Your Team Isn’t the Problem. The Workflow Is.

I’ve led training teams where everything should’ve worked. Good people. Smart designers. Clear goals.

And yet… we’d still get stuck.

Projects dragged. Feedback got lost. Morale dipped. And I’d find myself wondering: Why does everything take so long?

It took me a while to realize the issue wasn’t effort or talent. It was the way work moved—or didn’t—through the team.

Where Things Break Down

If you manage a training team, you’ve seen this:

• A simple project takes months because no one knows who’s doing what
• Feedback loops stretch into rewrites with no end
• Designers get dragged into every project, not because they should—but because they’re fast and dependable
• Your team is buried in requests but unclear on priorities
• You, as the manager, spend most of your time chasing updates or cleaning up confusion

This isn’t about performance. It’s about clarity. And it’s usually buried inside your everyday process.

More Time Doesn’t Fix It

Too often designers would tell me giving a project more time meant it would turn out better. That if we just held one more meeting or refined the review process, we’d get a stronger result.

What actually happened? We got slower. And everyone got more frustrated.

More time rarely makes a better decision – in fact, it never does. It just delays the outcome. And making changes doesn’t always make something stronger—it just makes it different.

What Actually Helped

What moved us forward wasn’t new content, another image or a fresh strategy. It was asking one question: Where does the work get stuck?

We mapped it out. Not the official process—the real one. The messy, behind-the-scenes version that no one wants to admit to. And once we saw the friction, we started making changes:

• Shorter project windows forced better decisions up front
• Clear roles reduced the back-and-forth
• Early check-ins replaced long, looping reviews
• Done became more valuable than perfect

The result? Projects moved faster. People had more focus. We weren’t chasing ghosts.

You Don’t Need to Overhaul Everything

This isn’t about reworking your whole system. It’s about spotting what’s slowing you down and removing it—quickly.

Don’t wait for the perfect process. Don’t spend weeks deciding how to work. Pick one friction point and fix it. Then another. Then another.

Because a training product that’s 80 percent done and delivered is more useful than a 95 percent masterpiece no one sees.
Because speed doesn’t sacrifice quality—confusion does.
And because your team doesn’t need more complexity. They need more flow.

If your team feels stuck, don’t ask how to work harder. Ask how to work cleaner.

And then move. Fast.