Your Team's Dysfunction Has Nothing To Do With Your Workload

Read Time: 4 minutes.

Your team is working hard. Nobody's coasting. And somehow, nothing's working.

You reorg. You hire. You lean into coaching individuals. Six months later, everything is different, except the same dysfunction.

Here's what's actually happening: you're trying to fix the wrong things.

It’s no wonder you feel overwhelmed.

Worse, management dysfunction shows up as one symptom, but it comes from three completely different sources. You can fix two of the three and still end up spinning.

Every team’s design has three levels that all need to align:

The Game. What winning actually means. How it's measured. Set by your company, by you, or some hybrid of both.

The System. How you've organized people to play that game. Roles, responsibilities, handoffs.

The Player. Who's actually in each seat, and whether they're excellent at it.

Let’s make this real. I'm an Arsenal fan. This week they kick off their EPL title defense. The rules of soccer are fixed. That's the game. Their manager, Mikel Arteta picks a formation and a style of play. That's the system. Then, he selects from 25 or so players to pick the ones who’ll play best in their position within the system. That's the player.

In sports, all three levels are clear.

In business, the manager is the source of the clarity for all three levels.

But here’s the trick: dysfunction shows different symptoms at each level. If you spot the symptom, you know where to look for the root cause.

Vague on the Game: everyone's confused. No shared definition of winning. People work hard toward different finish lines and nobody notices until the deadline.

Vague on the System: responsibilities go uncovered. People collide, duplicate work, or wait on each other with no clean handoff. You keep adding headcount and 1+1 never equals 3.

Vague on the Player: individuals grind. Real effort, real hours, real intent. And they go nowhere, because nobody defined what excellent looks like for their specific seat.

Same underlying dysfunction on the surface. Three completely different fixes underneath.

Here's what ties all three together: the ability to visualize excellence, compare reality against it, and decide whether the gap is an improvement or a problem.

At all three levels.

Most managers never separate the three, so they misdiagnose constantly. A player problem gets treated like a system problem. Reorg the team, nothing changes, because the actual gap was one person in the wrong seat. A game problem gets treated like a player problem. Someone gets coached hard for missing a target that was never clearly defined in the first place.

Wrong level, wrong fix, same dysfunction next quarter.

AI doesn't build this visualization for you at any level. If anything, it fills whatever gap you leave, and it fills it somewhere between reasonably and sloppily. And if you don’t know what excellence looks like, it can be hard to spot the difference.

Vague on the game? AI will write you a clean set of OKRs. They'll look sharp. They'll measure the wrong thing, because you never told it what winning actually means.

Vague on the system? AI will design you a tidy workflow. It'll look efficient on a slide. It'll create more counterproductive collisions, because it inherited your unclear handoffs and organized around them anyway.

Vague on the player? AI will draft you an employee scorecard. It'll read like it was written by someone who knows the role. It'll miss what actually matters for that that role needs to be done in your company, because you never defined it yourself.

Same judgment required to direct AI is the same judgment required to direct the people before AI existed. The tool doesn't remove the need for judgment. It just executes the absence of it faster, and at scale. That's how slop gets into a system that used to have people screaming about the gaps.

Get the visualization right at all three levels, your team gels and AI becomes serious leverage.

Done well, it doesn't just let you hold more roles in your head. It frees the capacity to design more elaborate systems and go after bigger, more lucrative games entirely. You're not managing five people because that's your full capacity. You're managing whatever span your visualization can support, because AI is handling the administrative collection and dot-connecting that used to eat your day.

It gives you the bandwidth to keep asking, constantly: Has the game changed? Is the system still the right to win it? Is every player excellent? And to apply judgment fast enough that your adjustments decide the outcome.

It not how much span you can control.
It’s effectively your visualization can scale.

Lead on,
Dave & Mar

PS. September 10 is our next MGMT Second Brain workshop. 3 hours, live build. One of the first skills people install is an AI coach that pressure-tests your thinking and helps you refine your approach to different people on your team.

It’s how a chat becomes a Chief of Staff.

PPS. And seriously, come learn Claude Cowork with us. It’s free. And less than an hour.