Lean In
A fable about effort, ambiguity and the hidden costs of vague leadership
This piece is a collaboration, with a twist. We hope you have as much fun reading it as we did writing it!
Jennifer Houle opens with a short fable shaped by her years working in HR and across organisational systems — a story that will feel familiar to anyone who has worked in a team under pressure, with ambiguity and unclear leadership.
Andrea Chiarelli then steps into diagnosis mode, naming the moment things start to drift and why the pattern described through the fable repeats across organisations of every shape and size.
The result is a cautionary tale about systems and expectations. Here’s Jennifer:
“Lean In”
The project started the way these things usually do. On Tuesday, a client deliverable that had been circling for a while had suddenly become very real. During the planning meeting, the Team Lead acknowledged the timeline was tight, though not impossibly so, and reassured everyone that they were all highly capable. This was an experienced and trusted team.
“If we all lean in,” he said, “this should come together.”
No one asked what “leaning in” meant.
The team was a small one. Four people who knew each other well enough to comfortably divide and conquer, so they split the work quickly, almost instinctively. Everyone left the meeting ready to roll up their sleeves, even with a cloud of pressure hanging over them. They were capable, as the team lead said. They just needed to lean in.
By the end of the day, questions began to surface. Should this go deeper? Is the scope right? Are we making the correct assumptions? But no one wanted to be the person who slowed things down. Keep going, we can adjust as needed. The clock was ticking, after all.
As the evening crept in on that first day, everyone logged off and headed home. Rahul stayed later than the others, just to tidy things up. A pass for clarity, a few transitions tightened. Then a few sections didn’t quite hold together the way they should, so he reworked them. It felt easier to keep going than to interrupt someone else’s night with questions that didn’t have obvious answers.
His phone buzzed. Emily, his wife. He switched it to silent. Just another half hour.
He sent a couple of updates to the team, and some early responses came back. Looks good. One small suggestion. He incorporated them, and as the night wore on, replies slowed, then stopped altogether. The work, meanwhile, kept expanding to fill the space until it was finally time to head home.
The next day passed in a blur of revisions and brief check-ins. No one objected to the direction things were going; there was a sense that reopening core questions would cost more time than anyone had left to give.
By the third night, Rahul was still at his desk, exhausted, but committed. His phone, face down next to the monitor, already set to ‘Do not disturb.’
The document was solid now, finally. Thorough and defensible. Maybe not perfect, but ready for a final pass before being submitted to the client tomorrow.
On Friday morning, the team was gathered in the lunch room, refilling their coffees. As the Team Lead poured sugar into his mug, he mentioned with a relieved tone that the client had agreed to push the deadline.
“Just a few days,” he said.
He’d meant to flag it earlier, but things had moved quickly.
“Still, though,” he smiled, taking a sip of coffee, “great work, everyone. Really appreciate the effort.”
No one spoke until eventually, someone made a joke to fill the silence, and they all made their way back to their desks.
Rahul stayed seated, though. His face unreadable as his coffee cooled on the table in front of him.
How Ambiguity Turns Into Extra Hours
The team in the story clearly shows plenty of effort and commitment. But that effort is being treated as a substitute for coordination, with the phrase “lean in” serving as the permission slip for everyone to keep moving without agreeing what “good” looks like, what “done” means and what trade-offs they are allowed to make under time pressure.
In such an environment, the safest move is to produce more work, because more work can be defended. The cost is that the work stops being steered.
The first moment things go off the rails is the planning meeting, specifically the statement: “If we all lean in, this should come together.” It’s a motivational cue masquerading as a delivery plan. The team hears reassurance (“you’re capable”) but receives no operational definition of priorities, decision rights or acceptable risk. Nobody asks what “lean in” means because the social penalty is obvious: asking would signal doubt and force the lead to be specific. Silence becomes agreement-by-default, which is a fragile foundation.
The second moment is the end of day one, when real questions surface (“scope,” “assumptions,” “depth”) and the team chooses momentum instead of seeking clarity. That choice is understandable: when a deadline is looming, reopening fundamentals feels expensive. But this is exactly when teams need a small reality check. Without it, uncertainty moves downstream and gets paid for later. The vague responses (“keep going, we can adjust as needed”) also don’t reduce uncertainty, but amplify and distribute it.
Everyone is now free to interpret “as needed” differently, and the only coordinating mechanism left is rework.
Rahul’s behaviour is just the system revealing itself. He stays late because (a) the work is coupled, so “cleaning up” exposes structural issues that feel urgent; (b) interrupting others requires asking questions that the team has not legitimised; and (c) producing a stronger draft is a way to avoid a conversation about scope and assumptions. In cases like this, polishing becomes the socially acceptable form of escalation. Instead of saying, “We need a decision,” Rahul tries to make the decision unnecessary by doing more.
By days two and three, the team is trapped in some sort of revision momentum: once you start paying for ambiguity with extra hours, it becomes harder to stop, because stopping would force you to discuss the ambiguity explicitly. The absence of objections is, once again, the predictable outcome of a context where objections are framed as delay.
When urgency is the shared value and clarity is treated as a luxury, people learn to keep their doubts private and compensate with labour.
Then comes the final act: a deadline extension was in place, and the Team Lead held it (or failed to transmit it) while the team paid the price. That’s the point where the story stops being a generic “deadline crunch” and becomes a systems failure: information asymmetry combined with an unspoken norm that suffering is an acceptable cost for performance.
The lead’s casual tone (“he’d meant to flag it”) tells us that the organisation does not treat schedule changes as critical operational information. It treats them as an update, when they are actually a control signal. This is painfully and infuriatingly common.
In any well-functioning delivery system, a change in constraint (time) should immediately trigger a change in behaviour (pace, depth, allocation).
At this point, the mechanism is clear. A motivational directive replaces a shared plan. Uncertainty is managed through individual overwork rather than collective decision-making. Critical information moves too slowly to prevent unnecessary cost.
The reason this type of pattern shows up so often is that it is stabilised by incentives and social dynamics. The Team Lead gets to appear supportive and appreciative without doing the harder work of specificity. The team members get to appear committed by working longer, and they avoid the interpersonal risk of forcing clarity. Rahul becomes the pressure valve that keeps the system from confronting its own coordination gaps; until he can’t, and you see the emotional residue in the lunch room silence.
🎯 The exact moment to watch for in real teams is when a leader uses a high-energy phrase (“lean in,” “let’s just push,” “we’ve got this”) at the point where the team actually needs constraints, priorities and clear responsibilities. When that happens and nobody asks clarifying questions, the team has already entered the failure mode. The rest of the story is just the bill arriving.
The Minimum Structure That Saves a Team
The alternative to “lean in” is a short sequence of clarifying moves that turn individual effort into coordinated effort, early enough that the team does not end up paying for uncertainty with late nights and missed family dinners.
Define the work before you divide it
Start at the planning meeting, because that is where the costs are either prevented or baked in. When the Team Lead said, “If we all lean in,” the next sentence should have been an operational definition, not encouragement. In practice that means naming the deliverable, the standard and the trade-offs:
What does “good” look like for this client?
What is the minimum viable version that would still be defensible?
What will we not do, even if we have time?
Share control signals early
Then come the control signals. Before anyone divided work, the Team Lead should have shared every constraint that might change behaviour, including the possibility of a deadline move. If the deadline was even potentially flexible, the team needed to know that on day one, not after three nights of revisions. When timelines shift, plans should shift with them. Treating that as an “FYI” is irresponsible and, quite frankly, poor leadership.
Add decision checkpoints
After that, you need to give the team decision checkpoints that are appropriate to the assignment. You don’t always need daily stand-ups with a slide deck (in fact, you rarely ever do). You need one fifteen-minute checkpoint at the end of day one that is explicitly for narrowing uncertainty:
Are we aligned on scope?
Are there assumptions we need to validate with the client?
Are we aiming for breadth or depth?
What is the riskiest section and who owns it?
If the answers are unclear, that is not a signal to keep going; it is the reason to pause and steer.
Legitimise questions
The other shift is to protect questions as part of delivery rather than treating them as friction. In the story, the team avoided being “the person who slowed things down.” In a healthy team, the person who slows things down at the right moment is doing quality control. The simplest way to normalise that is to assign the role deliberately: when the role is formally there, with endorsement from the Team Lead, the social cost drops. It is also important to encourage all team members to ask questions when uncertain.
Set boundaries that stop unnecessary overwork
Finally, the team needed boundaries that prevent overwork from becoming the default coordination mechanism. Rahul staying late was a signal. The organisations should have set customs for this sort of scenario: no major rewrites after 7 p.m. without a message to the group; no one should be alone with core structural decisions; if something feels “easier to fix than to ask,” that is precisely when you ask.
Replay the same situation with these moves in place and the story changes. Day one ends with a shared view of scope and acceptable depth. Day two is execution rather than rework. If the deadline shifts, the team replans in minutes. Rahul goes home because the system is carrying clarity, instead of leaving one person to carry it alone.
When Endurance Replaces Coordination
Many teams burn out because ambiguity is allowed to sit in the middle of the room while everyone behaves as if it had been resolved. “Lean in” becomes a norm: do more, ask less, absorb the mess. For a while, that looks like commitment, but what really happens is that the team stops coordinating judgement through conversation and starts paying for uncertainty with extra hours.
Rahul’s late nights are not an individual story. They are what a system produces when standards are fuzzy and critical information moves too slowly. If a deadline extension is mentioned after the cost has already been paid, the lesson is about leadership treating clarity, constraints and assumptions as optional, when they actually are the work that protects people.
The practical takeaway is to try and notice moments where a team is asked for effort without being given the conditions for good judgement. That is the moment to insist on definitions, priorities, and a short decision checkpoint, even if it slows things for a moment. The discomfort is small. And the alternative shows up later as exhaustion, and a silence over coffee that says exactly what the team has learned: endurance has replaced coordination.
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I’m Andrea, a management consultant with over a decade of experience across industry and academia. I work with commercial, non-profit, academic and government organisations worldwide, helping them capture meaningful insights through mixed methods research.
I write about practical frameworks to help you discover what others miss. My main goal is to translate complex concepts into techniques that readers can use immediately.
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I like the format, so bravo for taking a chance. I can feel your story, Jennifer, so that really lands. I also agree with your analysis, Andrea, of how it could have gone better and what you can do better the next time.
I want to point out something at the system level. The system worked. The project was understood well enough by the team and delivered on time despite all that. From the system’s point of view, nothing failed. So the question becomes: why would the manager or leader change here if they could get the outcome they wanted without changing?
The real cost, both of you have pointed out in other posts, shows up later as a lagging effect in churn and burnout. Because of that delay, this does not register in the moment as poor leadership to the system, even though the human cost is real. The tension you are naming is that gap between immediate delivery success and long-term human cost.
Really thoughtful piece. It captures a pattern that many teams recognize, even if they experience it differently depending on where they sit.
Nice job. If I’m honest, I have been the person shouting “lean in” and not defining clearly. I have learned a lot over the years and adjusted but it’s super easy to fall into that trap when you’re in the daily grind. Nice list of tactics at the end.