Columbia Professor and HR Expert Shares How to Reclaim Your Team from a Crisis of Culture
Key Points
Many workplaces face burnout from constant manufactured urgency, but leaders can adopt a new mindset to break this cycle.
Steve Safier, a Columbia University HR expert, explains that this shift requires leaders to act as empathetic shields for their teams.
By modeling healthy work habits and embracing ambiguity, leaders can foster a culture where quality and employee well-being take priority.
My definition of mental health is the ability to tolerate ambiguity. We can't predict everything, and sometimes we're going to feel stressed out. Ride with it. We'll figure out what to do. We don't have to figure it out by tomorrow.
Steve Safier, PhD
Program Director, M.S. in Human Capital Management
Columbia University
In too many workplaces, a culture of manufactured urgency is the default setting. Driven by the push to do more with less, an “everything-is-an-emergency” mentality leads teams toward burnout. That pressure isn’t new, but it is amplified by today’s technology, company cultures, and economic uncertainty. Flexibility in exchange for constant connectivity is now a standard feature of modern work, but escaping the urgency cycle also involves looking inward at the mindsets that drive our behavior.
To better understand workplace mindsets, we turned to Steve Safier, PhD, an award-winning Program Director for the M.S. in Human Capital Management program at Columbia University. His advice isn’t just academic theory, but informed by a long career as a Chief Transformation and Human Resources Officer, COO, and management consultant, giving him a grounded perspective on the modern workplace.
“My definition of mental health is the ability to tolerate ambiguity,” he says. “We can’t predict everything, and sometimes we’re going to feel stressed out. Ride with it. We’ll figure out what to do. We don’t have to figure it out by tomorrow.”
Pleased but never satisfied: The drive to optimize is often internal, rooted in a human tendency to constantly improve. Many of us are conditioned to believe that if we can do more, we must do more, making it difficult to feel a sense of completion. Safier recalls a former client, a chief operating officer, who personifies this mindset. The COO’s motto created a culture of ongoing dissatisfaction, showing how this internal pressure establishes a continuous cycle of work. “His motto was to be ‘pleased but never satisfied.’ Once in a while, be satisfied. It doesn’t mean not to strive, but now with technology, we have the ability to connect the dots even better. When you combine that ability with that mindset, it becomes a never-ending stream of work,” Safier explains.
The mud flows down: Think the answer is just better communication? Safier points to a messier reality: a chaotic “open field,” where pressure comes from analytics, stakeholders, and customers, not just a manager. An effective strategy is to cultivate an empathy that recognizes this wider system. “Everybody has a boss. I used to think mine was shoveling mud down at me until I realized that mud was coming to him from somewhere else,” Safier notes. “Realizing my boss couldn’t always control what he was asking made it less personal. It helped me become much more effective because I could shift my focus to figuring out what would make him successful.”
For leaders, that concept of empathy should be a core management philosophy. As Safier explains, a manager’s job is to act as a shield, exercising judgment to buffer their team from manufactured crises. That approach asks leaders to cultivate a mindset rooted in situational awareness, prioritizing team well-being over rigid processes. “It’s more an attitude than a process,” Safier states. “I use a simple phrase: if it’s not a crunch, don’t make it a crunch. You have to wax and wane, and you can’t ask the same individuals to do it all the time. You have to shuffle the workload around people. That’s where the empathy comes in.”
But for a culture of rest and prioritization to take hold, leaders must authentically model those values themselves. “The answer is 20/80,” Safier says. “20% of the time, you talk about it. 80% of it is modeling. You have to live it. That’s the only way people will take it seriously. Modeling is the most important management tool that exists.”
Perhaps the biggest lesson Safier offers comes from the world of higher education. He suggests that even at an impersonal corporate scale, the core mission can still be a focus on quality, coupled with a genuine investment in people. The mindset he describes points toward a different definition of personal resilience. “The other thing we can do is show caring for our students in a more explicit, consistent way. My students know that I care about them. It doesn’t mean that I’m not going to grade them harshly or hold them accountable. I want them to succeed in their personal and professional lives. It’s that personal caring and commitment to quality that I would hold up in higher ed as being the lodestar,” Safier explains.
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TL;DR
Many workplaces face burnout from constant manufactured urgency, but leaders can adopt a new mindset to break this cycle.
Steve Safier, a Columbia University HR expert, explains that this shift requires leaders to act as empathetic shields for their teams.
By modeling healthy work habits and embracing ambiguity, leaders can foster a culture where quality and employee well-being take priority.
Steve Safier, PhD
Columbia University
Program Director, M.S. in Human Capital Management
Program Director, M.S. in Human Capital Management
In too many workplaces, a culture of manufactured urgency is the default setting. Driven by the push to do more with less, an “everything-is-an-emergency” mentality leads teams toward burnout. That pressure isn’t new, but it is amplified by today’s technology, company cultures, and economic uncertainty. Flexibility in exchange for constant connectivity is now a standard feature of modern work, but escaping the urgency cycle also involves looking inward at the mindsets that drive our behavior.
To better understand workplace mindsets, we turned to Steve Safier, PhD, an award-winning Program Director for the M.S. in Human Capital Management program at Columbia University. His advice isn’t just academic theory, but informed by a long career as a Chief Transformation and Human Resources Officer, COO, and management consultant, giving him a grounded perspective on the modern workplace.
“My definition of mental health is the ability to tolerate ambiguity,” he says. “We can’t predict everything, and sometimes we’re going to feel stressed out. Ride with it. We’ll figure out what to do. We don’t have to figure it out by tomorrow.”
Pleased but never satisfied: The drive to optimize is often internal, rooted in a human tendency to constantly improve. Many of us are conditioned to believe that if we can do more, we must do more, making it difficult to feel a sense of completion. Safier recalls a former client, a chief operating officer, who personifies this mindset. The COO’s motto created a culture of ongoing dissatisfaction, showing how this internal pressure establishes a continuous cycle of work. “His motto was to be ‘pleased but never satisfied.’ Once in a while, be satisfied. It doesn’t mean not to strive, but now with technology, we have the ability to connect the dots even better. When you combine that ability with that mindset, it becomes a never-ending stream of work,” Safier explains.
The mud flows down: Think the answer is just better communication? Safier points to a messier reality: a chaotic “open field,” where pressure comes from analytics, stakeholders, and customers, not just a manager. An effective strategy is to cultivate an empathy that recognizes this wider system. “Everybody has a boss. I used to think mine was shoveling mud down at me until I realized that mud was coming to him from somewhere else,” Safier notes. “Realizing my boss couldn’t always control what he was asking made it less personal. It helped me become much more effective because I could shift my focus to figuring out what would make him successful.”
For leaders, that concept of empathy should be a core management philosophy. As Safier explains, a manager’s job is to act as a shield, exercising judgment to buffer their team from manufactured crises. That approach asks leaders to cultivate a mindset rooted in situational awareness, prioritizing team well-being over rigid processes. “It’s more an attitude than a process,” Safier states. “I use a simple phrase: if it’s not a crunch, don’t make it a crunch. You have to wax and wane, and you can’t ask the same individuals to do it all the time. You have to shuffle the workload around people. That’s where the empathy comes in.”
But for a culture of rest and prioritization to take hold, leaders must authentically model those values themselves. “The answer is 20/80,” Safier says. “20% of the time, you talk about it. 80% of it is modeling. You have to live it. That’s the only way people will take it seriously. Modeling is the most important management tool that exists.”
Perhaps the biggest lesson Safier offers comes from the world of higher education. He suggests that even at an impersonal corporate scale, the core mission can still be a focus on quality, coupled with a genuine investment in people. The mindset he describes points toward a different definition of personal resilience. “The other thing we can do is show caring for our students in a more explicit, consistent way. My students know that I care about them. It doesn’t mean that I’m not going to grade them harshly or hold them accountable. I want them to succeed in their personal and professional lives. It’s that personal caring and commitment to quality that I would hold up in higher ed as being the lodestar,” Safier explains.