Elevarse Performance Consulting

We are witnessing a massive spike in “public CEO meltdowns” and a pervasive decline in workforce well-being. While it is easy to look at a struggling employee and assume it is an individual issue—a personal crisis, a lack of resilience, or burnout—the data suggests something far more contagious.

When one person is not OK, it is likely a complex web of personal factors. But when thirty people are not OK, it is rarely a coincidence. It is a systemic failure.

The Viral Nature of “Not OK” In highly interdependent organizations, overwhelm spreads virally. When one team member falters, the support gap widens for everyone else, pulling them into the “blast radius” of negative energy and increased workload.

If you are seeing clusters of burnout, you need to stop acting like a therapist and start acting like a detective.

Three Systemic Suspects to Investigate: According to recent insights from Melissa Swift in MIT Sloan Management Review, wide-scale wellness issues usually point to one of three structural flaws:

1. Fractured Job Design: Are you asking people to do the impossible? If effort feels futile because demands keep escalating, even the most resilient employees will break.
2. Incentive Misalignment: Are you paying people to burn themselves out? If your incentives reward speed over sustainability, you are engineering your own turnover.
3. The Bully in the Room: Large pockets of “unwellness” often layer back to a single leader who is a bully. The negative impact of this behavior is measurable and destructive, affecting even those who merely observe it.

The Strategic Pivot: Mitigate, Then Investigate Your immediate move must always be compassionate mitigation—ensuring safety and distributing workloads evenly. But your next move must be structural.

Don’t just treat the symptoms. Audit your ecosystem. If you don’t address the root cause, you aren’t leading; you’re just managing the decline.

Next Step for Leaders: Conduct a “Blast Radius” audit. Identify the teams with the highest rates of absenteeism or turnover and look for the common denominator—is it the workload, the incentives, or the leadership?

#OrganizationalCulture #HRStrategy #SystemicChange #ExecutiveLeadership #TalentManagement

https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/your-people-are-not-all-right/