Doing the Work of a Nonexistent System

For a long time, I thought the exhaustion meant I wasn’t doing enough.

Not firm enough. Not organized enough. Not decisive enough.

Which is a very convenient lie, by the way… if the problem is me, then the solution is just more effort.

Turns out, I wasn’t underperforming. I was overfunctioning. I was doing the work of a system that didn’t exist. This is what happens in a lot of workplaces, especially small ones. When there’s no structure, people quietly become the structure. They remember everything. They smooth things over. They make judgment calls in real time, all day long, about things that should have been decided once and never revisited. It gets rewarded as dedication and it gets praised as flexibility.

And then, without much ceremony, it turns into burnout that everyone politely calls disengagement. We love to diagnose this as a motivation problem, a morale problem. or a leadership presence problem. Culture gets dragged into the conversation almost immediately.

But most of the time, the issue isn’t emotional.
It’s architectural.

When the system is missing, effort becomes compensatory. People absorb ambiguity like a second job. They carry unspoken expectations. They manage exceptions, edge cases, and “just this once” scenarios instead of doing the work they were actually hired to do.

I’ve seen this play out on teams that are sharp, capable, and deeply invested. The problem was never that they didn’t care. It was that everything depended on them caring all the time.

The shift happens the moment something external starts doing the holding.

Clear decision paths.
Visible expectations.
Defined handoffs.
Predictable consequences.

Nothing dramatic. Nothing inspirational. Just enough structure to stop asking people to improvise their way through the same problems every single week.

And yes, there’s data behind this. Research in organizational psychology consistently shows that clarity and role definition reduce cognitive load and improve performance, especially in complex, fast paced environments (Newman et al., 2020; Edmondson & Bransby, 2023).

What happens next often surprises leaders.

Things feel calmer.
Not slower. Not softer.
Just calmer.

That calm gets misread as complacency, but it isn’t. It’s capacity coming back online.

When people aren’t busy interpreting expectations or guessing where boundaries are, they can focus on execution. Energy stops leaking into confusion and starts going back into the work itself.

This is why well designed systems feel supportive without being suffocating. They don’t control people. They contain the chaos so people don’t have to.

Small businesses feel this contrast most clearly. Without layers of infrastructure, decisions and boundaries tend to live inside individuals instead of processes. The result is an intensity that feels personal, even when it’s entirely systemic.

Once teams intentionally design how work moves, how decisions are made, and how standards are reinforced, something important changes. The environment starts absorbing the weight people were carrying alone.

The best systems don’t announce themselves. They don’t require buy in speeches. They quietly make the right behavior easier and the wrong behavior harder.

When the system does the holding, people aren’t asked to be tougher, faster, or endlessly resilient.

They’re finally allowed to do the work they were hired to do.

References

Edmondson, A. C., & Bransby, M. L. (2023). Psychological safety and learning behavior in organizations: A review and future directions. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 10, 89–112.

Newman, A., Donohue, R., & Eva, N. (2020). Psychological safety: A systematic review of the literature. Human Resource Management Review, 30(3).