A team can hit every target and still fail at something fundamental: making its way of working sustainable.
Dashboards report delivery, deadlines and growth. They rarely show who made up for a missing decision, replied late at night, corrected contradictory instructions or prevented a poorly designed process from becoming a customer-facing mistake. That invisible work may be the difference between a system that works and one that only appears to work.
Extraordinary effort can conceal ordinary dysfunction.
In some organisations, “team spirit” has become a flattering name for permanent compensation. One person translates vague priorities. Another absorbs disputes that nobody resolves. A third anticipates coordination failures so the service continues uninterrupted. The output looks respectable. The cost does not make the meeting agenda.
Repeated often enough, this effort is no longer treated as exceptional. It becomes expected. The system learns that it need not fix the cause because someone will always prevent the consequences from becoming visible.
What gets recognised shapes what people repeat.
If visibility matters more than quality, people learn to display activity. If instant availability is rewarded over clarity, priorities become hostage to whoever interrupts most loudly. If firefighting brings prestige while prevention goes unnoticed, the organisation begins to rely on emergencies to identify talent.
Culture is therefore not simply about declared values. It is about the decisions that carry consequences: who sets priorities, who is allowed to challenge them, what happens when someone makes a mistake and whether additional work is acknowledged before it becomes exhaustion.
Leadership should not simply praise resilience. It should examine the conditions.
Good leaders look for work that depends on effort no plan accounts for. They reconsider how responsibility is distributed, clarify decision criteria and protect uninterrupted time. Crucially, they distinguish a legitimate period of high demand from a system that requires everyone to operate at crisis intensity as a matter of routine.
The goal is not to remove every difficult day. It is to stop treating poorly distributed pressure as commitment or mistaking human overcompensation for organisational efficiency. Explore the book’s three movements ↗
A result may be excellent evidence of delivery and poor evidence of long-term sustainability.
O Teu Próximo Passo explores this tension across professional identity, work systems, leadership and the human conditions of organisational performance. The book, published in Portuguese, asks not only what work delivers, but what it costs to keep delivering.