Work Whiplash

The quiet thing that burns out your best people

Nothing burns great people out faster than what I call “work whiplash.”

People can handle hard work. They struggle when priorities constantly reverse, decisions get made and un-made, and goals keep changing underneath them.

One of the most demoralizing things that can happen to someone at work is spending weeks pushing something uphill — only to find out the strategy changed, the project no longer matters, or another team was quietly working on the same thing on the other side of the building.

The most common versions I see inside scaling companies:

• The strategy changed during an offsite or in a leadership meeting, but nobody told the three teams who were already heads down executing the old one.

• A decision got made, then un-made, then made again. No one doing the work knows which version is real.

• Two teams were handed the same problem. Both built solutions. Neither knew about the other until someone gave a demo.

• A person busts their ass to get something across the finish line… and their boss undoes it at the last minute. [This one is the worst.]

• The goal was never actually agreed upon to begin with. It just seemed like it was, because no one pushed hard enough on the details.

None of these are malicious. Most of them happen because leadership is moving fast and communication is a surprisingly hard skill. But they land the same way on the receiving end: as a signal that your work doesn’t actually matter, that your time isn’t valued, that there’s no point in running hard.

I think leaders often underestimate how emotionally exhausting this is for their teams.

You are holding context that your team doesn’t have. You are in rooms they aren’t in. Decisions get made at the leadership level that feel small or obvious to you and land as earthquakes on the people executing underneath you.

The question I reinforce with leaders in Glue Club is: when you make a decision, change your mind, or reprioritize something — do you stop and ask yourself who is actively working on something that this affects right now? Not at the next all-hands. Not in the quarterly email. Today.

Change is inevitable. Whiplash is not.

Whiplash is what happens when change occurs without communication. The gap between what leadership knows and what everyone else knows is where most work whiplash gets manufactured. And the only thing that closes that gap is treating “who needs to know about this?” as a non-optional follow-up question every time a decision gets made or a priority shifts.

This is harder than it sounds at scale. When you’re small, communication is more or less effortless — everyone roughly knows what’s going on. Once you pass 50 employees, that stops being true almost overnight. The default assumption needs to flip: instead of “people know,” assume “people don’t know.” Assume that even if you said it at the all-hands, half the company missed it or forgot it.

I wrote a lot more about this over here, but my two rules of thumb: if you feel like a broken record, you’re probably doing it right — you have to feel genuinely a little insane with repetition to even be in the ballpark of people actually hearing you. And always craft your communication for the person who started this week. Think of the most junior employee with the least context. Talk to them.

Work whiplash is, at its core, wasted time. When you hire someone, you are fundamentally paying for their time and their skills. That’s it. Nothing should piss companies off more than wasted time, and yet so much of it is wasted by bad process, bad leadership, and bad structure.

Bad structure is a big criminal when it comes to work whiplash. I talked about how important structure is in the Waterline Model, but the basic idea is that if roles aren’t clear – if you don’t delegate a clear owner for a project, if no one knows who the decision maker is, etc – then it creates all sorts of other issues on a team.

People do a ton of work that goes nowhere not because the work is bad, but because the path to a real decision was never clear. They didn’t know who could say yes. So they go around in circles or head down a path, hoping someone would eventually approve it.

Wasted. Time.

Clear delegation — one person who owns something, a handful of people who need to weigh in, an agreed-upon timeline — sounds incredibly boring. It is boring. It also prevents an enormous amount of wasted time and burned-out talent.

If you are in a rapidly scaling company, revisit this stuff more often than you think you need to. Does each major initiative have one single person responsible for getting it across the finish line? (I use a model called Captains for project ownership that I love for its simplicity.) Do people know how to get a decision made? If something changed, do the people affected know about it?

These feel like basics. They are basics. They also break constantly, especially when you’re moving fast.

To be clear: some amount of whiplash is unavoidable. Priorities change. Strategies shift. That’s not a failure of leadership — that’s the reality of building something.

But there’s a real difference between change and whiplash. Change is “this thing shifted, here’s why, here’s what it means for you.” Whiplash is “surprise, everything you were working on is now irrelevant and we forgot to tell you.”

Your job isn’t to eliminate change. It’s to reduce unnecessary whiplash as much as possible — to be deliberate about what changes, how often it changes, and who needs to know as fast as possible when it does.

Your best people have options. They will not stay somewhere that makes them feel like their work doesn’t matter.

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What else?

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