Ex-Stanford Leader Champions ‘Culture of Calm’ for Better Creative Productivity
Key Points
Hustle culture, characterized by manufactured urgency, backfires in knowledge work, negatively impacting business results.
Stanford vet Audrey Witters, now leading Learning Impact Advisors, says managers fail when they resort to undue pressure instead of cultivating intrinsically motivated teams.
Her core philosophy emphasizes creating a “culture of calm” where leaders model resilience, coach effectively, and establish explicit communication expectations.
She sees this evolution, driven by younger generations and reinforced by regulatory changes, as a hopeful step toward a healthier and more productive workforce.
When you push too hard, it isn't good for the business. You might get more volume, but the company is just going to get a bunch of slop.
Audrey Witters
Founder of Learning Impact Advisors
Audrey Witters
In the debate over workplace productivity, a culture of manufactured urgency is counterproductive. The thinking goes that for work requiring focus and attention, constant pressure doesn’t produce better results, but diminishes quality and hurts the bottom line. So, the push for a calmer, more intentional work style isn’t a sign of laziness, but a move toward better business outcomes.
That’s the belief of Audrey Witters, an education and innovation expert with over two decades of experience at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Now the founder of Learning Impact Advisors, Witters previously served as Managing Director of Online & Entrepreneurship Programs, where she scaled the flagship Stanford LEAD program to over $20 million in annual revenue.
According to Witters, the entire debate around overwork needs a fundamental reframing, starting with a manager’s core mission. “When you push too hard, it isn’t good for the business. You might get more volume, but the company is just going to get a bunch of slop,” she says.
The slop factor: Leaders often mistake activity for achievement, a relic of an industrial-era mindset that is actively counterproductive for knowledge work. “If you work in a factory sewing buttons on shirts, then sure, 9-9-6 is probably great for business. You’re going to get more buttons. But that’s not the work most people are doing. They’re doing work that requires creativity and focus,” she explains.
Witters is blunt about it: if a manager has to “crack a whip” to manufacture urgency, they have already failed. A better solution builds a team that is intrinsically motivated. According to Witters, a starting point for leaders is to understand the tangible, bottom-line costs of a stressed-out workplace, detailed in the work of experts like Stanford’s Jeffrey Pfeffer. The belief is that giving people agency and a clear understanding of why their work matters can allow them to deliver more without feeling burned out.
A culture of calm: Wiiters’ philosophy is built on a simple mantra she used to de-escalate manufactured urgency. For decades, she reminded her teams, “We don’t work in an ER. Nobody’s going to die”—a mantra that informs her view of a manager’s core purpose. In her view, a manager’s purpose should be to actively build a culture of calm and creativity, not a culture of crisis. When issues arise, she says, a manager’s role is to model resilience and coach the team to solve problems with calm intention.
Calibrate and clarify: A highly practical solution to manufactured stress is often the simplest: talking about it. Witters says a key step is to consistently manage expectations by creating explicit communication norms. That means defining which channels are for emergencies and repeatedly stating that an immediate response is not expected for routine matters. She encourages employees to ask their managers questions like, “How can I calibrate that with you? What is your preferred style? How can we work together?” Explicitly setting up these norms, she notes, is not that hard to do and solves a lot of problems from the beginning.
She views the pushback on urgency culture by younger workers as a healthy and welcome evolution toward a more sustainable workforce. And that cultural change is getting a regulatory push. New federal overtime regulations effective in 2025 adjust salary thresholds, and this legal change elevates the protection of personal time from a good idea into a business requirement.
“My favorite thing about that generation is how they take care of themselves and each other and prioritize self-care in a way that, as a Gen X-er, we often let our accountability to organizations and other people come at the expense of taking care of ourselves,” she concludes. “I have three sons who are all Gen Z, and I love seeing that in my children. I love seeing that in society. I think we’ll just be a better world. This is a good direction for us to move, and I’m hopeful that it continues.”
Related articles
TL;DR
Hustle culture, characterized by manufactured urgency, backfires in knowledge work, negatively impacting business results.
Stanford vet Audrey Witters, now leading Learning Impact Advisors, says managers fail when they resort to undue pressure instead of cultivating intrinsically motivated teams.
Her core philosophy emphasizes creating a “culture of calm” where leaders model resilience, coach effectively, and establish explicit communication expectations.
She sees this evolution, driven by younger generations and reinforced by regulatory changes, as a hopeful step toward a healthier and more productive workforce.
Audrey Witters
Audrey Witters
Founder of Learning Impact Advisors
Founder of Learning Impact Advisors
In the debate over workplace productivity, a culture of manufactured urgency is counterproductive. The thinking goes that for work requiring focus and attention, constant pressure doesn’t produce better results, but diminishes quality and hurts the bottom line. So, the push for a calmer, more intentional work style isn’t a sign of laziness, but a move toward better business outcomes.
That’s the belief of Audrey Witters, an education and innovation expert with over two decades of experience at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Now the founder of Learning Impact Advisors, Witters previously served as Managing Director of Online & Entrepreneurship Programs, where she scaled the flagship Stanford LEAD program to over $20 million in annual revenue.
According to Witters, the entire debate around overwork needs a fundamental reframing, starting with a manager’s core mission. “When you push too hard, it isn’t good for the business. You might get more volume, but the company is just going to get a bunch of slop,” she says.
The slop factor: Leaders often mistake activity for achievement, a relic of an industrial-era mindset that is actively counterproductive for knowledge work. “If you work in a factory sewing buttons on shirts, then sure, 9-9-6 is probably great for business. You’re going to get more buttons. But that’s not the work most people are doing. They’re doing work that requires creativity and focus,” she explains.
Witters is blunt about it: if a manager has to “crack a whip” to manufacture urgency, they have already failed. A better solution builds a team that is intrinsically motivated. According to Witters, a starting point for leaders is to understand the tangible, bottom-line costs of a stressed-out workplace, detailed in the work of experts like Stanford’s Jeffrey Pfeffer. The belief is that giving people agency and a clear understanding of why their work matters can allow them to deliver more without feeling burned out.
A culture of calm: Wiiters’ philosophy is built on a simple mantra she used to de-escalate manufactured urgency. For decades, she reminded her teams, “We don’t work in an ER. Nobody’s going to die”—a mantra that informs her view of a manager’s core purpose. In her view, a manager’s purpose should be to actively build a culture of calm and creativity, not a culture of crisis. When issues arise, she says, a manager’s role is to model resilience and coach the team to solve problems with calm intention.
Calibrate and clarify: A highly practical solution to manufactured stress is often the simplest: talking about it. Witters says a key step is to consistently manage expectations by creating explicit communication norms. That means defining which channels are for emergencies and repeatedly stating that an immediate response is not expected for routine matters. She encourages employees to ask their managers questions like, “How can I calibrate that with you? What is your preferred style? How can we work together?” Explicitly setting up these norms, she notes, is not that hard to do and solves a lot of problems from the beginning.
She views the pushback on urgency culture by younger workers as a healthy and welcome evolution toward a more sustainable workforce. And that cultural change is getting a regulatory push. New federal overtime regulations effective in 2025 adjust salary thresholds, and this legal change elevates the protection of personal time from a good idea into a business requirement.
“My favorite thing about that generation is how they take care of themselves and each other and prioritize self-care in a way that, as a Gen X-er, we often let our accountability to organizations and other people come at the expense of taking care of ourselves,” she concludes. “I have three sons who are all Gen Z, and I love seeing that in my children. I love seeing that in society. I think we’ll just be a better world. This is a good direction for us to move, and I’m hopeful that it continues.”