Why Single-Threaded Leadership Beats Multitasking for Big Goals

It’s a familiar problem: a high-priority initiative gets stuck because everyone involved treats it as one more item on a too-long to-do list. Deadlines slip, meetings meander, and no one can quite say who’s responsible. In practice, this is what happens when leadership is distributed—sometimes with good intentions. But ambitious goals rarely move forward as a side job.

Teams that win big pick a single-threaded leader: one person, freed from competing priorities, who becomes obsessed with the project’s success. When Amazon wanted to build a fulfillment platform for third-party sellers, the early months dragged—busy executives kept getting pulled into unrelated fires. It wasn’t until an executive was relieved of all other duties and given budget to build a dedicated, separable team that real momentum began. The new leader, focused and undistracted, tackled bottlenecks head-on, set clear goals, and charted the entire path.

This approach isn’t common outside top-performing companies. Organizational inertia pulls people into multitasking—yet studies consistently show that divided attention tanks both output and morale. By unchaining a leader from other business lines and curbing conflicting roles, projects pick up speed. The science is straightforward: single-threaded attention reduces decision delays, increases ownership, and makes recognizing both triumphs and failures far clearer.

When roadblocks persist, ask who’s really in charge—and if they’re free to focus. If not, you know what to do.

First, go through your most important but lagging projects and check if responsibility is diluted or people are juggling too much—write down where the real focus issues are. Then, assign or volunteer one dedicated leader for each initiative, making sure their calendar and job scope stay fixed on this goal. Build a team around them whose only concern is the completion and quality of this project, with no outside distractions. Give them room to make decisions and remove day-to-day dependencies that would otherwise slow things down. Try it on a key effort and see how focus delivers breakthroughs; you’ll be surprised by the results.