Why Organizations Normalize Unhealthy Ways of Working

A workaround introduced during a busy quarter is still in place two years later. A meeting continues every week, even though nobody can explain what it accomplishes. Teams repeatedly commit to more work than they can deliver, then rely on extra hours to close the gap.

People adapt because the work needs to get done. They find ways around unclear decisions, competing priorities and processes that don’t reflect how the organization actually operates. That adaptability can keep things moving, but it can also allow the underlying problems to continue.

Over time, a temporary response becomes an expectation. What once prompted concern becomes something people plan around. Eventually, someone describes it as “just how we do things here,” and the conversation moves on.

How temporary responses become permanent expectations

Workarounds often begin for understandable reasons. There’s a deadline to meet, a vacancy to cover or an urgent issue that can’t wait for the usual process. People make adjustments to get through it, assuming they’ll return to a more sustainable approach once the pressure passes.

But the next demand arrives before anyone revisits the arrangement. The extra reporting continues. The vacant role’s responsibilities remain spread across the team. The person who stepped in to clarify an unclear handoff becomes responsible by default, even though nobody formally agreed to the change.

When the work keeps getting delivered, it can appear that the arrangement is working. What’s less visible is the effort required to sustain it: the repeated follow-ups, duplicated work, delayed priorities or evenings spent catching up. Future plans may then be built around a level of delivery that depends on those same adjustments continuing.

This is one way unhealthy working patterns become established. People solve the immediate problem, but the organization never returns to examine what made that solution necessary or what it now costs to maintain.

People may notice more than leaders realize

Some patterns become so familiar that people stop questioning them. Others remain painfully obvious to the people working within them. They know which approval always causes a delay, which meeting produces no decision and which commitments are unrealistic before the work even begins.

What changes is their expectation that raising the issue will make a difference. Perhaps they’ve brought it forward several times without a response. Perhaps everyone agrees it’s a problem, but no one has the authority or ownership to address it. Or perhaps the people who keep things moving despite the difficulty are praised for their flexibility, while the difficulty itself remains untouched.

“That’s just how things work here” can mean more than acceptance. It can mean, “I’ve tried to change this,” or, “I don’t know who can resolve it.” A lack of challenge doesn’t necessarily mean people believe the approach is effective. They may have learned to put their energy into managing around it.

For leadership teams, that distinction matters. The work may involve making a pattern visible, but it may also involve listening to something people have been trying to explain for a long time.

The cost of working around the same problem

Consider a team whose decisions repeatedly wait for one senior leader’s approval. As requests build up, people begin booking extra meetings, sending reminders and approaching the leader informally to get an answer. Some decisions move through quickly because someone knows whom to ask. Others sit unresolved.

The team becomes skilled at navigating the bottleneck. That skill helps individual pieces of work progress, while the underlying question remains unanswered: which decisions actually require that leader’s involvement?

If the response is another status meeting or a new tracking tool, the organization may become better at monitoring the delay without reducing it. The recurring issue needs a conversation about authority, accountability and where decisions should sit.

Similar patterns appear when teams repeatedly compensate for unclear priorities or insufficient capacity. Adding coordination can help in the short term, but it can also create more work around a problem that requires a leadership decision.

Awareness creates an opportunity to choose

In the previous blog, I explored how leadership decisions and behaviours shape the conditions people work within. Examining normalized ways of working means looking at which of those conditions have become established and whether they still support what the organization needs.

A useful starting point is a recurring frustration. Where does work consistently wait? What requires repeated follow-up? Which commitments depend on someone stepping in beyond their role or working additional hours? What issue keeps returning despite repeated attempts to resolve it?

These questions help a leadership team move from a general sense that work is harder than it should be to a specific pattern it can examine. The aim is to understand how the pattern developed, what it helps people accomplish and what it makes more difficult.

That context matters. A workaround may still be serving a real need. Removing it without addressing that need can create another problem. Once the team understands both its purpose and its cost, it can make a more informed choice about what to keep, change or stop.

What happens after the pattern is named

Naming a familiar problem can be a useful moment in a team conversation. Someone says, “We’ve been working around this for a year,” and others begin connecting their own experiences to the same issue. What seemed like separate frustrations becomes something the team can examine together.

But that moment needs follow-through. Who can make the decision? What information is missing? What will the team change, and when will it review whether the change helped? If nothing happens after the conversation, people may become even less willing to raise the issue again.

The first action doesn’t always need to be large. A team might clarify authority for one recurring decision, remove a duplicated approval or agree on what work will pause when an urgent priority is added. A specific adjustment gives people a chance to experience a different way of working and identify what still needs attention.

Where a problem sits beyond the team’s authority, leaders can be clear about what they’ll escalate, what they can address locally and when they’ll report back. That clarity gives people something more useful than another acknowledgement that the situation is difficult.

Familiar doesn’t have to mean permanent

Every organization develops habits in response to pressure. Some remain useful. Others continue long after the circumstances that created them have changed. Making time to examine those habits is part of maintaining a working environment that supports people and delivery.

It also matters when new change is introduced. Existing delays, unclear ownership and workloads leave people with less room to learn and use a new approach. Addressing those conditions is part of building readiness for what comes next.

This is part of the work I do through leadership team facilitation: helping teams examine recurring patterns, hear the perspectives behind them, and decide how they’ll work differently.

A question to bring to your next leadership meeting is: What are people repeatedly working around that we need to resolve?

If a familiar problem comes to mind, book a conversation. We can explore what’s keeping the pattern in place and how I can help your team work through it.

Lisa Blanchet, Champion of People-Centric Change