthans becomes incredibly useful. He introduced the concept of Psychological Capital, which describes four internal capacities that drive how people show up at work:
What’s important here is that these are not fixed traits. They are developable capacities.
And they directly influence whether people:
take initiative
persist through obstacles
recover from setbacks quickly and productively
believe they can solve problems without waiting for direction
Once you start looking through this lens, you see things differently.
→That leader who is pulled into every decision? It’s not just a delegation issue. Her team may not yet have the confidence to move forward without her.
→That team that stalls when a plan fails? It’s not a strategy problem. It’s a hope problem. They have not learned branch thinking and how to generate alternative pathways.
→That executive group avoiding difficult conversations? It’s a mix of optimism that the conversations will go well and resilience to handle the discomfort.
Understanding Hope in the HERO Model
Now let me start by saying a few things about ‘hope’ because I think it’s one of the most misunderstood concepts in this model.
I remember being at a conference years ago when a speaker mentioned some research on how hope contributes to performance in an organization. I happened to be sitting beside the CEO at the company and she turned to me and said “Hope? I would have no idea how to build that!”
That’s because often we just think it’s about wishful thinking.
But in the research, hope is highly practical.
And interestingly, research from Fred Luthans and colleagues has shown that hope is strongly related to outcomes like job satisfaction and performance.
Which makes sense.
People don’t feel good at work because everything is easy. They feel good because they can see a way forward.
People want to make progress.
In my last newsletter, I talked about clearing external barriers to performance; unclear roles, messy decisions, unspoken tension.
Those matter.
But this is the other side of the equation.
Leaders also need to clear the internal barriers that slow people down.
Using the HERO model, here are four simple ways to start:
High-performing teams don’t rely on one plan. They generate multiple paths forward. When something gets stuck, ask:
“What are three different ways we could approach this?”
This simple shift moves teams from feeling blocked to feeling capable.
Confidence doesn’t come from encouragement alone. It comes from evidence. Break work into smaller steps. Acknowledge progress, not just outcomes. Ask:
“What have you solved like this before?”
When people see that they can make progress, they start to believe they can handle more.
Resilience is not about avoiding problems. It’s about recovering quickly. After something goes wrong, resist the urge to dwell. Instead, ask:
"What worked? What didn’t? What do we do next?"
Momentum matters more than perfection.
Optimism isn’t blind positivity. It’s how people explain what’s happening. When setbacks feel permanent, widespread, or personal, people get stuck.
High-performing teams reframe them as: temporary, specific, solvable.
As a leader, ask:
“What’s within our control?”
“What part is solvable?”
“What’s still working?”
This isn’t about ignoring reality. It helps people stay grounded in it while still believing they can move forward.
The Real Work of Leadership
So the real work of leadership is not just to structure a high-performing external environment, but to pay attention to the internal friction that might be getting in the way of high performance.
The kind that lives inside people:
→ Doubt.
→ Narrow thinking.
→ Fear of getting it wrong.
You can’t remove that with process. But you can build something stronger in its place. Psychological capital.
Most leaders are working hard on the external environment. The goals, the structure, the process.
This is an invitation to look inward, at the people inside that system. If you'd like help doing that work, connect with me.