Fast Growth Isn’t Always Healthy

There was quite a bit of time that I just stopped going into my greenhouse.

Not because I lost interest in it. Because I lost the time, and somewhere in there I lost the part of myself that used to make time for things like that on purpose.

I was busy. So busy that other people started to notice it.

I was advocating for a team that was running on empty, doing the work of people we didn't have because the hiring had quietly stopped for us while it kept going for everyone else. I was filling in for what they couldn't carry anymore, then asking them to carry it again the next day because there wasn't another option. I was trying to keep people as okay as I could with almost nothing to work with, and in the middle of that, I couldn't always name what was actually happening to me. I was too busy drowning to notice I was underwater.

I watched things happen around me that I couldn't always explain in the moment, and can name more clearly now. Watching the standards shift depending on who was in the room. Evenings with my family where I was only half present, still replaying a conversation from work I couldn’t let go of. The greenhouse. Soil I used to turn with my hands, plants I used to actually watch grow instead of walking past on my way to somewhere more urgent.

I want to be clear about something, because I think it gets lost in most conversations about burnout. I was good at my job. I cared, deeply, about the people I worked with. None of this happened because I wasn't trying hard enough.

It happened because trying hard was never the problem to solve.

Fast growth has a way of disguising itself as health. Revenue climbs, headcount climbs, the calendar fills up, and from the outside it looks like things are working. But growth without the right conditions underneath it doesn't build something sturdy. It builds something that's one bad quarter away from falling apart, propped up by whoever's willing to absorb the difference between what the system can actually hold and what it's being asked to hold anyway.

I was absorbing it. A lot of people still are, at all kinds of companies and organizations that have nothing to do with the ones I’ve left throughout my career.

When I finally had quiet again, the patterns I’d been too close to see came into focus. It wasn’t tied to one company, one industry, or one type of organization. It was something I've seen at every kind of workplace, startups, nonprofits, fully built-out companies that looked impressive from the outside. The size and mission never mattered. The thing missing was almost always the same: nobody had thought to evolve the systems at the same pace the company was growing. The business scaled. The people supporting it didn't.

That's the entire foundation of what I do now. Not "how do people perform better under pressure," but "what conditions would make this kind of pressure unnecessary in the first place." Clarity. Capacity. Communication. Care. Considered on purpose, as the company grows, instead of assumed to keep up on their own.

I started spending time in my greenhouse again. Not as a metaphor, although I'm aware of how convenient that sounds for someone who talks about roots for a living. Literally. Hands in soil, watching something grow at the pace it actually grows at, which is slower than I want most days and exactly as fast as it needs to be.

I'm good now. I'm out of it, and I'm not going back. But this isn't really about me, and I don't want it to read like it is. It's about the people who are still in it. The leader still fighting for a team with almost nothing left to fight with. The person who's overworked, underpaid, and quietly under-appreciated, who can't just walk away because there are bills to pay and people depending on them. If that's you right now, I want you to hear this clearly: it is not you. It was never you. The conditions around you were never built to hold what they're asking you to hold, and that is a structural failure, not a personal one.

In two weeks, I'm going to write about the first of the four conditions I believe makes the difference: clarity. What it looks like when it's there, what it costs when it isn't, and how to start building it back, on purpose, before the people holding everything together run out of what they have left to give.

The roots are strong. Even when growth feels slow, even when it doesn't feel like it yet.

Kelleigh