Written by Michiel R. De Boer
The project had been the hardest thing any of them had ever done professionally. Eighteen months of sustained intensity: late nights, compressed deadlines, decisions made under conditions of incomplete information. They had lost weekends. They had cancelled holidays. The team had developed, in that crucible, a kind of closeness that most of them had never experienced at work before. They trusted each other completely. They communicated without formality. They made calls quickly and moved on without the usual organisational friction. They were, by every observable measure, an exceptional team.
When the project delivered: on time, on scope, to genuine applause from the leadership: the team gathered for a celebration dinner that most of them remember as one of the best professional evenings of their lives. They were proud of what they had done. They felt, together, the specific satisfaction of having survived something difficult and produced something real.
Three months later, I was talking to the team leader. Several of her best people had requested transfers. The team’s current project: a smaller, steadier piece of work, important but not urgent, was running behind and producing low-quality outputs. The energy that had characterised the team at their peak had simply evaporated. People were doing the minimum. Some were calling in sick more than usual. The meetings that had once been electric were now flat.
“I don’t understand it,” she said. “It’s the same people. Why are they so different?”
Because they are not the same people, I told her. Not exactly. They are people who have been running at an unsustainable level for eighteen months, who have depleted reserves they cannot yet replenish, and who are now discovering that the thing that held them together was the crisis, not the team.
Urgency As False Glue
Urgency is one of the most powerful motivating forces available to a team. It aligns everyone’s attention on a single priority. It compresses decision-making. It creates a common enemy: the deadline, the threat, the external pressure, that replaces the need for leadership to align individual agendas, because the situation has done the alignment work. It removes the social friction of differing priorities and preferences and replaces it with the clear, shared answer: we all need to get this done.
None of this is a problem in itself. A team that cannot mobilise around urgency is a team that will be slow, fragmented, and easily distracted. The problem is not urgency. The problem is mistaking it for team culture.
Team culture is what remains when the urgency is gone. It is the shared values, norms, and practices that govern how the team operates in normal conditions, not in extremis, but in the steady, ambiguous, less-than-critical work that constitutes most of what any team actually does. Teams with strong culture perform well in ordinary conditions and perform extraordinarily under pressure. Teams whose apparent strength is built on urgency alone perform well under pressure and poorly in ordinary conditions, because the ordinary conditions remove the false glue that was holding everything together.
That distinction carries real practical weight. An organisation that primarily exposes its people to high-intensity, crisis-level work develops teams that are crisis-adapted and everything-else-unadapted. When the crisis ends, what is revealed is not a resilient team. It is an exhausted group of people who have been running on external fuel for so long that they have not developed the internal motivational resources that would sustain them in its absence.
What Burnout Actually Is
Christina Maslach’s foundational research on burnout, developed across four decades of study and codified in the Maslach Burnout Inventory, describes it as a multidimensional syndrome rather than a simple state of exhaustion. Three dimensions interact: emotional exhaustion: the depletion of the emotional and cognitive resources required for engagement; depersonalisation, also called cynicism: the distancing, detachment, and reduced investment in the people and work; and reduced efficacy: the declining sense that one’s work is producing meaningful outcomes.
What is important about this model is that burnout does not look the same in all three dimensions simultaneously. A person can be highly exhausted while still showing good performance outputs, because their commitment and competence are carrying them through the exhaustion. In the period immediately after a high-intensity project, many team members are in exactly this position: depleted, but functional. The depletion is invisible until the urgency that was sustaining the functional layer is removed.
When the urgency lifts and the normal conditions return, the exhausted person does not spring back. They decelerate. The depersonalisation dimension begins to activate: the work that seemed meaningful in the crisis context seems smaller and less important in its absence. The efficacy dimension follows: without the clear feedback signal of a crisis, where you always know whether things are going well or badly, and the outcome of your effort is immediately visible: the more ambiguous, slower-feedback environment of normal work produces a reduced sense of impact.
The neuroscience is relevant here. Sustained periods of high stress elevate cortisol levels and activate the HPA axis: the hormonal stress response system. Under acute, time-limited stress, this is adaptive: it sharpens focus, increases energy, and prioritises threat-relevant processing. Under chronic, sustained stress of the kind that an eighteen-month project produces, the accumulated effect (what researchers call allostatic load) damages cognitive function, emotional regulation, and immune response. The body’s recovery from this level of depletion is not a matter of weeks. It is a matter of months, and for some people, longer.
The team that burned out did not burn out when the project delivered. They burned out during the project. The post-delivery phase simply removed the urgency that was masking the depletion.
The Team Cohesion Illusion
One of the most disorienting aspects of the post-crisis collapse is the discovery that the team’s cohesion, which felt so real, so earned, so durable, was partly a function of the conditions rather than the team.
Research on social cohesion in high-stress groups, including military psychology, first responder studies, and organisational research on project teams, consistently finds that crisis conditions produce temporary cohesion effects that are not reliably predictive of longer-term team performance. The shared enemy, the compressed time horizon, the visible interdependence of the crisis create genuine bonds. But those bonds are tested, not formed, by what comes after.
The test is whether the team can maintain trust, collaboration, and mutual investment in normal conditions, when the stakes are lower, the feedback is slower, and there is no external pressure forcing everyone’s priorities into alignment. Many teams discover, in this test, that what they had was situational solidarity rather than genuine team culture. It was real, but it was conditional.
This is not a failure. It is a starting point. Situational solidarity is the raw material from which genuine team culture can be built, but only if the organisation understands the difference and invests in the transition. Left unmanaged, the situational solidarity dissipates and the team fractures, as people process their exhaustion privately and begin to re-evaluate what this environment actually costs them.
What Organisations Typically Do, And Why It Makes It Worse
The typical organisational response to a high-performing crisis team is to deploy them immediately to the next high-priority challenge. They delivered. They are exceptional. The next problem needs exceptional people. The logic is straightforward.
The consequences are predictable.
A team that is asked to sustain crisis-level performance indefinitely does not sustain it. The first project they produce at peak performance. The second they produce at degraded performance. By the third, they are performing at a level that would have been unremarkable from the beginning, and they are now not just depleted but disillusioned, because the thing they gave so much of themselves to has been treated as a baseline expectation rather than an exceptional contribution.
The message the organisation sends through this pattern, whether it intends to or not. The message is that extraordinary effort is the floor, not the ceiling. That the sacrifice was not a temporary requirement for a specific situation, but the permanent condition of belonging to this team. This is one of the most reliably demotivating conclusions a high performer can reach. It triggers the recalibration described in Piece 3: the private decision to give the amount of themselves that the organisation has demonstrated it will protect, which is now visibly less than everything.
Practical Recommendations
Build recovery into the project lifecycle as formally as delivery. A project that ends without a defined recovery period is a project that is spending future capacity. Organisations that run their best people at maximum intensity continuously are borrowing performance from future periods without acknowledging the debt. Define recovery periods explicitly, with protected time that genuinely protects: no major new deliverables, no stretch demands, space for the slower work that requires the kind of reflective thinking that is not available in crisis mode.
Invest in team culture in ordinary conditions, not only in crises. The crisis builds solidarity. The ordinary conditions are where culture is actually formed. If the only time a team has shared experiences of meaning, connection, and high performance is under pressure, the team has not developed culture: it has developed crisis adaptation. Invest in the relationship-building, the shared norms, the way the team discusses its own work and learning, in the periods between high intensity. This is the foundation that makes the next crisis productive rather than damaging.
Build the intrinsic foundations before the extrinsic urgency arrives. A team that is already motivated by purpose, autonomy, and mastery does not depend on the crisis for its fuel. It brings its own. The practical implication: before deploying a team into a high-intensity project, invest in ensuring that the three motivational foundations are solid: that people understand why the work matters and believe in it, that they have genuine ownership of how they approach it, and that the work will develop their capability in ways they value. With these foundations in place, the crisis is genuinely productive. Without them, the crisis is extractive.
Conduct an honest debrief: not a celebration, an examination. After a high-intensity project, the standard organisational response is a celebration and a move on. What is more valuable, and much rarer, is a genuine examination of what the project cost as well as what it produced. What would we do differently to protect the team’s sustainability? What signals of burnout did we miss? What did we learn about how this team works under pressure, and what do we want to preserve and what do we want to change? This conversation, held with appropriate honesty, produces learning that improves the next project. The celebration alone produces momentum that the next project depletes.
Watch the three months after delivery. The post-delivery period is when burnout manifests. Not during the project, when the urgency is sustaining performance, but after it, when the urgency is gone and the depletion becomes visible. This is the period for check-ins, for genuine one-to-ones that ask about energy and motivation rather than delivery status, for attention to the signals: increased absenteeism, reduced quality, withdrawal from meetings, transfer requests, that indicate the team is struggling rather than recovering.
The Sustainable Team
The team that performs brilliantly under pressure and sustains that performance after is not a myth. It exists, and it is built on a different foundation from crisis adaptation.
Sustainable high-performance teams have strong intrinsic motivation that does not require urgency to activate. They have clear accountability structures that allow them to make decisions and maintain momentum in normal conditions. They have a culture of productive conflict, built in ordinary times, that means they do not need an external enemy to align their priorities. And they have leaders who understand the difference between performance management and people management, and who take the wellbeing of their teams seriously not as a welfare consideration but as a performance one.
When a team with these foundations encounters a genuine crisis, they are extraordinary. When the crisis passes, they continue. Not at crisis-peak intensity, that would be neither possible nor desirable, but at a sustained level of quality and engagement that does not require the pressure to remain in place.
The crisis-adapted team performs brilliantly under pressure and averagely everywhere else. The sustainably motivated team performs well everywhere, and brilliantly when it genuinely matters.
Building the second kind of team is harder in the short term and incomparably better in every way that the long term measures.
The Question Worth Sitting With
Think about the team that delivered your organisation’s most demanding project in the last two years.
What happened to them in the three months after delivery?
If the honest answer is that you do not know, or that you moved them into the next high-priority challenge before you had time to find out, that is the question worth sitting with. The depletion was already there. The urgency was simply masking it.
This is Piece 7 of an eleven-part series exploring the patterns behind organisational dysfunction: and what the GITO® Approach reveals about addressing them at the system level.
The next piece moves from the team to the organisation: The strategy offsite that produced a brilliant plan nobody implemented: the gap between insight and execution, and why it is almost always a people problem in disguise.
