What if your team isn’t overwhelmed because they can’t handle the workload?
What if they’re overwhelmed because of the way your culture expects them to handle it?
When leaders notice the signs of an overwhelmed team, the instinct is to look for the obvious answer. Too much work. Not enough people. Poor time management. And sometimes that’s exactly the problem.
But what if it isn’t? What if it’s that everything is urgent? That no one knows who owns what? That people are afraid to make a decision without approval? That no one asks for help until they’re already underwater — and every new process you introduce disappears three weeks later?
The real question isn’t: are they overwhelmed? It’s: have you built a culture that keeps recreating it?
In this post I’m applying my Five Overwhelm Culprits™ framework not to individuals — but to entire teams and organizations. Because when the same patterns keep showing up across multiple people, the question to ask isn’t what’s wrong with them. It’s what are they responding to?
The Signs of an Overwhelmed Team Are Often a Culture Problem
Overwhelm becomes cultural when the same culprits are systematically reinforced across people — rather than occasionally experienced by one person.
So if multiple people on your team are overwhelmed in the same way, stop asking only what’s wrong with them. Start asking what are they responding to.
The Five Overwhelm Culprits™ — Clarity, Confidence, Community, Conditioning and Consistency — give us a framework to diagnose exactly that. Here’s what each one looks like when it shows up not in one person, but across a whole team.
5 Signs of an Overwhelmed Team — and What Each One Points To
Sign 1: Competing Priorities and Unclear Ownership — Lack of Clarity
For individuals, lack of clarity sounds like: “I don’t know what the next step is.” Across a team, it sounds like: “Does your team know what matters most — or does everything matter most?”
The symptoms to watch for:
- Competing priorities with no clear direction on what wins
- Unclear ownership — no one knows who’s responsible for what
- Constantly shifting directions
- Conflicting instructions from different leaders
Here’s the hard truth: you can’t tell people they need to prioritize better if the organization refuses to prioritize its own vision, mission, values, and direction. Your team only has as much clarity as you do as a leader. It’s a trickle-down effect — and it starts at the top.
Sign 2: Approval Bottlenecks and Decision Paralysis — Lack of Confidence
For individuals, lack of confidence sounds like: “I don’t trust myself to act.” Across a team, the question becomes: have you created an environment where people feel safe making decisions — or have you created one where being wrong costs them something?
The symptoms:
- Micromanaging and second-guessing decisions
- Approval bottlenecks — nothing can move without sign-off
- Punishing reasonable mistakes instead of allowing people to fix them
- Overriding people after supposedly delegating to them
Ask yourself this: if everyone needs your approval before they can move, is your team actually lacking confidence — or have you trained them not to trust themselves?
Sign 3: Siloed Teams and No One Asking for Help — Lack of Community
For individuals, lack of community sounds like: “I feel like I’m doing this alone.” Across a team, the question is: can people actually ask for help here?
And I don’t mean just technically — in the sense that yes, they have Slack. I mean: do people share the workload? Can someone admit that they’re at capacity? Are they allowed to protect their boundaries? Do leaders model asking for help? Is collaboration rewarded — or does everyone protect their own territory and their silos?
This is where psychological safety and belonging come in. There is a real difference between having people available to help and creating a culture where people actually feel safe asking for it. You can have an open door policy, weekly meetings, and a full Slack workspace — and still have a team where everyone believes they’re supposed to figure it out alone.
Sign 4: Always On, Never Resting — Lack of Conditioning
Conditioning refers to physical and mental health and wellness. This culprit is often an organizational afterthought. But it may be one of the most telling signs of an overwhelmed team.
The key question here isn’t what you’ve explicitly told people to do. It’s what they’ve learned they have to do in order to be seen as successful in your organization.
Watch for:
- An always-available expectation — fast response equals committed employee
- Busyness as a metric of value — the busier you are, the more important you must be
- Saying no or setting a boundary is seen as not being a team player
- PTO that isn’t actually safe to take — because no one covers the workload
- Leaders working nights and weekends — modeling that behavior for everyone else
- Eating at desks as the norm — signaling that breaks aren’t necessary
This is where you start to see the difference between what the employee handbook says and what your culture is actually rewarding.
Sign 5: New Processes That Don’t Stick — Lack of Consistency
For individuals, lack of consistency sounds like: “I know what helps, but I can’t sustain it.” At the organizational level, the question is: does the way you operate actually support the behaviors you’re asking people to maintain?
Examples of this in action:
- “Protect your focus time” — but then scheduling eight meetings on the same day
- “Take your PTO” — but no one covers the workload, so it never feels safe to actually use it
- “Speak up” — but when people do, nothing happens, so they stop
- “We care about wellbeing” — but the culture is a constant, perpetual fire drill
Culture isn’t what you say you value. It’s what your people repeatedly experience.
The Diagnostic Shift Every Leader Needs to Make With Signs of an Overwhelmed Team
Here’s the question I want you to take back to your team: if multiple people are showing up overwhelmed in the same way — stop asking what’s wrong with them. Start asking what are they responding to?
Because when you see the same signs of an overwhelmed team across multiple people, it’s rarely a coincidence. It’s usually a pattern. And patterns point to culture — not capability.
The Five Overwhelm Culprits™ give you the framework to diagnose exactly which culprit your culture is systematically reinforcing — so you can address the root, not just the symptoms.
Bring This Framework to Your Organization
If today’s post had you thinking “my team or organization needs to have conversations like this” — this is specifically what I do. I work with organizations, many of them Fortune 500, through keynotes and workshops designed to help leaders and their teams understand and address what’s driving overwhelm so they can perform more effectively under pressure.
Learn more about keynotes and workshops here.
Go Deeper With the Book
If you want to explore the full Five Overwhelm Culprits™ framework — including how to identify what’s driving overwhelm at the individual level and what to do about it — it’s all inside my book.
The Five Overwhelm Culprits™: Strategies to Save Your Sanity Without Sacrificing Your Success is available now everywhere books are sold.
CLICK FOR TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00] What if your team isn’t overwhelmed because they can’t handle the workload?
What if they’re overwhelmed because of the way that your culture expects them to handle it? So if you’re leading a team right now, there’s a pretty good chance that you’ve had someone tell you that they’re overwhelmed. Maybe you even looked around at your entire team and thought, “Oh my God, everyone seems so overwhelmed right now.
We are really in it.” And when this happens, we tend to look for the obvious explanation, that there’s too much work. So maybe they’re understaffed. Maybe priorities need to shift. Maybe people need better time management or productivity skills. Maybe we need another conversation about workload and capacity.
And sometimes that’s absolutely the problem. But what if it isn’t? What if the workload itself isn’t what’s overwhelming people? What if it’s the fact that everything is urgent? That no one knows who owns what? That people are afraid to make a decision without approval? That no one asks for [00:01:00] help until they’re already underwater, and every new process that you introduce just disappears three weeks later. So the real question is not are they overwhelmed.
It’s are they overwhelmed or have you built a culture that keeps recreating overwhelm.
And we’re gonna figure that out today through a framework that I developed after years of studying overwhelm called the Five Overwhelm Culprits™. They are all super easy to remember and begin with the letter C.
So the five overwhelm culprits are lack of any one of these five things. We have lack of clarity, lack of confidence, lack of community, lack of conditioning, which is your physical and mental health and wellness, and lack of consistency. So individually, these five things help us understand what’s actually driving our own experience of overwhelm.
But today, I wanna do something a little bit different. So instead of asking what these five culprits look like inside one overwhelmed person, we’re gonna zoom out and ask what happens when they start showing up across an [00:02:00] entire team. Because when the patterns keep appearing across multiple different people, I don’t just wanna know what’s happening with the individuals, I wanna know what they’re all responding to.
And before we get into that quick, if you’re new here, I wanna give you a little bit of context for where this work comes from. So my name is Corrie LoGiudice, and I’ve spent years studying this topic from both sides. So about me, before I was doing this work, I spent over 15 years working inside my family’s business and eventually led at the executive level. So by the time I departed, I was working as a senior vice president and had been for quite some time.
Today, I work with leaders and organizations, and I’ve interviewed more than 100 leaders while developing the research behind my book, The 5 Overwhelm Culprits: Strategies to Save Your Sanity Without Sacrificing Your Success. And if you followed The Next Step for a while, you may notice that we’re doing things a little bit differently today.
I’ve done about 80 pre-recorded episodes on my show, I’ve decided now I wanna take the [00:03:00] show live. We’re gonna do this twice a month, and I’m gonna spend the first part of these conversations digging into a real challenge that leaders are currently navigating, like this topic with teams and culture.
This actually came from my audience. And then following that conversation, then I’m gonna open up the room for Q&A and live coaching because the truth is, I want The Next Step to be more of a conversation and not just me talking at you. Which is what my old show had become. It’d become me hanging out here in my studio in my basement, recording videos and talking to myself for YouTube and podcasts and whatnot, where really I wanna be having a conversation with you.
And hopefully this new format’s gonna help us test that out. So if you are listening to this later, whether that be on my podcast or reading it on my blog or even we’re launching, spoiler alert, a LinkedIn newsletter. You’re still gonna be in the right place. You’ll continue to get The Next Step in whatever format works best for you.
So let’s go ahead and get started with clarity. So lack of clarity, very first overwhelm culprit, and when this shows up for individuals, it shows up [00:04:00] as, ” I don’t know what to do,” right? “I don’t know what the next step is.
I’m overwhelmed.” That’s why this show is called The Next Step to help out with that. So shifting from that individual framing to a cultural framing is, does your team actually know what matters most, or does everything matter most? So ways that this shows up when this is a cultural issue is you’re gonna see symptoms like competing priorities.
Unclear ownership is definitely a big one. Teams constantly shifting directions, not knowing which direction they should be prioritizing. Conflicting instructions from different leaders. So the key reframe to look at with this when you’re working with a whole team is you can’t tell people they need to prioritize better if the organization refuses to prioritize their own vision, mission, values, and direction.
‘Cause your team only has as much clarity as you do as a leader and your organization does. So it’s really very much a trickle-down effect. So if you’re missing clarity, especially at the top layer of that, then you’re gonna see it reflected through the whole organization [00:05:00] moving down
So number two is lack of confidence. So the way this shows up for individuals is I don’t trust myself to act. And it could be many different reasons. It could be you don’t trust yourself because you believe you’re an imposter. You don’t think that you deserve the role, that you’re the only person in the room that looks like that. There’s so many different ways that people can believe that they don’t trust themselves.
The cultural framing that you wanna look at is have you created an environment where people feel safe making decisions, or have you created one where being wrong costs them something? And I’m sure we could all relate to this, that we have all worked in an environment where making the wrong decision had huge ramifications.
So some ways that this shows up, it could be through micromanaging, second-guessing decisions, approval bottlenecks, punishing reasonable mistakes, or not giving somebody an opportunity to be able to fix their mistakes without any kind of, impact for it. So you’re overriding people after supposedly delegating. So when you’re looking at this then from there, the question to ask yourself, it’s really a more provocative one, is if [00:06:00] everyone needs your approval before they can move, is your team actually lacking confidence, or have you trained them to not trust themselves?
The third one is lack of community. So the way this shows up for individuals is, “I feel like I’m doing this alone.” And so many of us can relate to this, whether we feel like we’re the only, person like us in the role. I definitely experience this as a woman in leadership. It could be that you literally feel like you’re doing the workload alone.
There’s so many different ways that this can manifest. The way that it shows up from, a culture framing is can people actually ask for help here? And not just in the sense of like, yeah, they can, they have Slack. It’s not just about that. It’s do people share the workload? Is the workload even?
Can someone admit that they’re at capacity? Are they allowed to protect their boundaries? Do leaders model asking for help? Is collaboration amongst teams rewarded, or does everyone protect their own territory and their own silos? So this is really where psychological safety as well as belonging comes in, because there’s a difference between having people available to help and [00:07:00] creating a culture where people actually feel safe asking for help.
There’s a big difference between the both of them. So you could have Slack teams, weekly meetings, an open door policy and still have a team where everyone believes that they’re supposed to figure it out themselves. So what are you doing to ensure that they know that it’s okay to ask for help?
Number four is lack of conditioning. And as I mentioned before, this is our physical and mental health and wellness. So this one could be especially interesting organizationally because it’s often an afterthought. So what behaviors has your culture taught people are required to succeed there? And looking at that, how does that affect their mental and physical health So some ways that this might show up that we don’t realize are people taught that they need to be always available.
Having boundaries is not acceptable. They need to always be on. Is a fast response, does that equal a committed employee? Do we reward for that? Is someone being busy all the time, does that show that they’re valuable, and that’s how we value people based on their busyness? [00:08:00] Saying no, if somebody says no and protects a boundary, are they immediately called a not a team player?
That or taking PTO, that if you’re asking for time off, that you’re letting people down, on the team, that we’re so busy and we need you here. Another one some industries are like this where they’re pulling all-nighters all the time, and that’s getting the job done at the stake of your own wellness, ’cause we need sleep to be able to function. Eating at your desk, it basically shows people that breaks aren’t necessary. The work is more important than you actually fueling your body to be able to do the job at a high capacity.
Or, leaders, that work nights. And then they’re modeling for everybody else that they should be doing that as well. So conditioning is where I want you to pay attention, not necessarily to what you’ve explicitly told people to do, but what they’ve learned that they have to do in order to be seen as successful, here in your organization.
So this gets you into the difference between what the employee handbook says and what your culture is actually rewarding.
The fifth culprit is lack of consistency. [00:09:00] So for individuals, this is gonna show up as “I know what helps, I know what to do, but I just can’t do it on a regular basis.
I can’t sustain it.” Which is very, very common, because to be able to remain consistent in things, you need to be able to have habits, systems, routines, processes, checklists, things like that to help with it. When you’re looking at this from the cultural framing, it’s does the way that you operate actually support the behaviors that you’re asking people to maintain?
Some examples of this. If a company says, “Protect your focus time,” but then schedules eight meetings on a specific day, it’s working in conflict of letting those people be consistent with protecting their focus time.
Another example would be take your PTO. But then in the process of having your people take PTO, no one bothers to cover their workload, so then they feel it’s not safe for them to do so, so then they don’t consistently use their PTO. Handle the process. Like, hey, you pass this off, you hand it off to somebody, but there’s no sort of SOPs, standard operating procedures, or any kind of documentation regarding what the, expectations are of said [00:10:00] process.
Another one is speak up. Everybody wants those to speak up consistently, but if people speak up and then nothing happens when they do, then people are gonna stop doing it consistently. Other ways would be, saying, “We care about wellbeing,” but at the same time, your actions showing that you’re creating this overwhelming environment that is a continual perpetual fire drill.
And also, it gives you overall a strong culminating idea. Culture isn’t what you say you value, it’s what your people repeatedly experience. And therefore, overwhelm becomes cultural when the same culprits are systematically reinforced across people rather than occasionally experienced by one person.
So the diagnostic shift that you look at for these two is if multiple people on your team are overwhelmed in the same way. Showing multiple people are showing the same ways it’s manifesting versus what I just showed you, the five different examples. Stop asking only what’s wrong with them and start asking what are they responding to.
So before we officially wrap [00:11:00] up, if today’s conversation gave you something to think about and you wanna take this work deeper than I have the ability to even do here on The Next Step, there’s a few different ways that you can do that.
So first is if you want to explore the full framework on your own, you can pick up a copy of my book, The 5 Overwhelm Culprits. That’s where I go much, much deeper into each of the five culprits on how to identify what’s actually driving your overwhelm and what to do about it, more so from the personal perspective than from the team perspective that we talked about today.
But on that note, if today had you thinking, ” My team or my organization needs to have conversations like this,” this is specifically what I do. I work with organizations, many of them Fortune 500, through keynotes and workshops designed to help leaders and their teams better understand and address what’s driving overwhelm so that they can perform more effectively under pressure.
On the other side, if what you’re navigating is more personal to your own leadership or business, I work privately with a very small number of leaders through my coaching and advisory work. That’s where we can get much more specific about what you’re navigating and how to navigate your [00:12:00] next step together.
And finally, if you just want more conversations like this, you wanna come back, really be a part of it, come back and join me for the next one. It’s gonna be on September 29th at noon Eastern. And just like today, you’ll have the opportunity to help decide what we talk about next.
So go ahead, drop it in the comments. Feel free to message me any specific topics you’d like to see. So thank you so much for spending time with me here today. I really hope that today gave you
a different question to take back to your team instead of only asking why is everybody acting so overwhelmed, and to start asking what might they actually be responding to. So thanks again, and I will see you next time on The Next Step.