System Pullers: The High-Impact Improvement Levers Hiding in Plain Sight

Not all improvement efforts are created equal. Smart leaders focus their energy on those that elevate the performance of the entire system.

Jun 24, 2025

If you could fix just one thing in your organization, what would it be?

Not all improvement projects are created equal. Most leaders go after the visible issues. But the real prize is tackling what I call the system puller.

A system puller is a critical process, function, or leverage point that, when improved, delivers outsized, cascading benefits.

Improving a system puller reduces friction, increases flow, and unlocks performance gains far beyond its immediate scope. It creates positive ripple effects across the entire organization.

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A Case Study

Let me give you an example from a recent project. I was helping an HR team fix the process for onboarding new hires. We started with mapping the process and already saw plenty of opportunities to improve productivity and the new hire experience. We had decided early on to focus on hiring frontline workers who accounted for 90% of the hiring volume.

When I asked what their conversion rate for frontline workers was, I was told that for every 100 offers accepted, only 60 would complete their orientation - and only 30 would still be there after 90 days.

Ouch. That meant 70% of the hiring team's effort was pretty much wasted. In order to fill 900 open positions each year, the talent acquisition team had to hire 3000 workers.

Changing that ratio from 3 in 10 to 5 in 10 would mean that they only had to hire 1800 workers, which would reduce the team's workload by a whooping 40%.

But that was not all. It would also eliminate the number of new hires that needed to be trained, put on the payroll, enrolled in benefits, and off-boarded - a significant reduction in workload for the rest of the HR team.

And even more important, improving that ratio would have a significant impact on the entire organization. Hiring managers were scrambling to get the work done. The high turnover in the first few weeks meant more work for the remaining employees, who were already stretched to the limit.

We had found the system puller. Anything we could do to improve that conversion rate would deliver huge gains.

Realizing that, the conversation shifted. Instead of focusing on just reducing the effort required to onboard a new hire, the team decided to cast a wider net and look at the entire talent value chain.

Better targeting: The team decided to look at what candidates would be most likely to succeed. What differentiated new hires that would stay for a long time from those that would quit after a few weeks, and how could the team leverage those insights?
Leveraging employee referrals: A quick data analysis showed that candidates that were referred by current employees were much more likely to make it to the finish line. The team decided to revitalize its employee referral program and invest less in generic recruiting channels.
Faster conversion: The longer it took for new hires to complete the onboarding process, the more likely they would be to consider competing job offers. What could they do to reduce the time it takes to complete onboarding?

Those considerations prompted the team to expand the project into a comprehensive program focused on finding the best candidates.

The Power of System Pullers

Not every business has an obvious system puller. But I have come across several in my career, and have come to appreciate their power:

For a US-based manufacturer of generics who pivoted to becoming a contract development organization, the time it takes to complete a client project was the system puller. The faster they could finish a project, the sooner that product could get approved and commercialized. Anything that could do to reduce project cycle time would help the firm to compete against low-cost offshore providers.

For the R&D function of large pharmaceutical firms, the system puller is often the portfolio review process, where project teams present an update on their progress to secure funding and maybe even additional resources. That process involves preparing the inputs for the meeting as well as spending time to align with each functional head prior to the crucial meeting. These meetings included the most senior scientific and commercial leaders and presented high-stakes, so teams are prone to spend a lot of time preparing for it. In some companies, teams present at least once a year, creating hundreds of polished presentation slides just in case a question comes up. But all that preparation comes at a cost - the hours spent on preparing for the meeting is not spent on moving the asset through the process. The system puller is an effective and efficient governance system that balances decision quality and preparation workload.

How to Identify System Pullers

System pullers often hide in plain sight. Here's how to spot them:

Challenge your assumptions: System pullers sometimes hide behind “that is just the way it is” thinking. The HR team had come to accept the waste as a constant, the cost of doing business.

Focus on the big ticket items: Assess what activities consume the most time, presenting the biggest opportunity. Hiring frontline workers consumed most of the TA team’s capacity.

Measure the waste: Calculate efficiency ratios across key processes. In the HR example, 70% of the hiring effort was ultimately wasted. High waste ratios often indicate system pullers where small improvements create disproportionate value.

Calculate the multiplier: System pullers have high multipliers. The HR retention example didn't just reduce hiring workload—it reduced training, payroll, benefits administration, and operational strain across the entire organization.

The System Puller Mindset

Finding system pullers requires shifting from local optimization to systems thinking.

If you already have a list of potential improvement projects, ask yourself: “If we fix this, what else improves?”

If you do not have such a list, review the key metrics on your dashboard and ask yourself: “What would happen if we were able to improving this metric dramatically?”

Focusing on system pullers delivers compound benefits. It focuses limited improvement resources on those topics that move the needle most.

Remember: system pullers are force multipliers. When you find one, the investment in fixing it pays dividends across the entire organization. The challenge isn't just identifying them—it's having the courage to tackle the big, messy problems that create the biggest impact.

The next time you're prioritizing improvement projects, don't just look for the easy wins. Look for the system pullers. They're hiding in plain sight, waiting to transform your entire operation.