Indulge me a moment while I tell you a story you’ve heard before.

A worker starts a new job. Let’s call her Lisa. She is new, so her manager gives her a nice easy task to start with. She is a good worker, and completes the task quickly. Her manager is happy. Onboarding complete, she now gets the less-easy work that people in her role normally do. She is a good worker, and completes that task quickly as well. Her manager is happy. Clearly Lisa is a great hire and can do more work.

The executives come down with an ambitious new project. New client, lots of money at stake, needs to be done soon. Lisa just finished her task, this is the same sort of stuff she excelled with so far, and is a good worker so her manager gives her the new project. It’s a tight deadline, but Lisa puts in the hours and gets it done. Celebration all around! The company isn’t totally dysfunctional, so Lisa gets a nice raise and a small promotion.

Now Lisa gets all of those projects. They aren’t all quite so ambitious, but she is now the proven expert at that work. Lisa is busy. The work is getting done well. Everyone is happy. The company grows, and more projects come in. Lisa is very busy. Some of the projects are late. That’s okay. There’s a lot going on.

Then it happens: some clear failure that isn’t just being late. That is less okay. Her manager is not a complete idiot, and realizes that Lisa is overworked. They move a few projects to other people so Lisa has less on her plate. Lisa still struggles though. Projects are late. The work is poor. Her manager is not happy. Lisa is certainly not happy. Months go by. The struggles continue. Lisa is disengaged. Her manager tries different approaches, but none of it works.

One way or another, Lisa leaves.

What happened? How did such a good worker have such a downfall?

Two things happened.

The first is garden variety burnout. Too much work. Too much stress. Usually, reducing the stress and giving Lisa time to recover would help that. Many managers stumble here, because even a “normal” workload is probably too much for someone suffering from burnout. But I’m not here to talk about burnout. There are plenty of good articles about that already.

I’m here to talk about the second problem, which tends to show up alongside burnout. The problem is that sort of workload maximization that managers do to “get the most out of their people”. You tend to see it when companies have dedicated project managers, since the company will reward those who maximize productivity. You tend to see it at consultancies that directly bill hours since optimizing billable hours means greater profit margins. You tend to see it in departments that are seen as cost centers since companies rarely want to invest or innovate (read: spend more money) in teams that don’t make them money. The second problem is when managers give people more and more work until they can’t handle any more.

You can think of it sort of like a variant of the Peter Principle (people are promoted to their level of incompetence), but instead of being promoted and given more/different responsibilities, people are just given more of the same work.

The fact of the matter is that “get the most out of your people” is doomed to failure. The “most anyone can do” requires an unsustainable effort that leaves them exhausted and worn out. But burnout is only part of it. Mastery is a key part of engagement. People need to feel like they’re getting better. They need to feel progress and growth so that their time and effort hasn’t been wasted. A tight deadline or overwhelming workload doesn’t require increased mastery though, it only requires increased endurance. Doing the same work you already do well doesn’t make you better — it makes you bored. The overwhelming busyness hides the boredom, but the dissatisfaction is still there. Once people have time to take a breath, they feel that lack of personal progress. All that work and they’re not meaningfully better at their craft.

A slight aside: It doesn’t just apply to individuals. This hyper optimization applies to teams too. High functioning teams tend to be given more projects or more scope until they stop being high functioning. When new projects come in, managers don’t give them to teams that are already struggling. They add that work to the teams that are performing well. When a struggling team drops the ball, it’s never some other struggling team that helps out, it falls to the high functioning team. Good teams can step up a few times, but it comes at the expense of the glue work and process improvements and cultural maintenance and experimentation that make them a great team. Eventually it all becomes too much and team cohesion falls apart. Without deliberate action to prevent it, companies tend to load teams to their breaking point.

The reasoning makes sense. Workers get rewarded for doing some work. They want more rewards, so naturally think that more of that work will get them more rewards. Managers see someone thrive in a certain situation, so will favor that over the risky unknowns. Everyone naturally thinks that as you’re more successful, the work gets harder. Cognitive dissonance pushes people to believe that stress and suffering is the cost of being paid more.

All of that is reasonable. Most of it is true. It’s also wrong.

Unless you’re doing basic labor that anyone can do, you are not being paid for the work that you do. You’re paid for the value you can provide (and maybe some extra if companies compete for your scarce skillset). For most modern professions, a little more mastery provides substantially more value than a little more work. Quality of work matters. Capability — that is, being able to do things that your competitors can’t — matters. Growing your career isn’t extra hours to ship a few more units of $1 work, it’s developing the mastery necessary to produce $2 work.

Yes, higher value work is harder. If everyone could do it well, then others wouldn’t need you to do it. But that doesn’t mean the harder work needs to be stressful or painful. If management is doing a good job, people should have a fairly constant challenge level. They should have enough challenge to learn from, but not so much that it overwhelms them. And as people master that challenge, the hard work becomes easier and easier until it’s just their normal work. Then it is time for a new challenge (and usually a promotion). If managed well, work grows with the people.

What if management isn’t doing a good job? When the work grows too quickly (or staffing too slowly), you get the Peter Principle or burnout as people struggle with more challenge than they can handle. When the work grows too slowly (or staffing too quickly), you get disengagement or overengineering as people try to cope with their lack of growth. And sometimes you get the worst of both worlds. Lisa’s situation above happens when bad management provides too much low-challenge work: burnout and disengagement combined.

Management is hard. Even great managers won’t be 100% successful here. But if you are lost in a challenge that you’re not ready for or are feeling the pain of being too busy, that’s not good. Suffering isn’t a normal part of the promotion cycle. Drowning isn’t a normal part of a new role. Some of the worst managers will double down on the dysfunction. They will deify hustle or claim that sacrifice is necessary for success. It’s gaslighting. Obviously they aren’t exploiting you. Obviously they aren’t terrible at staffing. Obviously the 60 hour weeks are why they’re successful, not luck or bias or favoritism. If you can’t handle the tough situation, it must be your fault.

Don’t fall for it. The reward for good work isn’t more work — it’s mastery.