The Chain Breaks Somewhere

I was listening to a talk by the spiritual teacher Sadhguru on leadership, and one line stuck with me: he talked about "dragging feet" employees — the ones who aren't causing problems, they're just coasting — and he made the point that firing them isn't really a fix. It just resets the problem, it doesn't solve it.

That matched something I've seen play out more than once running a business.

You don't fix a team by pointing out who's not pulling their weight. You fix it by quietly doing their job for them — once — and letting them watch what it costs.

Someone's coasting. Not lazy, exactly. Just going through the motions. Instead of calling it out, I just do the task myself. No speech. No "we need to talk."

But I was already doing something else. So now that gets dropped, or delayed, or someone else has to cover it.

And that's when it clicks. Not because I said anything — because they watched the chain break in real time. My attention went somewhere it shouldn't have had to go, and someone else — a teammate, a member, whoever was waiting on me — felt it.

That's the part people miss about accountability in a group: your slack doesn't disappear. It just moves to someone else's plate.

This isn't just a "management" thing. It's true in any group where people depend on each other — a team, a coaching staff, a small business, even a friend group planning something together. The person coasting usually isn't a bad person. They just haven't seen the cost yet, because someone else has been quietly absorbing it.

You don't always need a confrontation to fix that. Sometimes you just need to stop absorbing it long enough for them to see it themselves.