When Work Hurts More Than It Helps: How One Team Reclaimed Control by Fixing the Way Work Worked
The Context
On paper, this financial services team looked like a leadership success story.
Smart, dedicated, and deeply committed.
They showed up early, stayed late, and genuinely cared about the clients they served.
Yet beneath the commitment was something else.
People were tired.
Not the satisfying tired that comes from meaningful effort.
The draining kind that comes from fixing problems that should not exist.
Fire drills had become routine.
Weekends disappeared into rework.
Morale slipped, not because of lack of effort, but because the effort felt futile.
The work was breaking the people.
The Emotional Toll
Analysts described their days as “never catching up.”
Managers privately said they felt they were constantly apologizing to clients, to their leaders, and even to their teams.
One senior leader confided,
“I hate that people assume we do not care. We care too much. The work keeps falling apart.”
It was tempting to blame motivation or accountability, but none of those were actually the problem.
The problem was how the work was constructed.
The Catalyst
When I was asked to review the operating model, I started with conversations, not flowcharts.
I listened to how people talked about their work.
Where frustration surfaced.
Where energy drained.
Very quickly, a pattern emerged.
A process that should have been simple, terminating a client account, had evolved into:
five separate workflows
ten departments needing notification
documentation so dense that no one referenced it
Everyone was working hard.
But they were working against the system, rather than inside it.
And that strain was exhausting them.
The Turning Point
Instead of asking for more accountability, we asked a different question:
“What if the work was easier to succeed at?”
That single question changed the tone of every conversation.
We brought everyone connected to the workflow into the same room and mapped what really happened, not what the procedures claimed happened.
The emotional moment came when someone reflected,
“No wonder we are always scrambling. This was never built to work.”
That realization lifted blame that had been silently sitting on people’s shoulders.
The Intervention
We dismantled the fracturing process and rebuilt it as one unified workflow.
Together, we clarified:
ownership
decision points
timing
handoffs
exception criteria
Notifications were automated.
Approvals were clearly defined.
People no longer had to chase information to complete their work.
The change was not only procedural.
It was emotional.
Teams no longer braced for breakdowns.
They no longer apologized for failures they could not prevent.
The Results
Within weeks:
Errors dropped
Escalations decreased
Rework time declined
Evenings and weekends returned to people’s lives
The most meaningful change was not captured in a metric.
It was visible in how people talked about their work.
Analysts said they felt they could breathe again.
Managers shifted from firefighting to coaching.
Team meetings became calmer and more forward-looking.
The work stopped hurting the people.
What Leadership Learned
A senior leader reflected,
“I realized I was asking my team to perform inside a system that was designed to fail. Fixing the process was the first time I actually gave them a fair chance.”
That insight reshaped their approach to improvement.
They began asking:
What is draining people here?
How do we design work so people succeed rather than struggle?
What is burnout trying to tell us about the structure of our work?
The story became less about operational control and more about creating conditions where people could thrive.
The Larger Lesson
When teams are exhausted, leaders often assume the issue is discipline or motivation.
But more often, the source of burnout lies in how the work is structured.
This case reinforces a truth many leaders overlook:
People do not burn out because they do not care.
They burn out because the system requires disproportionate effort to succeed.
When work becomes easier to execute, people stop fighting the system and start performing at their potential.
That is where transformation begins.
