Lately, we’ve been hearing a lot of the same themes from our community. There’s a widespread feeling of exhaustion out there – not just from the sheer volume of work, but from constant context-switching, trying to figure out what an ‘AI-native’ workplace looks like, and the friction of trying to scale teams without breaking culture.

During our recent Global Chats – which are informal, fireside conversations we host with leaders from our community – we noticed these same patterns popping up.

We heard it when Sean Westcott talked about leading through a literal crisis in Europe. It came through when Griff Davenport spoke about stepping into strategic advisory after 4O years of growing an architecture firm, when Caitlin Gleeson broke down Canva’s leadership framework, and in Nick Petrie’s latest research on burnout and resilience.

When you look at these four perspectives together, they don’t feel like separate conversations. They feel like a collective attempt to solve a single problem: how do we protect the human engine of our businesses while everything around us is accelerating?

The logic of stepping aside

When corporate tension rises, the natural reflex for most organizations is to tighten the grip. We build more approval layers, we demand more reports, and we try to manage the chaos by holding onto the steering wheel a little tighter.

But if you look at examples how highly successful, complex systems actually scale, the reality points in the opposite direction.

Take Griff Davenport’s experience at DLR Group. He spent decades growing the firm before transitioning from CEO to Chairman. You would think someone who poured their life into an organization would want to keep their hands on the operational levers. Instead, Griff realized that his continued presence in day-to-day decisions was actually a bottleneck for the next generation of leaders.

“I knew that I couldn’t continue to take that front seat and do all of that, or the new leader would have zero luck,” Griff told us. “I spent more time figuring out when I needed to be in the room versus when I didn’t need to be in the room… I just didn’t want people always looking at me for the answer.”

It provokes the question: how much collective capacity is locked up in organizations simply because leaders are sitting in rooms they don’t need to be in.

At Canva, they’ve actually given this boundary a name. They call it ‘handing over your Legos’. Caitlin Gleeson explained that as the company grew from a tiny startup to thousands of people globally, holding onto your favorite projects became a risk to growth.

“We need to scale the org and scale our impact so rapidly that you can’t keep holding onto your Legos,” Caitlin noted. “You need to hand over your Legos so that you can then continue to step up.”

And we heard a complementary perspective from Nick Petrie, whose research for his book Burn Bright focuses on ‘thrivers’ – outliers who sustain peak performance without burning out. Stepping back isn’t just an executive strategy; it’s a physiological necessity.

Nick notes that leaders moving at such a fast pace at work often suffer from ‘boundary confusion,’ crash-landing into their personal lives without winding down. Thrivers master a ‘controlled re-entry,’ intentionally using their commute or end-of-day rituals to clear their mental whiteboards. When leaders don’t release their grip, they don’t just micromanage during the day; they ruminate at night, replaying operational loops long after hours.

By distributing agency as a leader, you aren’t just checking a team empowerment box. You’re clearing your mental whiteboard and can actually rest. It’s one thing to apply this to our evening routines, but it takes on a completely different weight when the stakes are high.

Sean Westcott saw this play out in the extreme while leading PepsiCo’s R&D team in Europe during the onset of the conflict in Ukraine. He explained how when the environment is moving that fast, the executive team in a distant office literally cannot have the answers.

“I realize I can’t empower anybody,” Sean said. “What you can do is create a space of empowerment where, and then encourage the people in those situations to use those principles, to use that space of empowerment to take the decisions and to coach those people in those moments.”

Good friction versus bad systems

As people developers, we often talk about creating the right environment for growth. Think about the last time you actually grew as a professional. It probably wasn’t during a comfortable, perfectly optimized week. It was likely when you were thrown into a situation that made your palms sweat a little.

Griff shared a story about being asked to help open DLR Group’s Salt Lake City office when he was only 27. He admitted he barely understood the business, let alone how to run a practice. But that deliberate push into a space where he felt unready became the catalyst for his entire career. He later used that exact philosophy to develop the firm’s talent pipeline, intentionally nudging leaders into a state of ‘modest discomfort’.

“The company did the right thing by pushing me out there,” Griff reflected. “Pushing people to a place of a modest level of discomfort is OK… you’ll learn a lot by experiencing things that you don’t have a ton of confidence in at the outset.”

But there is a line here, and it’s one that Caitlin articulated beautifully in the follow up Q&A of her chat. As she explained, there is a world of difference between ‘productive friction’ (the heat experiences and colliding perspectives that stretch our thinking) and ‘unproductive friction’ (the administrative clunkiness, bad tooling, and outdated policies that just exhaust people).

Canva focuses its system design on aggressively removing the unproductive stuff so that leaders have the energy to face the productive heat.

“We want to design thoughtfully to ensure there is enough productive friction in the system while removing the unproductive friction,” Caitlin explained.

Sometimes, removing that unproductive friction means throwing out the corporate rulebook entirely to protect your people. Sean recalled a moment during the crisis when his local team in Ukraine requested simple laptop power banks so they could work from bomb shelters during rolling electricity outages.

Standard corporate policy dictated that contractors weren’t eligible for hardware upgrades. It was classic unproductive friction. Sean didn’t argue with the policy; he worked with corporate management to bypass it in 24 hours. He realized that in high-pressure environments, work was actually serving as a welcome distraction and a source of agency for his team.

“If you’re not prepared to be sympathetic and to really deeply listen to people and to hear their stories and also to feel some of their emotions, I think it’s very difficult to help… But through reflection, through conversation, you can actually discover and understand the needs of your team and be able to respond to them,” Sean said.

Protecting the collective

This brings us to perhaps the most urgent trend we are hearing in our conversations: the illusion of productivity.

We have more tools, slicker communication channels, and faster technology than at any point in history. Yet, macro data shows organizational productivity has largely stagnated. We’re moving faster, but we aren’t necessarily moving forward.

Caitlin brought up a concept called ‘AI brain fry’ – the cognitive exhaustion caused by constant context-switching and interacting with always-on systems. When we reward people for being constantly visible and instantly responsive, we aren’t driving performance. We’re just draining their cognitive real estate.

Nick Petrie’s research shows that sustainable impact has nothing to do with a continuous, linear grind. True performance relies on ‘pulsing’ – a deliberate rhythm of intense output balanced by disciplined restoration. But an individual can’t maintain that pulse if the culture around them rewards constant visibility over actual impact.

It requires what Griff calls ‘leadership capital’ – a deep reservoir of trust that a company builds with its people long before they ever need to call it in. Griff noted that DLR Group built that capital through an uncompromised commitment to a ‘listen first’ approach.

He explained that when you have leadership capital, you can have transparent, difficult conversations about productivity and schedules during tough times because the team knows the trust is real.

Ultimately, you can’t build a sustainable performance ecosystem with a clever policy or a wellness perk. The culture is simply a reflection of what the leadership team models when the pressure is on.

In his chat, Sean described how his executive team completely transformed their own dynamic. They moved away from a traditional, competitive ‘alpha’ boardroom by introducing a practice where presenters scored the executives on their behaviors at the end of every single meeting. They forced themselves to look in the mirror and make changes.

“There’s no business situation where kindness, compassion, whatever you call it, is something that you can set aside,” Sean said. “It’s actually something that you have to find in every situation. And I’m firmly convinced that if you do that, you’ll get the best outcome.”

Connecting the dots

These perspectives combine to highlight that organizational capacity is often built by bringing fresh awareness to the underlying rhythms of how our leaders show up, experiment, and recover.

That’s what Adeption’s Be Conscious, Be Curious, Be Better (B3) methodology enables – a framework that embeds reflection and growth into everyday work. It gives leaders a practical cadence to slow down and become conscious of their own context and mindset, connect with others to stay curious about alternative perspectives, and then focus on getting better through real-world, on-the-job experimentation. It’s about shifting the operating rhythm of leaders and organizations, one small trial at a time.

If you’re looking to bring this perspective into your next alignment or strategy meeting, these three reflection prompts are a practical place to start:

• How much cognitive real estate is going toward navigating administrative complexity versus exploring new strategic growth edges?
• Do your current performance metrics recognize and reward leaders for stepping back to build team capability, or is the focus entirely on tracking individual craft output?
• When you observe the current operating rhythm of your culture, does the pace resemble a continuous, linear grind, or is there a visible cadence of intense output balanced by intentional recovery?