The Leadership Friction  |  Edition No. 19  |  July 6, 2026

The Problem You Keep Solving

When a problem keeps coming back, it is not asking you to try harder. It is telling you that you have been solving the wrong thing all along.

There’s a problem in your organization you’ve solved more than once this year.

You handled it. It came back. You handled it again. Maybe you’ve stopped counting how many times, because handling it has quietly become part of the routine.

Here’s what that pattern is telling you. You haven’t solved it. You’ve been managing a symptom, and symptoms don’t stay gone.

Let me show you what I mean, because I watched a CEO learn it the hard way.

The Call

A department that kept falling behind

He called me about an area of the business that was falling behind. Thirty-five people. Deadlines slipping. Decisions stacking up. From where he sat, the read was obvious. The department was underperforming, and its leaders needed to pick up the pace.

Then he mentioned the detail that actually mattered, almost in passing. This wasn’t the first time.

They’d addressed the pace before. He’d had the meeting, reset the expectations, watched things improve for a few weeks, then watched them slide right back to where they started. He wasn’t calling me because the department was slow. He was calling me because it kept getting slow, no matter what he did.

That’s the part most leaders move past too quickly. A problem that comes back is not asking you to try harder. It’s telling you that you’re solving the wrong thing.

The Pattern

Why capable people keep missing

When I started working with those two leaders, the first thing I looked for was the performance problem the CEO described. I didn’t find it.

Both of them were capable. Neither was coasting. Neither lacked skill. If effort were the issue, I would have seen it, and it wasn’t there.

What I saw instead was a handoff that didn’t work.

The two of them had never built an operating rhythm between them. Decisions that should have been spread across the team defaulted upward, to one person. Communication broke at the exact points where the two of them needed to connect. And the thirty-five people underneath them had no reliable system to work inside, so they did the only thing they could. They waited: on decisions, on direction, and on each other.

The organization was moving fast. The department couldn’t, because everything was routed through a single point.

That is not a problem that effort fixes. Which is exactly why it kept coming back.

The Signal

The recurrence is the tell

Here’s what I’ve found after 15+ years of this work. Capable people do not all become incapable at the same time. When a good team keeps missing, something in the structure is producing the miss, and it will keep producing it until someone changes the structure.

So when a problem returns, that return is information. It’s the clearest signal you get that the thing you fixed was never the cause. You treated what was visible. The visible thing felt like the problem because it was the part making noise. But underneath it sat something quieter that nobody had named, and that quiet thing was still there the whole time, generating the same problem on a loop.

A problem that comes back is not asking you to try harder. It’s telling you that you’re solving the wrong thing.

Think about what the CEO kept trying to do. Each time the pace slipped, he was one decision away from adding headcount to a department that didn’t need more people. Or restructuring a team that wasn’t the problem. Or leaning harder on two leaders who were already working hard, which would have made the communication gap worse, not better.

Every one of those moves would have felt like leadership. Each would have bought him a few good weeks. And then it would have come back, because none of them touched the thing actually generating it.

The Fix

What actually changed it

So we stopped trying to fix the pace.

The harder work was the conversation the two leaders had been avoiding. They’d never talked honestly about how decisions really got made between them, or who actually owned what. It had felt easier to work around each other than to name the friction directly. Easier in the moment. But working around it was costing them their evenings and costing the team its momentum, week after week.

Everything DiSC gave them a shared language for how each of them made decisions and communicated under pressure. That mattered less as a tool and more as a mirror. Once they could see the pattern between them clearly, they could finally have the conversation they’d been sidestepping for months. From there we built the decision-making structure and the communication rhythm the department had never had.

The deadlines started getting hit. The CEO noticed the change without being told to look for it. And here’s the part that matters most for this edition. It held. It didn’t come back in three weeks. That’s the difference between solving a problem and managing one.

Here’s the question worth sitting with this week: what have you solved more than once this year, and what would it cost you to finally find out why it keeps coming back?