The Key to Speed: Keeping Your Backpack Empty
The fastest teams are the least weighed down
A question came up in team practice last week: for a team on a fast growth trajectory, what’s the most important thing to focus on to make sure they succeed?
When the question was asked, the team was digesting the full list of tools we teach in the Elevate Program. At the heart of the question they wanted to know: which of these tools is most important for us.
It’s a great question. And the answer someone offered in that conversation is worth passing along.
The thing that helps a team move fastest is staying clean with each other.
When things are moving fast, and decisions are stacking up, it’s easy for frustration to build. For disconnection to creep in. In small ways you don’t even notice at first.
The analogy that came up: you’re hiking up a hill and little by little, rocks are getting added to the backpack you’re carrying. You don’t really notice it or feel it happening. Then one day you realize you’re hauling eighty pounds. You aren’t briskly walking up the hill anymore, you’re trudging.
What slows us down isn’t usually one big thing. It’s all the little things you didn’t put down.
It’s Not One Magic Tool
If you’re building a team that’s trying to grow fast, it’s tempting to look for one tool, the one framework, the one system that will keep everyone aligned. But that’s not really what makes a team move faster than everyone else. (Don’t get me wrong: a smooth operating system is absolutely vital. But a perfect operating system can’t overcompensate for a dysfunctional culture.)
What makes the biggest difference, in my opinion, is a team’s ability to hold each other accountable. To give feedback. To keep bringing tensions into the open instead of letting them sit. To have the uncomfortable conversation instead of deciding it’s not worth the friction.
“Letting something go” can feel like the fast move. Skip the hard conversation, keep the momentum, get over it. But that’s exactly the thing that comes back around and slows you down more than anything else. Because we aren’t really letting things go. All we did was throw them in our backpack.
Skill Isn’t Enough
Here’s the easy part to miss: you can teach a team how to give feedback well, and it still won’t matter if they don’t trust each other.
If the emotional bank account between two people isn’t in a good place, the ability to format feedback becomes less relevant. Knowing how to say something isn’t the same as being in a relationship where you feel safe to say it and where it can actually be heard.
That’s why this isn’t a one-time fix. It’s not “now that we technically know how to structure feedback, we’re set.” It’s a stacking effect of trust, of practice, of choosing again and again to name what’s true instead of glossing over it. It’s built over time, the same way the weight in that backpack builds over time. Just in the other direction.
Why This Matters More When We’re Growing
A lot of the teams we work with are in exactly this spot: growing, moving fast, adding people and decisions and complexity all at once. That’s precisely the environment where little tensions accumulate the fastest, and where it’s easiest to convince yourself there’s no time to deal with them.
This is one of the clearest places where culture stops being a soft add-on and becomes a strategic advantage. Not because it feels good. (Although, it does.) But because a team that stays clean with each other genuinely moves faster than one that doesn’t.
Working this muscle is exactly what allows you to capitalize on the growth opportunities in front of you.
