I have pushed a boulder up a hill.
Not literally, though there were days it felt close enough. I mean the specific experience of working hard, caring genuinely, bringing everything you have to the job in front of you, and still feeling like something is working against you that you can't quite name or locate or fix. The effort is real. The commitment is real. The results just don't seem to reflect either of them.
If you have felt that, you know it's one of the more demoralizing experiences a working person can have. Because it doesn't feel like failure, exactly. It feels like friction. Like the ground itself is tilted wrong, or the path you've been pointed down is harder than it needed to be, or somewhere nearby there's a cart and a set of horses and nobody thought to mention them.
I spent years in that experience before I had language for what was creating it. And what I eventually understood was that the boulder wasn't the problem. The hill wasn't the problem. The problem was that nobody had stopped long enough to ask whether pushing was actually the right answer.
That question, why are capable people working this hard and still feeling stuck, is one I've never been able to leave alone.
Most of the time, the answer isn't the people.
It's what the people are being asked to carry.
There is a particular kind of organizational drag that capable people are especially good at absorbing. They compensate for unclear processes because they're resourceful enough to figure it out. They fill accountability gaps because they care enough to make sure things don't fall through. They adapt to inconsistent information, work around broken systems, and carry institutional knowledge that was never documented because they're the kind of people who take ownership seriously.
And for a while, it works. The boulder moves. Progress happens. From the outside, and sometimes from the inside, it looks like a team that's functioning well.
What it actually is, is a team spending a significant portion of its energy on things that were never supposed to be their job.
This is the part that I think leaders sometimes lose sight of, not because they stop caring, but because they've been removed from the feeling of the work long enough that they've forgotten what it actually costs. They remember the deliverables. They remember the outcomes. What they sometimes forget is what it feels like to be told to push the boulder because that's how it's always been done, to ask why and be given something close to "because I said so," to work hard every day with the quiet sense that the effort isn't landing where it should.
Most people don't quit over workload. They quit over that feeling.
And the feeling is almost never about the work itself. It's about what the work costs relative to what it produces. When capable people spend their energy compensating for structural friction, the return on their effort goes down. Not because they're working less. Because too much of what they're working on is invisible, unrecognized, and structurally unnecessary.
That last word matters. Structurally unnecessary. The friction isn't random and it isn't inevitable. It accumulated. Through workarounds that became permanent, processes that were never quite documented, systems that grew around the people using them rather than the other way around. The capable people on the team didn't create it. They inherited it. And because they're capable, they absorbed it quietly, which is exactly why it went unaddressed for so long.
High performers hide organizational debt better than anyone. That is one of the more important things I've learned working inside a lot of different organizations. The team that never misses a deadline despite a broken process isn't proof that the process works. It's proof that the people are good enough to compensate for it. And compensation has a cost, even when it's invisible, even when nobody is tracking it, even when the only evidence is a team that always delivers but never quite feels like it's winning.
That gap between delivering and winning is worth paying close attention to.
Because if your team is working hard, they have earned the right to feel like the effort is going somewhere real. Not to have everything be easy, not to be protected from difficulty or the genuine hard work of building something. But to feel like the friction they're fighting is necessary friction, not accumulated debt that everyone stopped questioning a long time ago.
The businesses I have watched struggle most are rarely the ones with talent problems. They're the ones where talented people quietly stopped believing their effort was connecting to anything. Where the boulder kept moving but nobody could say with confidence where it was going or why this particular hill was the right one.
And the businesses I have watched thrive are almost always the ones where the leader never forgot what it felt like to push, and cared enough to ask whether pushing was still the right answer.Systems matter. Structure matters. Process matters. VerraForge spends a lot of time helping organizations build all of those things. But systems are the cart. They exist to make the work of capable people more effective, not to add to the load those people are already carrying.The machine of a business is not its technology or its tools or its org chart or its strategy deck.
It is the people inside it, doing real work, every day, on a hill that should be getting easier to climb. Pay attention to whether it is.