Look around your company for a second.

The same names show up on every critical project. The same managers catch every last minute request. The same people hero their way through each quarter.

You tell the board they are your 'rock stars.' You tell them they are the reason the company wins.

Here is the hard truth.

Their commitment is not just an asset. In your current system, it is a liability.

Because every time those people say yes when the system is already at capacity, they hide the real problem. They make bad planning look fine. They make sloppy prioritization look survivable. They let executives believe the company can handle more than it actually can.

Then one day they are gone. Or worse, they are still in the seat, but the edge is gone and nobody knows why.

The Praise That Turns Into A Problem

Most companies confuse availability with commitment.

They see late night Slack replies and weekend decks as proof that people care. They give bigger scopes and faster promotions to the ones who never flinch. They tell stories about the time a team pulled off an impossible turnaround and 'saved the quarter.'

On paper, it looks like loyalty. In real life, it is people trading their sleep, attention, and relationships to cover for leadership gaps.

Research on burnout from Christina Maslach makes this brutally simple. Burnout spikes when there is a chronic mismatch between what people put in and what they get back in control, recognition, and fairness. When those lines stay out of balance, exhaustion and cynicism follow fast. Maslach & Leiter, 2016.

Now layer that onto your most committed people.

They keep taking on more work without more control. They absorb every urgent ask without more clarity. They are praised in town halls, then left alone with the fallout in their calendar.

They look like heroes. In reality, they are warning lights. When you celebrate that pattern, you are not rewarding commitment. You are rewarding your own refusal to fix the system.

Here is where it gets worse.

Why Your Most Committed People Can't Hit The Brakes

Your highest commitment employees are not wired to protect themselves from you.

Decades of work by Robert Vallerand on 'obsessive' passion shows that when people fuse work with identity, they do not just like their job. They feel compelled to keep going even when it hurts their health and relationships. That pattern is tightly linked to burnout and workaholism in high achievers. Vallerand, 2015.

Look at your top performers through that lens.

They have spent their whole lives being 'the reliable one.' The person who takes the hard assignment and lands it. Their reputation is built on never dropping the ball.

So when the system starts to overload them, they do not raise their hand. They double down.

They tell themselves three lies.

1. 'If I step back, someone I respect will pay the price'

They see peers grinding just as hard. Saying no feels like putting weight on friends. So they keep saying yes and tell themselves it is temporary.

2. 'If I slow down, I am not who I thought I was'

Their identity is welded to endurance. Admitting they are past the line feels like admitting weakness. They would rather burn out than rewrite that story.

3. 'If I speak up, I become one of those people'

They watch who gets praise. It is the people who pull off miracles, not the ones who protect boundaries. They do not want to be seen as difficult. So they keep going long after the work has stopped being sustainable.

That is why waiting for your best people to 'tell you' they are overwhelmed is a fantasy. By the time they talk, the damage is old.

You will not see the first cracks in what they say. You will see it in how they work.

How Overcommitment Hides A Broken System

Look closely at where commitment clusters in your org.

It is the same manager who catches every executive drive by ask. The same senior IC who rewrites the launch plan three times because priorities keep shifting. The same product lead who patches cross functional chaos with personal project management at 10:30 p.m.

Every extra hour they pour in covers for a missing piece.

• Work that was never de-scoped.

• Dependencies nobody mapped.

• Deadlines leaders pulled in without touching anything else.

From the top, it looks like 'the team pulled together.' In the tools, the story is different. Spikes in after hours messages. More urgent language. Shorter, colder replies. Less appreciation. More hedged phrases like 'should be fine.' You have already seen Workplace surface these patterns as early fingerprints of burnout and future execution risk long before surveys catch them.

Here is the brutal part.

Those heroics distort your understanding of capacity. They make it look like eight people can do the work of twelve. So you keep planning like you have twelve. Then act shocked when quality slips or attrition hits clusters of high performers.

Your problem is not that people are not committed enough. Your problem is that the system keeps overdrawing commitment and calling it culture.

The fix will not come from asking people to 'set better boundaries.' The fix has to start in the way you, as a leadership team, treat commitment itself.

Turn Commitment From Fuel Leak Into Strategic Asset

If you are a CPO or CEO, your job is not to squeeze more commitment out of people who already care. Your job is to manage commitment like a finite resource.

Here is how that looks in practice.

1. Draw The Line On 'Healthy Commitment'

Right now, commitment in your company is probably undefined. People just know they are supposed to 'go above and beyond.' That vagueness is dangerous.

Define it.

Healthy commitment means people keep their promises inside a system that respects capacity. It does not mean they say yes to every unplanned demand. It does not mean they give you their nights to fix your planning gaps.

Put that definition in manager training. Put it in performance reviews. Say out loud that chronic overwork is not proof of loyalty. It is a sign that leadership is offloading risk onto the same shoulders over and over.

2. Make Commitment Visible In Your Data

Stop guessing where the line is being crossed.

Use your communication data as a dashboard. With tools like Workplace you can see where after hours volume is climbing, where urgent language clusters, where tone flattens and appreciation dries up across teams.

Bring those patterns into your executive reviews alongside revenue and churn. Ask a simple question.

Where are we spending commitment faster than we can replenish it?

If one org or one leader generates a disproportionate share of late messages and unscheduled asks, that is not passion. That is a named operating problem.

3. Attach A Cost To Every Big Bet

Big initiatives are not the issue. Endless stretch with no exit is.

Before you greenlight a major push, answer three concrete questions.

1. How long will people run hot?

2. What stops or slows down so they have room?

3. What recovery window follows and who protects it?

If you cannot answer those, you are not leading boldly. You are throwing a grenade into the calendar and counting on the usual committed few to absorb the blast.

4. Retrain Managers From 'Collectors' To Gatekeepers

Managers sit where pressure turns into workload. Many still think their job is to prove their worth by saying yes to everything from above.

Change the script.

Instead of asking 'Can you take this?' tell them to ask 'What will slip if we do this?'

Give them explicit permission to say 'We can own this if we move that date' or 'We can do this if another team takes that other work.' Then celebrate the managers who actually protect their teams, not the ones who grind themselves down in silence.

5. Change Who Gets Treated As A Hero

Culture follows status. If the heroes in your stories are the people who pulled three all nighters, everyone learns that this is what success looks like.

Start spotlighting different wins.

• The product lead who delivered a launch on time because they negotiated scope early.

• The manager who pushed back on an unrealistic timeline and still hit the outcome a different way.

• The team that hit an aggressive target without spiking after hours volume once.

When you raise the status of sustainable execution, your best people change on their own. They stop proving their worth by self sacrifice. They start proving it by design.

The Real Measure Of Leadership

This is not just about burnout. It is about the kind of company you are building.

You can keep running on invisible withdrawals of human energy. You can keep telling yourself that things are fine because numbers look good and the same dependable people are still answering messages at 11 p.m.

Or you can read those patterns for what they are.

A short term sugar high that hides long term damage.

The strongest cultures do something different. They treat commitment as something they are responsible for, not something they are entitled to.

They use data to see where they are overreaching before people collapse. They install real guardrails around big pushes. They build norms that let managers protect capacity without losing status. They design work so that people can care deeply and still stay human.

If you are a CPO, your job is to bring this truth to the table and refuse to water it down. Put the language patterns. Put the after hours load. Put the real human cost next to the quarterly targets.

If you are a CEO, your job is to stop treating limitless commitment as a free input. Start treating it like the scarcest resource you have.

Because your most committed people will not walk into your office and announce that their loyalty has turned against them.

They will keep holding things together.

Right up until the day they do not.

The only real question is whether you build a company that waits for that moment, or a company that sees the warning signals early and has the courage to change course.