Even the best systems break when you lean on them too long.
I was at a friend’s house recently, talking and laughing in her kitchen. Without warning, her fridge went berserk—beeping, flashing lights, the whole bit. Even her ice/water dispenser stopped working.
I jumped back, convinced I had done something inadvertently to make the fridge mad. Pushed a button, or moved it off its center somehow.
After a bit of investigation, the fridge just…needed a reset.
Am I going to relate this to leadership? Absolutely. What else is a blog post for?
We think we’re just asking for “a little bit more” from our teams. A little more productivity. Collaboration. Resilience. But that “little more” compounds into full-body weight.
And when people get leaned on too hard for too long, they don’t always tell you something’s wrong. They just shut down. Quietly. Until the breakdown is so visible you can’t ignore it.
Like that fridge, you can press all the buttons you want—incentives, urgency, accountability frameworks—but none of it works if you don’t first reset the system.
When we talk about reset and burnout, it’s usually through the lens of PTO. But in reality, it’s taking a structural, systemic pause to say: How did we overload the system? How did we build our work cadence, culture, or expectations in a way that made burnout the inevitable outcome?
People can handle pressure. Teams can stretch. But without intentional resets—and proactive recovery points—even the highest-performing systems will fail.
The real question isn’t whether your team can handle more pressure—it’s whether you’re building in the resets that prevent the breakdown in the first place.
What would that look like for your team?
Hey there! I’m a leadership team whisperer, executive coach, and speaker. I guide leadership teams in high-growth companies to achieve rapid growth in a healthy, sustainable way. I coach senior leaders to discover the path to lead with ease.
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