The Hidden Cost of Ignorant Diligence

I was sitting at my desk late the other night listening to a leader in an organization we support talk about a team that had been giving them trouble. 

This team was led by what they described as a charismatic high performer. He had a reputation for executing well and generally speaking “always getting the job done”. They were dependable and predictable. Until they started leading their function. 

The promotion had been a death nail for their productivity.

He was able to manage-up and make it seem like everything was great. But it wasn't, results began to slow, timelines are now being missed regularly, engagement is down and apathy is up. It was impacting teams across various siloes.

People across the function were doing their job but nothing more - they execute what has been asked of them but their brains are off. Everyone was looking for a way to say they had done their job and avoid doing anything better.  

Their leader had created a culture or ignorant diligence as a result of his own.

This was a case where the leader is waking up every morning with good intentions - but lacking the right skills to move beyond the task and into the realm of leadership. A form of ignorant diligence on its own.

The performance of this function was getting so bad that new leadership was being considered but also a wider intervention because it had become a cultural issue not just a staffing one. The losses due to poor performance were significant and fishing the problem was going to be a challenge that came with its own costs.

Why it happens

In organizations across industries, leaders are often promoted based on their ability to execute tasks rather than their ability to lead people. 

This approach creates the phenomenon of ignorant diligence—the tyranny of effort obsession and the pursuit of getting more done without the wisdom to put effort where it counts.

The persistent pursuit of tasks, goals, or results without the necessary competence, awareness, or consideration of broader consequences. This is a trap for where individuals are promoted or retained based on task execution rather than leadership ability, leading to the unintended erosion of team morale, innovation, and psychological safety. It reflects a misguided focus on short-term efficiency at the cost of long-term effectiveness.

The easiest way I can describe it is how we hear it from clients: “We don’t have time,” they say—but somehow, work takes forever to get done.

It’s not laziness. It’s not incompetence in the traditional sense. It’s something more insidious: effort without effectiveness. People working hard, doing their part, checking the boxes—yet nothing really moves forward. It’s like watching a rowing crew out of sync: lots of splashing, little progress.

And behind it, we often find three deeply human forces at play.

Apathy: The Quiet Killer

I like to say to leaders ‘The problem with apathy is that you’ll have a hard time seeing it happen”

Apathy doesn’t arrive all at once. It seeps in, slow and subtle. It begins when people feel their contributions no longer matter—when they stop being seen, heard, or valued. At first, it looks like politeness. People smile and nod. They show up. They do the job. But something’s missing.

No one pushes the work further. No one challenges the process. Meetings are quiet. Projects stay surface-level. Innovation stalls—not because the team is incapable, but because they’ve stopped believing their effort will make a difference.

Apathy is the cultural equivalent of oxygen deprivation. Work might go on for a while, but eventually, the system collapses.

The shift? 

• Start recognizing and re-humanizing. 

• Ask for input. Show that it matters.

•  Celebrate the way people work, not just the outcome. 

• Give people a reason to care by making it matter to THEM first.

Plausible Accountability: The Illusion of Ownership (Check out our recent blog on plausible accountability here)

This one’s tricky—because on the surface, it looks like

accountability. Tasks are assigned. Deadlines are discussed. Everyone agrees in the meeting. But once people leave the room, ambiguity takes over.

Who’s really owning the outcome? What does success look like? When will we know if we’re off track?

We’ve worked with organizations where “accountability” is just a word people use to signal urgency—but without the structure to support it. It’s like handing someone the steering wheel of a car… that’s still on cruise control.

This is perhaps the most pervasive consequence of leaders who lack awareness, skills and confidence that comes from training. The nice thing about it that you can hear it

“I need you to communicate better”

“Whenever you interrupt someone I need you to stop yourself, ask them to proceed, apologize when they are done and acknowledge their contribution by integrating it, asking questions to understand it or appreciating the new thinking it offered. Try to be as consistent as you can be over the next week and you can tell me what has changed in your conversations at our next 1:1”

What actually works? 

• Making ownership real and visible. 

• Name the owner, define the outcome, and create space for check-ins that go beyond updates—they go into reflection, support, and recalibration. Accountability without clarity is just theater.

Breaking the Cycle

So how do we move forward? How do we escape this trap of ignorant diligence—of promoting for performance but punishing for leadership missteps we never trained for?

We start by changing what we value.

• Promote character, not just competence.

• Invest in leadership as a craft, not a reward.

• Reward those who make others better—not just themselves.

When we do this, something powerful happens: teams start thinking again. They stop checking boxes and start asking better questions. People speak up. They lean in. They challenge each other with respect.

And perhaps most importantly, our leaders begin to feel proud—not of what they’ve done, but of who they’ve helped others become.

That’s the kind of diligence worth pursuing. The kind that sees beyond the task and into the heart of what leadership really is: the courage to serve, the skill to build, and the wisdom to know the difference.