When someone on a team starts to drift, the diagnosis is almost automatic. The person has a discipline problem, and the cure is more accountability: clearer expectations, tighter deadlines, more visible consequences.
Damian Creamer thinks the reflex is wrong.
The founder and CEO of Primavera Online School and StrongMind considers it one of his genuinely contrarian beliefs.
“I don’t see disengagement as a work ethic problem,” Creamer says. “I see it as an alignment problem. When there’s a real connection to the ‘why,’ effort feels lighter and momentum follows. When there isn’t, even small tasks feel heavy, no matter how capable someone is.”
The Orthodoxy Damian Creamer Is Pushing Against
Most businesses treat motivation as the individual’s responsibility. A professional, in that framing, delivers consistent, high-quality work regardless of personal interest or emotional connection to the mission. Discipline, process, and pressure are supposed to be enough.
“You can produce acceptable work that way,” Creamer says. From his perspective, however, you can only get so much out of a workflow built on pressure and discipline.
“Great work requires extreme ownership, curiosity, and an extra level of thought that’s hard to fake. When people care about the outcome, the quality goes up, the thinking gets sharper, and accountability shows up naturally.”
Accountability, in Creamer’s framework, is a byproduct of alignment. When the connection to the why is real, accountability emerges on its own.
When it is missing, no amount of process manufactures it convincingly. You can compel attendance and output.
You cannot compel the extra level of thought that separates great work from adequate work, and that is precisely the part that matters most.
Why the Reframe Changes a Manager’s Job
If disengagement is a discipline issue, the manager’s move is to apply more pressure. If disengagement is an alignment issue, the first question is no longer “How do I get this person to try harder?” It becomes “Where did the connection between this person and this work break down?”
That second question is harder because it asks whether the role itself still makes sense.
Creamer’s framing also reaches back into hiring. If alignment is the variable that determines whether someone does great work, then a hiring process built almost entirely around capability is incomplete.
“It’s really hard to do truly great work on something you don’t actually care about,” Creamer says.
The Uncomfortable Part
If a capable person has lost their connection to the work, the explanation may not be a flaw in them.
It may be a failure to communicate the why, or a mission that was assumed rather than genuinely shared, or a role that evolved past the thing that once made it meaningful.
That possibility is uncomfortable, which is exactly why the discipline narrative is so durable. Blaming an individual’s work ethic keeps the analysis simple and keeps it pointed away from leadership. It also, in Creamer’s view, keeps results average.
His argument distilled is this: average is what you get when you treat people as interchangeable units of execution.
Greatness is what you get when you treat alignment as a leadership responsibility rather than an employee virtue.
How It Shows Up at StrongMind
This theory is visible in how Creamer runs StrongMind, the K-12 learning platform he has spent more than two decades building.
His read on why ideas succeed reflects the same logic he applies to people. “Ideas don’t come to life because they’re brilliant,” he says. “They come to life because they’re aligned, actionable, and owned.”
Within this framework, the question stops being “Are people busy?” and becomes “Are people working on what matters most, and do they understand why it matters?” Those produce very different cultures.
The Test for Managers
Before reaching for the accountability playbook, ask: Does this person understand the why behind the work, not just the what? Has that why genuinely been communicated, or merely assumed? Does the day-to-day work still reflect it? And is this person in the right seat to contribute to it?
If the answers are uncomfortable, the fix might be redefining the role, or it might be clarifying or even reframing the mission itself. What it is not, in Creamer‘s framework, is more pressure on someone who has already lost the thread.
“When there’s a real connection to the why, effort feels lighter and momentum follows,” Creamer says. It is a deceptively simple observation, and in his experience it is the difference between a team that performs and a team that does great work.