Your Team Isn’t Toxic — It’s in Fight-or-Flight
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Earlier this fall I read the book Breath by James Nestor. At just about any given point in my reading journey, you might’ve seen me holding my breath, breathing to the count of something, or mildly hyperventilating. The book underscores what many of us have come to learn by now via the plethora of mindfulness resources, that our breath holds a special power to bring us calm and change our physiological state from one of panic to one of calm.
If you’re someone who, like me, has ever felt the need to “calm down,” or to “take a beat,” you’re probably aware of the states that often precede that need: stress, anxiety, panic, maybe anger or frustration, too. And when you’re fortunate enough to have the wherewithal to prompt that breath, you know it might just keep you on course, where that course is most likely away from an unmeasured reaction, an outburst, or saying something you can’t take back.
Lately I’ve been struck by a theme that keeps surfacing with leaders in higher education (and other sectors, for that matter), that is related, and that prompted my most recent blog article, “Care and Connection: The Quiet Resistance to a World Coming Apart.” It’s not burnout exactly, and not outright dysfunction, but a pervasive unease. Things are getting done, people are showing up, yet something feels off. Alignment is slipping. Collaboration feels harder. Priorities blur.
And I see leaders getting frustrated because they’re left wondering: is this a capacity problem? Is this a clarity problem? And they’re tempted to add another policy, or to clarify roles, or tighten processes. But I think what we’re seeing are symptoms of something below the surface, and something profoundly human: a collective nervous system under strain.
When we’re individually under pressure, our bodies go into survival mode — fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.
Organizations do the same.
When the external environment is unstable, like in the environment we’re seeing now: economic precarity, rapid change, social tension, political polarization, that uncertainty has an impact. People start to protect what feels controllable: their time, their projects, their influence. Maybe their criticism of your initiative is particularly biting. Perhaps they’re not responding to the survey you sent. Or they keep plugging away on a task you asked them to deprioritise. It can read as sabotage or apathy, but what if they’re having an instinctual response? It might be understandable, but our instincts seldom lead us to build trust or collaboration.
Organizations Have Nervous Systems Too
In these moments, organizations and the people inside them exhibit predictable behaviours:
Freeze: Teams avoid complexity and gravitate to low-stakes, easy tasks.
Fawn: People perform busyness: overworking, over-reporting, seeking approval to stay safe.
Fight: Silos harden, turf wars emerge, and collaboration turns competitive.
Flight: People emotionally withdraw, communicate less, and disengage from shared goals.
Have you been observing any of these behaviours on your team or in your faculty or department?
When We Forget the “We”
Even in organizations with clear missions, values, and smart people, cultural erosion can happen quietly when people are living in a near-constant state of unease. And the cause of this erosion isn’t incompetence, it’s isolation. When stress is chronic, people start to perceive their experience as unique. And instead of reaching out and finding care in/and connection, they turn inward. Work continues, but the why gets lost. Strategy becomes something to comply with, not something to believe in. Energy splinters. Connection frays.
“No one understands how hard my role is.”
“Other teams just don’t get it.”
“If I don’t hold this together, it will fall apart.”
Multiply that mindset by twenty, and you have a room full of capable, caring people all pulling in slightly different directions. Everyone’s doing “the most important work,” but rarely the same important work.
This isn’t a failure of will, it’s a failure of connection. And rebuilding that connection isn’t about a new communications platform or a re-org chart. It starts by recognizing that what we’re seeing isn’t resistance; it’s self-preservation.
The Work of Reconnection
Here’s the thing: you’ve got to resist the urge to jump straight into a new strategy, framework, or governance model. (You’ve especially got to be careful not to take this anxiety response personally!) Strategy or new initiatives without empathy just adds weight to an already overburdened system. The first step isn’t to fix people, it’s to see them.
Reconnection begins by helping people notice that what feels personal is, in fact, shared. You can start here:
Uncover shared challenges: surface the daily frustrations, barriers, and pain points everyone experiences, and recognize the patterns across them.
Share hopes: invite people to describe what “better” would look like in their own words, and notice (and reflect back to them!) how similar those visions really are.
Define shared priorities: co-define what matters most right now, not because it’s on a plan, but because it’s what the moment demands.
When people see that they’re not alone, that their colleagues share both their pain and their aspirations, something shifts. The nervous system relaxes. Collaboration becomes possible again.
From Scarcity to Collective Strength
The antidote to organizational anxiety isn’t control, it’s coherence. It’s a return to the we.
That might mean replacing top-down alignment with shared accountability frameworks: tools that let every person map their work to a common purpose. It might mean creating spaces for storytelling and reflection rather than another metrics dashboard. It might even mean pausing before the next “strategic refresh” to ask: Do we still feel connected to what this is all for? (Maybe you need a short-term resilience strategy that’s more agile and actionable than the 42-pager sitting on the shelf gathering dust.)
Now, don’t be fooled… In the same way a bubble-bath doesn’t wash away the causes of stress, reconnection doesn’t make external pressures disappear. But it does create resilience when you make it a practice. It can help your team face uncertainty without fracturing under it.
Because at the end of the day, organizations don’t thrive because they’re perfectly efficient (I giggled writing that, because they totally don’t!). They thrive because their people remember that they’re in it together.
Closing Reflection
If your team feels stuck in a loop of busyness without momentum, consider this: you might not have a productivity problem, you might have a nervous system problem.
The good news? Like any living system, organizations can heal, not through control, but through connection, curiosity, and care.
And if you missed the previous blog, now might be a good time to check it out.
Here’s to care.
Here’s to connection.
Here’s to building a resilience that might just see us come out stronger and more purposeful on the other side of unease.
P.S. If you’re a leader looking to build your Resilient Leader skillset, learn about your strengths and development areas with the Resilient Leader Self-Assessment and Peer Evaluation. Get it here.