It’s Friday evening. Your car sits in the driveway. The engine is still running, your hand is on the key. But you don’t turn it off yet.
Because you don’t actually want to go inside. Not yet. Not with this feeling in your stomach.
The business is doing well. Revenue is growing. The team is expanding. On paper, you’re doing everything exactly the way the textbooks describe.
And yet, it feels as if you’ve been living the same week over and over for months now. The same meetings. The same discussions. The same frustrations. As if your team has been set in concrete, and you’re trying to chip them loose with a teaspoon.
If this sounds familiar, you’re in good company. In twenty years of working with scale-up entrepreneurs, leadership teams and elite sports coaches, I see this moment show up every week. The moment when a leader silently admits: my team is stuck.
The good news: it’s almost never a talent problem. It’s almost always a structure problem. And structure is solvable, once you know where to start.
In this article I take you through the signals that your team is stuck, the causes, the hidden costs, and the method I’ve seen work in thirty scale-up coaching engagements: the PITPACK method.
Why you’re the last one to notice your team is stuck
A team gets stuck in ways you don’t immediately see. As the leader of a growing organisation, you’re actually the person with the least visibility on what’s happening in your team day to day. Sounds strange? I get it.
But think about it for a moment. You sit in customer meetings, investor updates, strategy sessions, supplier calls. You hear only the conclusions. The raw conversations, the energy in the hallways, the stories told after lunch: all of that you miss.
That’s why you don’t see anything is off. Until the numbers show you. And by then, you’re late.
Here are three signals that always show up before the numbers do. If you recognise at least one of them in yourself, it’s time to read on.
Signal 1: Everything is “fine”, but nothing is moving
You ask on Friday how the week went. The answer: “Fine.” “Going well.” “Busy but okay.”
That word, fine, is a red flag. Because fine is the language of a team that has stopped voicing ambition. Fine means: no arguments, but also no fire. No complaints, but also no dreams.
A team that’s growing doesn’t sound fine. A team that’s growing sounds frustrated, passionate, sometimes excited. Fine is the funeral of energy in your organisation.
Signal 2: You’re the busiest person in your own company
You eat your lunch standing up. You’re already behind on Monday morning. You plan your week on Sunday night. And your people? They look relatively relaxed.
That’s not a sign of good leadership. That’s a sign of bottleneck leadership. You have become the bottleneck. All the stress in the company runs through your head.
That’s not how elite sports coaches work. They stand on the sidelines, shout instructions, and let their team play. If the coach is on the field, you no longer have a team. You have a one-person act with 40 supporters in matching gear.
Signal 3: Your team brings you problems, not solutions
“Boss, can you take a look?” Do you hear that sentence often? Several times a day? From several people?
Then your people have learned that thinking for themselves carries risk, and asking you is the safe choice. They bring you the problem. You give the answer. They execute.
That looks efficient, but it’s the exact opposite. Every problem that lands on your desk disappears from the team. Ownership evaporates. You get busier. They get more passive. And no one dares say it out loud.
Recognition check: 10 signs your team is stuck
Take two minutes. Read the points below. Tick honestly what applies to your situation.
- I find myself having to repeat things more and more often.
- Important decisions still end up on my desk.
- My management team waits for my opinion before offering theirs.
- I spend my evenings clearing work that should have been done during the day.
- I feel lonely in my role, even though my calendar is full of meetings.
- Our new hires deliver less than I hoped.
- Top performers who left didn’t really leave with enthusiasm.
- Our weekly meetings end without real decisions.
- I doubt myself as a leader more often than I admit.
- When I’m on holiday for two weeks, things don’t run as smoothly as I’d like.
Three or more ticked? Then your team is stuck. Or about to be. Keep reading. Because when a team is stuck, the way back to movement is more concrete than you think.
Why a team gets stuck exactly where it should be growing fastest
There’s a stubborn misconception in entrepreneur land: if you just work hard enough, everything will be fine. More hours. More clients. More people. More processes. More growth.
But scale-ups don’t work that way. A company of fifteen people runs on trust and enthusiasm. A company of fifty runs on structure and rhythm. And a company of a hundred runs on leadership that makes itself redundant.
Somewhere between fifteen and a hundred people, the nature of the work changes completely. What made you successful as an entrepreneur (hands-on, fast switching, knowing everything yourself) is exactly what blocks your next stage of growth. The qualities that took your company from 0 to 1 get in the way of taking it from 1 to 10.
That’s not failure. It’s a transition phase. Except: no one ever prepared you for it. You taught yourself the old way. And no one hands you a manual for when to unlearn it.
The second problem: scale-ups rarely get the leadership investment they need. Big companies have HR, leadership development, coaches. Small companies run on instinct. Scale-ups are caught in between. Too big for improvisation, too small for an internal leadership practice.
Result: most scale-up leaders learn by trial and error. Usually more error than trial. And sometimes so hard that the company doesn’t survive it.
The hidden costs of a stuck team
If your team is stuck and you do nothing about it, you pay the bill on four fronts. Long before the numbers show it.
1. Your talent leaves. And takes your future with them. Top performers can smell stagnation a mile away. They don’t stay in a team that says fine. They leave for a competitor where they can actually grow. And they take their network, their client relationships and their knowledge with them.
2. You make worse decisions. Because you’re exhausted. A leader who finishes every evening at eleven makes different choices than a leader who rests on Sunday. Burnout is not a badge of honour. It’s a strategic risk for the whole company.
3. Your growth stalls. While your competitor keeps firing. While you’re busy internally putting out fires, your competition is winning market share. Every month you lose to standstill is a month you’ll never get back.
4. You lose yourself. And they feel it. Entrepreneurship that feels heavy is entrepreneurship that doesn’t last. Your family notices. Your partner notices. Your health notices. And eventually your team notices, and that’s the deadliest blow to your culture.
This isn’t doom thinking. This is what I hear first in nearly every coaching engagement once entrepreneurs finally dare to be honest. They thought hard work was the solution. They discovered it was the problem.
What stuck teams are missing: the seven building blocks of a top team
After twenty years of working in both elite sports and business, I see the same pattern everywhere. In every team that gets stuck, at least one of seven things is missing. Not more. Not less. Always those same seven.
I’ve bundled them into what I call the PITPACK method. Seven English words, chosen deliberately because I work internationally. From Schiphol to Kigali, from Amsterdam to Nairobi. Leadership, it turns out, revolves around the same seven things everywhere in the world.
If you want to learn the method from A to Z with all the real-world examples, you’ll find that in my book My Best Team Ever! (second edition, available in Dutch). Below you get the core of all seven steps.
The PITPACK method: 7 steps to Golden Leadership
1. Phases: What phase is your team actually in?
Teams aren’t in one fixed state. They move through phases: forming, storming, norming, performing. Every team goes through these phases. Even if you think you’ve long left them behind.
Most entrepreneurs lead their team based on where they think the team is. Not based on where the team actually is. That’s like a football coach giving the same instructions during practice as during a final.
Phases means honest observation. Is your management team still in the storming phase (clashing, claiming territory) while you already expect performing? That’s where the frustration is coming from.
Ask yourself: what phase is my team actually in. Not what I hope, but what I see?
2. Involvement: Being present is not the same as being involved
There’s a world of difference between being there and being involved. Presence is physical. Involvement is mental, emotional, personal.
People become involved when they experience that their contribution matters. Not when they hear it in a town hall speech. But when they feel it every day. In how they’re listened to, what happens with their ideas, what room they get to play.
A team without involvement is a team that executes. A team with involvement is a team that thinks with you. The difference lies in that one word.
3. Trust: The trust that makes growth possible
Trust is the most complicated word in leadership. Everyone says: “I trust my people.” And it’s almost never completely true.
Real trust means giving your people room to make mistakes. Not in theory. In practice. It means not walking behind them, not double-checking everything, not putting their email in CC just to make sure it’s going well.
Trust is the difference between a team that feels controlled and a team that feels carried. Without trust, nothing new happens. With trust, almost anything becomes possible.
More on how you as a leader concretely organise that trust, in 5 Signs Your Team Has Outgrown You.
4. Processes: Processes that help, not hostage
Most scale-ups don’t have a process shortage. They have a process overdose. Every new problem in the past produced a new process. And that process was never switched off again.
Good processes accelerate your team. Bad processes replace thinking with ticking boxes. The question I ask every leader: what process could we scrap tomorrow without anyone missing it?
If you can give five answers to that question, you know where it’s choking.
Ask yourself: which process has served its purpose and is ready to go?
5. Accountability: Ownership in both directions
Accountability is often confused with control. But it means something completely different. It means: someone owns an outcome, and we hold each other to it.
That last part, holding each other to it, is where most teams get stuck. Everyone is responsible. No one is addressed. So responsibility dilutes into an idea, not a practice.
Accountability is two-way traffic. You ask your team for ownership. Your team asks you for clarity, room and feedback. Without that second half, the first half doesn’t work.
More on this theme in My Management Team Lacks Ownership and Delegate Like a Pro.
6. Communication: From sending to landing
This is where I catch most leaders out. Including myself. We send a message. We tick it off. We move on.
But communication isn’t about what you send. It’s about what lands with your team. And between those two sits a world: noise, agendas, busyness, interpretation.
My first manager Leen taught me that once with a single phrase: répéter, toujours répéter. Repeat, always repeat. Leadership is not about saying something clever once. It’s about repeating what matters. Until it lands.
Repeating is not weakness. It’s taking responsibility for clarity.
7. Key: Your unique key as a leader
The seventh step is more personal than the rest. What makes you, you, a key for your team? Not your title. Not your method. But what is the unique thing that makes your team better because you’re there?
For one person it’s a clarity others don’t have. For another it’s calm in crisis. Others are strong at seeing people, smelling talent, making decisions where others hesitate.
If you don’t know your key, your team feels it. Then you work hard without a trace of distinctiveness. Then you’re interchangeable. And interchangeable leaders don’t build teams that make other people unforgettable.
Finding your key isn’t an afternoon’s work. But it’s the most important search you’ll do as an entrepreneur.
How do you recognise which PITPACK step applies to you?
Most teams get stuck on one weak link, not on all seven. The thing is, you often don’t see that weak link. Because everything looks the same from the surface.
A simple test to find your own weak spot: go through the seven steps and give each a score between 1 and 10. Honestly. Not too rosy.
- Phases: How clearly do I see what phase my team is actually in?
- Involvement: How involved does my team really feel?
- Trust: How much room do I give my people to fail?
- Processes: How many of our processes actually help us?
- Accountability: Who in our team really holds whom to account?
- Communication: Does what I mean actually land with my team?
- Key: Do I know what key I am for my team?
The lowest score is your first work area. That’s where your bottleneck sits. Not at the highest score. There you can already breathe.
What changes when you apply PITPACK?
This is where it gets interesting. Because scale-up entrepreneurs who apply these seven steps consistently, in order, with patience, see something remarkable happen.
After three months meetings start to feel different. Decisions are made instead of postponed. You get fewer emails asking “can you take a look”. People do what they’re good at and discuss their doubts with each other instead of with you.
After six months your calendar changes. Your evenings come back. You work fewer hours and deliver more. Not because you work harder, but because you no longer do the wrong work. Your team carries what it can. You’re finally working on the questions only you can answer.
After twelve months you return from holiday and discover that the team kept running without you. Decisions were made. Clients were helped. Problems were solved. Without a single panic call. And that. That’s the moment you know you’ve truly made it.
This isn’t fantasy. This is what I’ve seen in real engagements, with leadership teams of scale-ups in tech, food, healthcare, logistics and aviation. With teams of fifteen and of a hundred and fifty. It works.
More on what a team that actually top-performs looks like, in The Secret of High Performance Teams.
Where do you start tomorrow? Three concrete actions for this week
Reading an article is easy. Changing something is harder. So here are three actions you can carry out this week. No extra budget, no consultant, no big reorganisation.
Action 1. Ask one question differently. Choose one theme where your team is stuck. Instead of “why isn’t this done?” ask “what do you need to get this done?” Listen for twenty minutes. Say nothing. See what happens.
Action 2. Scrap one process. Go through your week and find one meeting, one report or one approval step that no longer contributes. Ask your team: would we really miss this if we stopped? The odds are the answer is no. Stop it. Use the freed-up time for something that does contribute.
Action 3. Repeat one thing. Choose one message you consider important this quarter. The strategic direction. A behavioural change. A value. Say it this week in three different ways to three different groups. And ask each time: what do you hear in this?
Three small actions. One week. Together they lay the foundation for something bigger.
Frequently asked questions about the PITPACK method
How long does it take to implement PITPACK?
The seven steps are not a linear project with an end date. They’re a way of looking at your team that stays with you for life. First visible changes often show within three months. Structural change within six to twelve months. And it keeps deepening. New leadership questions ask for a new round of attention on the seven building blocks.
Is PITPACK only for big companies?
No. I apply PITPACK with teams from six people up to organisations of more than a thousand employees. The principles are universal; the execution differs by scale. For scale-ups in the phase between twenty and a hundred people, PITPACK is particularly effective, because that’s exactly the phase where old informal leadership stops working.
What’s the difference between PITPACK and other team methods?
There are many good methods on the market. PITPACK stands out on three points. One: it works from both the leader and the team, not one or the other. Two: it’s built on twenty years of practice in business and elite sports, so not purely academic. Three: it’s not about policy or structures, but about the human foundations on which everything else is built.
Can I apply PITPACK myself or do I need a coach?
Much of what’s in this article you can take on yourself. The book My Best Team Ever! is written as a workbook with exercises. Many leaders work with it independently and get far. For complex trajectories, like a stuck management team, a merger or a difficult succession, guidance works faster. You accelerate the process, avoid blind spots, and prevent yourself from falling back into old patterns under pressure.
Where does the name PITPACK come from?
PITPACK is an acronym for the seven steps: Phases, Involvement, Trust, Processes, Accountability, Communication, Key. I deliberately chose English terms because I deliver my leadership programmes across multiple countries. From the Netherlands to African aviation companies, where I’ve been training management teams for eight years. The seven steps turn out to work across languages and cultures.
Find out where your team stands: in three minutes
If you’ve made it this far, you already sense somewhere what needs to happen. You feel where the weak link is. You see which step needs attention. Now it’s about doing something with it.
The fastest way to discover where your team stands on the seven PITPACK steps is the Team Growth Quickscan. Three minutes. Eleven questions. Immediate insight into where your bottleneck sits and what your first action could be.
It’s free and gives you a concrete starting point.
Start the Team Growth Quickscan →
Want to go deeper into the method, with all practical examples, worksheets and step-by-step plans? Then my book My Best Team Ever! 7 Steps to Golden Leadership is the logical next step. Now in its second edition, written from thirty years of practical work.
And when it’s time to work together on your specific situation: get in touch. In a first conversation we’ll look at where your team stands and whether my guidance is a fit. No sales pitch. Just an honest look at whether it matches.
Because your team doesn’t have to be stuck. And you don’t have to sit exhausted behind the wheel of your car on a Friday evening. There’s another way. And it’s closer than you think.
