HIGH PERFORMANCE SHOULDN'T BREAK PEOPLE
- Brandon Lawrence
- Sep 4
- 6 min read
Updated: Sep 19
By Brandon Lawrence
You've invested heavily in culture and strategy, to enable performance. Engagement scores are high and dashboards look healthy. So why are burnout levels through the roof? Why are so many of your people battling fatigue and stress, and close to cracking under pressure?
This paradox is not about lack of ambition or effort. It is about design.
The way organisations are structured, the rhythms they demand, and the roles they create often push people beyond sustainable limits. Yes, we make targets and achieve high performance – but at a human cost that steadily erodes the very capacity and resilience you're trying to build.
At TPA, we see this daily. In boardrooms, call centres, plants, and project teams across South Africa, the same pattern emerges: The system looks strong on paper, but people are breaking under pressure. That’s why we’ve shifted our focus from wellness as a programme to wellness as a design condition – a structural safeguard woven into operating models, leadership architectures, and ways of working from day one.
We've been in the thick of this work – leading large-scale operating model and organisational design projects, talent and performance redesign, learning architecture, and leadership development interventions.
In this article, I draw on those experiences to show how this shift takes shape in practice – and why designing for performance now means designing for human capacity.
The paradox of engagement without capacity
With access to a growing body of longitudinal insight, we stoppedd to examine a critical question:
How are organisations actively shaping wellness? Not in messaging and programmes, but in how work is designed at strategic, functional, and personal levels?
Our analysis revealed that:
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The human cost of high performance became impossible to ignore:
Leaders found themselves navigating emotional domains they were never equipped to manage.
HR practitioners were increasingly being pulled into conversations about trauma, fatigue, and system capacity, often with little support, and
Employees feel that transformation is still being done to them, rather than with them.
The shift from wellness as a programme to wellness as a design condition became a visible differentiator.
To illustrate how this shift takes shape in practice, we share a recent case study which shows how we embedded wellness into technical organisational design. The project redefined levels of work, service delivery models, and leadership architecture to enable human sustainability and long-term delivery capacity.
DESIGNING FOR PERFORMANCE WITHOUT BREAKING PEOPLE
Over the past year, TPA has supported five large-scale organisational design projects across financial services, manufacturing, and the public sector. Each began with a familiar ambition: improve performance, accelerate strategy, and optimise clarity.
In every engagement, however, we uncovered the same thread:
Misaligned levels of work that created gaps in accountability and overloaded decision points.
Performance frameworks that rewarded speed but left no space for recovery or recalibration.
Role definitions that looked technically complete but were emotionally unsustainable - leaving managers responsible for spans of control that exceeded what could be sustained.
Our pulse data and interviews told a consistent story: rising burnout, emotional disengagement, psychological distress, and quiet withdrawal, especially among mid-level leadership.
The conclusion was clear: to design for performance we must design for human capacity.
Embedding wellness at every design layer
TPA’s organisation design process builds on well-established OD methodology - diagnostic analysis, value chain definition, operating and service delivery model design, role and structure refinement, ways of working alignment, and leadership architecture development.
This multi-phase journey ensures that designs are structurally aligned to strategy and operationally equipped to deliver at scale. However, in recent projects, it became increasingly clear that following this sequence alone was not enough.
The traditional OD approach, while technically sound, missed the human cost of constant delivery, the emotional weight of ambiguity, and the invisible pressures woven into daily organisational rhythms. We realised that to truly enable high performance, we needed to evolve beyond traditional capacity planning towards a human-centred, wellness-by-design approach. Wellness couldn't be a design principle tacked on later - it had to be a core support layer from day one.
Every design layer needed rethinking through a wellness lens. We deliberately called out wellness as a design principle in all projects. Here’s how we embedded wellness at each layer of the organisational design journey.
1. Levels of work (LoW) and the energy stretch profile
We retained our LoW framework to define decision-rights, problem-solving complexity, and accountability levels. But we added something new: what we now refer to as the energy stretch profile. This goes beyond output or complexity to assess what a role demands emotionally, relationally, and rhythmically. Take a Level 4 role that involves sustained stakeholder conflict navigation – it may carry far higher emotional demand than you’d expect. By mapping these zones, we could rebalance workloads, add buffering layers, or redesign escalation pathways.
2. Recovery loops in the operating model
Designing the operating model used to stop at defining value chains or core capabilities. Rather we looked for delivery inflection points where intensity peaked, coordination became complex, or people repeatedly reported exhaustion. We didn’t treat wellness as something that eventually finds its way into a role profile, but rather tested if the operating model enhanced or inherently detracted from organisational resilience and individual wellness.
We built in recovery loops: deliberate space after delivery sprints where functions would intentionally slow down, realign priorities, review energy levels, and reset their focus before diving back into high-output cycles. To bring it to life it cascaded into all structure designs that followed.
We also challenged a fundamental assumption – that wellness belongs in HR. Traditionally, wellness sits within the Human Resources domain, often under People Experience, Talent, or Culture portfolios.
In our recent designs, we repositioned wellness where it actually belongs: within integration and coordination capabilities that oversee enterprise-wide resource planning, capacity management, and service flow. By placing wellness alongside functions such as departmental workforce planning, business rhythm, and cross-functional coordination, we elevated it from a care initiative to a systemic enabler. This shift signalled that wellness isn’t just about supporting people, it’s about protecting the system’s ability to perform over time.
3. Evaluating the Service Delivery Model (SDM) for human load
SDMs usually get evaluated on efficiency, cost, and control. We added a fourth lens: load coherence. This meant assessing how each SDM archetype (e.g., centralised vs. federated) would affect responsiveness demands, decision latency, and cross-functional pressure. In several cases, centralisation created hidden stress by over-consolidating escalation, leading to middle leader overload. We adjusted the SDM structure to redistribute decision power and lighten constant responsiveness burdens especially for enabling functions.
4. Wellness accountability in role design
We rewrote role purpose statements and key responsibilities to explicitly include wellness accountability, especially for leaders and line managers. This meant expectations to monitor team rhythm, to protect recovery time, and to model sustainable performance behaviours. These were not just “soft skills”. They were embedded KPIs that connected directly to retention, engagement, and delivery rhythm metrics.
5. Leadership architecture: from performance management to system health influence
Leadership architecture in OD includes defining the behaviours, expectations, and development pathways for leaders at every level. We extended this to consider how leaders shape wellness indirectly through tone, urgency, and rhythm. For example, in our change enablement approach to support the OD transitions, we integrated wellness behaviours into leadership charters, equipped leaders to read energy signals, and tracked their influence on team emotional climate. Leadership scorecards included indicators of system impact, not just outputs.
6. People processes and ways of working
The success of any OD project, hinges on the success of the change intervention that supports the transition. Ways of work matter disproportionately, something often overlooked by OD practitioners. We integrated wellness into the everyday moments that shape experience: meeting cadence, onboarding flows, reset rituals, and decision forums. We helped teams create rhythm agreements that balanced delivery with decompression. In change adoption plans, we built pause points into implementation timelines, giving teams space to breathe, recalibrate, and reflect on the human impact of structural shifts.
Outputs in practice
Across these engagements, wellness was embedded into the following:
 | Reframed Levels of Work with energy stretch profiling |
 | Operating models designed for built-in decompression windows |
 | Service delivery models tested for decision density and load |
 | Role profiles with wellness-linked KPIs and rhythm expectations |
 | Leadership architectures that assess emotional impact and system pacing |
 | Onboarding, performance, and feedback systems redesigned for rhythm and results |
 | Change flight plans with built-in feedback and recovery loops |
These outputs collectively shifted the organisational design from a blueprint of functional alignment to a human system capable of sustaining high performance over time.
Closing insights
Performance doesn’t fail because of low ambition or weak capability. It fails when systems ignore human capacity.
By embedding wellness-by-design into each phase of the organisational design journey, we helped our clients reframe wellness as a structural condition, not a support service. From levels of work to leadership architecture, every layer of the organisation became an opportunity to protect rhythm, reinforce recovery, and model sustainable stretch.
The outcome wasn’t just a better organisational structure. It was a better system, one that breathes, absorbs, and performs over time.
Read more about TPA’s work transforming operating models
