Beyond Burnout: 3 Systemic Shifts to Unlock High Performance for Minds of All Kinds
Part II of the Neuro-Inclusion & Regenerative Leadership Series
What the Axolotl Taught Me About Performance
In fragile ecosystems, some species act as early warning signals.
The axolotl, an amphibian native to the lakes of Mexico, is one such species. Its health directly reflects the ecosystem's overall wellbeing. When the axolotl begins to disappear, it tells us that something deeper is unravelling beneath the surface.
In workplaces, we often miss these signals. We see a team member burning out, a strategic thinker missing deadlines, or a strong contributor resigning without a job. And many ask: What’s wrong with them?
But regenerative leaders ask a different question:
“What is our system trying to tell us here?”
In Part I, we explored how performance emerges from designing aware systems that prioritize regulation over pressure and diversity over conformity.
Here, I share three essential systemic shifts every regenerative leader should implement to build workplaces where minds of all kinds can thrive:
Design for Regulation, Not Just Resilience
Recognize Executive Function is Context-Dependent
Create Systems of Safety, Not Systems of Pressure
For each shift, I share some critical questions regenerative leaders must ask, as well as proven strategies and tools you can consider adapting in your organization.
SHIFT #1: Design for Regulation, Not Just Resilience
In nature, chronic stress is unsustainable. Coral reefs bleach under persistent heat. Human brains similarly struggle under relentless pressure.
High-pressure environments don’t just weed out the weak. They impair cognitive performance across the board, and disproportionately so for neuro-divergent minds. What looks like inconsistency or underperformance is often the visible outcome of invisible overload.
Nervous system regulation, not grit, is what supports executive function, deep thinking, and sustained high performance. When organizational cultures and processes combine to prioritize nervous system regulation, that leads to more capacity dedicated to deep, innovative, high-quality thinking across the organization.
Resilience asks individuals to adapt endlessly to high-pressure environments. Regulation proactively reduces chronic pressure, preserving cognitive resources for innovation and performance.
Leaders need to be asking, and honestly answering, a different set of questions:
What is the flavour of emotional charge in our organization?
What nervous system states does our organization normalize or reward?
Are our top performers truly regulated, or running on adrenaline and close to burnout?
What hidden costs come with sustaining chronic stress?
SHIFT #1: Proven Strategies & Tools
Here are some ways to build environments that help everyone regulate better.
1a. Reduce sensory overload:
Open-plan offices and constant communication can overload cognitive capacity. Quiet zones, deep work hours, asynchronous communication and customizable sensory environments are proven strategies to move away from presenteeism and unlock true productivity for all.
As leaders, you can play a significant role in shifting the rhythms of work in your organization by adopting and role-modelling these practices.
When you hold sacred space for uninterrupted and focused work, you institutionalize permission to NOT be ‘always on’. When you respect asynchronous ways of working by learning & applying the technology effectively, you make it possible for your teams to have more autonomy over how they work.
1b. Build rhythmic cycles of effort and recovery:
Peak performance isn't sustained by grinding but by rhythmic recovery. That’s how nature works, and that’s how humans work.
Ultradian rhythms are our body’s built-in energy management and maintenance protocol – for every 90-120 minutes of peak flow activity, a down time for roughly 20mins helps clear the decks and refuel.
For some people, the operating pattern involves higher, longer crests at their best but also lower & slower troughs for recovery. It's a smart strategy to understand what’s happening at a biological and hormonal level, and to design our work & schedule to optimize natural patterns.
Many high performers do exactly this.
But what happens when wave-form individual strategies rub up against linear organizational expectations and workflows?
ENTER: Friction, fraction, frustration, fatigue, aaaaand… failure.
Normalize rest.
Your neuro-divergent employees will thank you for it. Often, their hyper-focus will drive them to peaks of high performance that are emotionally depleting and fast-tracks to burnout.
Build micro-breaks into the day – start meetings 10min or 15mins past the hr, giving people time to transition.
Encourage ‘movement snacks’ through the day – short spells of stretching, squatting, walking. Get the blood going.
Have more walking meetings, go out where you can see greenery and feel the sun on your back as you work – walking meetings are proven to create both deeper connections between those walking side by side and more creative & reflective mental states.
Build reflection habits in your team, whether that’s quiet periods on calls or weekly learning logs in team workspaces.
1c. Train leaders in self-regulation and co-regulation:
Leaders set the organizational nervous system tone.
Dysregulated leaders create unsafe environments. When fear takes root, the prefrontal cortex functions are impaired, and the resilience, adaptability and innovation capacity of the whole system drops.
Regulation is contagious. Leaders who can create moments of calm, connection and clarity through their interactions raise the health levels of the whole organization. Some ways to build regulation into work practices are:
Begin key meetings with a few minutes of silence or with centering and breathwork
Train managers in nervous system literacy and trauma-aware leadership
Offer access to wellbeing support embedded into the workflow
Designing for nervous system regulation lays a strong foundation.
But how do we ensure our most talented minds aren’t undermined by environmental friction?
That brings us to our second critical shift.
SHIFT #2: Recognize Executive Function is Context-Dependent
We often treat executive functions like planning, focus, memory and time management as fixed capabilities. But these are state-based, not trait-based.
They’re actually highly context-dependent, especially for neuro-divergent minds. They vary based on nervous system load, sensory context, and workplace design.
Accessing these higher orders skills is more difficult under conditions of chronic stress, fear or overwhelm. When we ignore context, we misread brilliance as brokenness.
What leaders need to ask:
How are we evaluating performance – are we measuring true capability or just friction?
Do our systems scaffold executive function or drain it?
SHIFT #2: Proven Strategies & Tools
While some tools below are in wide use, some other strategies are highly subjective and require leaders to read the situation and be flexible in experimenting with approaches to find what works.
2a. Strength-based work design
Designing roles and performance management systems to account for spiky profiles, where someone may excel in one area but struggle in another, unlocks brilliance. Some ways we can do this are through:
Job crafting to match strengths and rhythms
Role flexibility in cross-functional teams
Moving away from "balanced" role expectations
2b. Strategic pairing and complementarity
Not all brilliance is solitary. Many high performers who are challenged in independent delivery thrive in complementary partnerships.
I once coached a brilliant, high-energy leader. Her ideas came fast, her energy was magnetic, her solutions innovative and far-reaching. Promoted into a BU leadership role in the region, she suffered from a credibility crisis early on – deadlines slipped, tasks fell through the cracks.
In a traditional system, she was seen as chaotic.
In most situations, this is where the axe would fall – she’d end up as just another statistic of someone whose star burnt too bright too fast and couldn’t sustain. Luckily, her manager could see beyond her performance of the moment to what was made possible when her potential could bloom fully.
The organization invested in her growth through coaching.
In urgent recovery mode when we began working together, we first took stock of the situation through a comprehensive behaviour-based leadership 360 feedback. Reflecting on the honest feedback, she made an interesting observation – in every role she had excelled at, she had ended up partnering closely with a more thoughtful & methodical colleague. She needed that solid runway so she could take flight and soar high. Her big-picture thinking fuelled momentum. Her colleague’s precision anchored it.
So, instead of correcting her perceived flaws, we designed for interdependence.
She reconfigured the workflow in her team so that she was working closely with a methodical, organized direct report on 3 of the BU’s key projects. She was free to develop the big ambitious plans and ask her colleague to poke holes in it. While he expanded his sense of what was possible by the ways in which she pushed into new territories, connected ideas and secured resources for the projects. Together, they delivered some of the best results that the region had seen.
Performance is not just personal. It’s ecological.
As leaders, contextualize performance and design for cultures & interactions that increase the potential for high performance for everyone.
Shaping context-sensitive environments can be very powerful and is a critical tool in every regenerative leader’s toolkit. But sustainable high performance demands one more essential shift: psychological safety.
SHIFT #3: Create Systems of Safety, Not Systems of Pressure
Psychological safety is not about being comfortable. It’s about feeling safe enough to take risks without fear, to innovate, and authentically contribute.
Fear and blame shrink our thinking, reducing the universe of possibilities we are willing to consider, and impact our ability to creatively problem-solve.
Innovation, deep learning, and accountability flourish in systems of safety. They shut down under pressure. And in neuro-diverse teams, the cues that signal “danger” may be more varied and more invisible.
Regenerative leaders need to be asking themselves and their HR leads:
What subtle threats or rewards are embedded in our culture?
Where are people withholding their best thinking due to fear?
Do our rituals and feedback loops amplify trust—or anxiety?
What rituals and structures can we adopt that restore a sense of trust?
SHIFT #3: Proven Strategies & Tools
Teams don’t become safe through words. They become safe through systems of practices and behaviours, showing up in how leaders respond, to what and to whom.
3a. Embed psychological safety in daily organizational practices:
In unsafe workplaces, significant emotional energy is spent in masking which reduces cognition & performance bandwidth across the organization.
In contrast, members of psychologically safe teams experience less stress, mask lesser and expend less energy on impression management.
Some systemic practices that help increase psychological safety are:
Anonymous input channels, and visibly sharing actions taken
Safe debrief rituals that focus on learnings for the future
Feedback loops at team and org level, naturalizing two-way dialogue
Public celebrations of experimentation and learning
Google's Project Aristotle uncovered that psychological safety is one of the top 3 factors of high-performing teams, which report significantly higher innovation (17–20%) when psychological safety is structurally integrated.
3b. Use restorative, not punitive, approaches to mistakes
Blame corrodes trust.
And punitive approaches foster compliance without commitment. A well-regulated leader who is able to zoom out of the moment and create space to respond intentionally during crises is modelling a healthy stress response for the organization.
Some ways to do this are to:
Shift from blame to inquiry ("Who’s at fault?" to "What happened here?” and “What did we learn?")
Normalize sharing failure stories, to develop growth mindset
Implement peer debriefs for process improvement, to facilitate lateral dialogue
3c. Design inclusive, flexible communication practices:
Not everyone processes information the same way, and there’s no right way either.
Start with trust.
Trust your people to know what makes them most productive & effective.
By loosening up on HOW and WHERE work gets done but staying clear & focused on WHAT results are expected, leaders can create safe, inclusive organizations where a range of styles can operate effectively.
Some ways are to:
Allow people to opt out of video calls, to reduce sensory load and need for masking
Offer pre-reading and follow-up summaries, to reduce anxiety from uncertainty
Use asynchronous voice notes or visuals for clarity
In the early days of COVID, the HR team I led struggled with communication overload. Old ways of working weren’t working anymore. So we pivoted. By leveraging asynchronous approaches through Microsoft Teams, we gave maximum flexibility to team members to manage their workload. We drastically reduced meeting hours and presenteeism, but also drove up transparency and clarity, enabling us to deliver with both the urgency and the precision that the moment demanded.
Reading the Signals as a Leader
In the early 20th century, coal miners would carry canaries underground. The canary, more sensitive to toxic gases than humans, would fall silent or die first, serving as a warning signal.
Today, neuro-divergent minds are our organizational canaries – early indicators of the health or dysfunction of the system.
As leaders, when you see those on the edges go quiet, burn out or opt out, examine the air they were breathing.
Wise leaders don’t ignore those signals.
They redesign the system.
Regenerative leadership is all about creating thriving habitats where high performance emerges sustainably and naturally. And the three essential systemic shifts discussed here – designing for regulation, recognizing that executive function is context-dependent and creating systems of safety – can help leaders mindfully design organizations for everyone to flourish.
Regenerative Leadership in Action: A note from the Mangrove forests
Recently, I stood amidst mangrove forests on the Konkan coast in India, at a beautifully run eco-resort called Ocean Deck.
At Karwar, where the magnificent Kali river flows into the Arabian Sea, the mangrove forests have a storied past. Speaking to the owner of Ocean Deck, Vinay Naik, I learnt how these forests had been near-destroyed and then rehabilitated.
Mangroves have always fascinated me – with exposed roots visible above tidal waters, they remind me of village belles daintily lifting their skirts to cross forest streams.
Mangroves serve a critical role along coastlines.
They prevent soil erosion, stabilize coastlines, and absorb shocks during storms and tidal floods. Thriving in the confluence of fresh and brackish water, these ecosystems flourish under unusual and highly specific conditions. These areas are characterized by high salinity, fluctuating tidal levels, and muddy soil, and mangroves need these specific conditions to thrive.
In their tangled roots, certain crab species lay eggs – because no other habitat offers the same mix of protection, nutrients, and flow. In return, the crabs play a role in aerating the soil with their burrows and consume decaying leaves to maintain the mangroves.
Mangroves are decidedly not efficient.
But, they are resilient.
They are regenerative.
They are thriving habitats.
Growing up in Karwar, Vinay Naik noticed a decade ago that the plentiful crabs he used to catch for fun were the first to disappear, followed by the fishes and then the mangroves started dying out. He noticed how these changes impacted livelihoods in his community.
Driven by a passion to protect his motherland and bring opportunities back for his people, Vinay started the Ocean Deck eco-tourism resort.
His goal?
To revitalize the Kali estuary by replanting thousands of indigenous mangrove varieties.
Vinay built this into his business plan – along with warm hospitality, he created unforgettable experiences for his guests by having them involved in the planting and conservation efforts.
A decade later, the entire stretch of the coastline has come alive again.
Fiddler, sesarmid and tree crabs are thriving once more, among others.
The estuarine coastline is back to being a bustling nursery for crustaceans and thriving fishing grounds for the local community, besides shoring up the coastline & protecting it from erosion.
Now, to measure the health of this mangrove ecosystem, Vinay simply looks to the health of its key indicator species – so long as the crabs are still building their nurseries in the mangrove roots, all is well.
Thriving workplaces resemble these ecosystems—resilient, adaptive, interdependent. They offer diverse forms of safety, allowing brilliance to unfold naturally.
“Hostility is not the point of leadership. A leader’s job is to shape ecosystems where minds of all kinds can do their best work – without apology, without masks, and without fear.”
Your turn: what small shift can you make this quarter?
—to design for regulation,
—to unlock contextual executive function,
—to build safety into the system?
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Hi, I’m Abby.
Whether you’re navigating burnout in Seoul, scaling innovation in Jakarta, or managing talent shortages in Singapore, let’s talk. I partner with APAC leaders, through consulting, coaching or as in-house HR lead, to build organizational cultures of high performance that respect local nuances and deliver global results.
Let’s build humane organizations that work for humans.