Stuck in the middle gear

For a long time I thought recovery was something you earned. You worked hard, you hit the targets, and then, if there was time left, you rested. Rest was the reward at the end of the performance, not part of it.

It took a burnout to show me how wrong that was. By every external measure I was doing well. The targets were green. And underneath, something had been running on empty for a lot longer than I admitted. What I had not understood is that performance and recovery are not a sequence, where one follows the other. They are two halves of the same thing. Leave one out and the other eventually stops working too.

I think about this a lot when I look at the leaders I work with in fast-growing companies. Almost none of them are lazy. Almost none of them lack drive. If anything they have too much of it. And yet very few of them are performing at their best, because they are stuck in a gear that feels like effort but produces very little.

The problem is not the pace. It is the missing recovery.

There is a useful picture from elite motor racing. A racing team does not run flat out all year. They have a preseason of testing and preparation, they have race weekends where everything is fully on, and then they have deliberate recovery. The recovery is not a nice idea they get to when the calendar allows. It is built into the system so firmly that working during the shutdown is actively discouraged. They learned that a mantra is not enough. If recovery is optional, it disappears, and when it disappears the whole system eventually breaks.

Most growing companies run the opposite way. There is no preseason and no shutdown. There is just an unbroken stretch of high effort with no clear peaks and no real troughs. Everything is important, everything is now, and nobody can point to the moment that actually mattered most, because it all blurs into one long push.

The result is what I have come to think of as the middle gear. Not resting, not truly peaking. Always busy, rarely at your best. It feels productive because it is tiring, and we have been trained to treat tiredness as evidence of work. But the middle gear is where good people slowly grind down, and where teams lose the sharpness that made them special in the first place.

Why knowing this changes so little

Here is the frustrating part. Most leaders already know all of this. They know they should protect their recovery. They know the pace is not sustainable. And they carry on anyway. The gap between knowing and doing is enormous, and it does not close by knowing even more.

It helps to see why the usual explanations are wrong. We tend to assume people who do not change lack motivation, or lack willpower, or just need to try for a few weeks. In practice none of that holds up. The leaders I work with are not short on motivation. Willpower is not the mechanism that makes change stick. And lasting change takes far longer than the tidy few weeks people give it, which is exactly why so many attempts collapse at the first setback.

What actually moves people is different. It is tying the change to something they genuinely care about, rather than to an abstract goal. It is redesigning the environment so the good pattern is the easy one. And it is accepting that setbacks are part of the process, not proof that it failed. Those are not personal virtues. They are design choices, and they can be built.

This is a systems problem, not a character flaw

That word, built, is the point. As long as we treat recovery and sustainable performance as matters of individual discipline, we keep asking exhausted people to fix their exhaustion through sheer effort, which is the one thing they have run out of.

The leaders who get out of the middle gear are almost never the ones with the most self-control. They are the ones who changed the system around them. They made the peaks explicit and protected them. They made recovery a part of how the team works rather than a private reward for surviving the week. They stopped relying on willpower and started relying on structure.

That is culture, in the end. Not a poster on the wall, but the set of unspoken rules about how hard is normal, whether rest is allowed, and what happens between the moments that actually matter. It sits below the surface of every growing company, and it decides far more than most founders realise. When it is healthy, people can push hard and come back. When it is not, the pushing never stops and the coming back never happens.

You do not fix that with a motivational speech. You fix it by looking honestly at the system you have built, finding where the recovery went, and putting it back. That is slower than a mantra, and it lasts a great deal longer.

Mees Loman is the founder of Loman Leadership. He helps growing companies lead with culture, and works with founders and teams below the surface, where the patterns that decide performance actually live.