Project Failure Files – Pushing the Team Too Hard

In Episode 79 of the Project Failure Files weekly webcast, our focus was “Squeezing the Last Drop from the Team,” in which Sharon and I unpack a deceptively “productive” leadership mindset: squeezing every last drop out of your team. Chasing output is easy to justify, especially in nonstop launch cycles where rest gets postponed until “after this one thing.” But when urgency becomes the default setting, teams stop functioning like teams and start operating like exhausted machines.

Sharon and I dig into the real cost of extraction culture: burnout, turnover, stagnating skills, and work that becomes purely transactional. When people are pushed to sprint marathon distances, curiosity fades, experimentation stops, and the goal becomes survival. You still get activity, but you lose innovation and resilience, and even small disruptions to timelines, tools, or customer needs become harder to absorb. We also call out the way this pressure can breed hero culture, where visibility goes to whoever runs fastest and shouts loudest, not necessarily who delivers sustainable value.

The conversation shifts to what healthy performance looks like: investing in growth, protecting time to learn, and using one-on-ones for people, not status readouts. We emphasize knowing your people beyond their job titles, matching work to strengths, and creating space to experiment. The practical bottom line is simple: if you want long-term performance, you have to build conditions where people can thrive, not just survive. High output can happen during crunch periods, but it should be the exception, not the operating system.

Enjoy the episode!

Be sure to tune in next Monday, March 2nd at 9am Pacific for the latest episode in our weekly series as we discuss the pitfalls of letting doomed initiatives run on autopilot. Hope you can join us on our NEW YouTube channel (please subscribe!) or find us on LinkedIn.