When agreement becomes exhausting

At first glance, nothing seems wrong. Cases are allocated without discussion, and contentious issues are left aside. People laugh at the same things about management, cover for one another and keep going. Yet sick leave mounts up, the most committed staff talk about leaving, and the word burnout circulates in the corridors. I suggest the term ‘collusive exhaustion’ for situations in which the tacit agreement about what can be thought and done itself becomes a source of wear and tear. The expression is an interpretative hypothesis, not a diagnostic category.

Faced with an exhausted team, two accounts often recur. One focuses on individuals: one colleague failed to set boundaries, another lacked resources. The other points to the organisation, insufficient resources or senior management too far removed from frontline work. These accounts illuminate real aspects of the situation. A systemic approach also looks at what develops in relationships: what purpose collective agreement serves, how it is maintained and what it costs those who take part in it.

This question does not erase the weight of working conditions or the organisation’s responsibilities. When posts remain unfilled and workloads overflow, resources and priorities must be addressed first. Collusion nevertheless helps us understand how a team tries to cope with these constraints, and why some of its protective arrangements eventually limit its ability to discuss them.

Maslach and Leiter’s work (2016) showed that burnout arises from lasting mismatches between a person and their work, whether these involve workload, control, recognition, community, fairness or values. They took burnout beyond individual psychology alone. They say less about how a team unwittingly organises itself so that nothing changes, and this is where the concept of collusion sheds light.

Collusion, or the art of holding together

Carli and Paniccia (2003) use collusion to describe an affective, largely unconscious way of sharing a representation of the context. It gives a group common reference points and makes uncertainty more bearable. When joining a team, people generally begin by observing, absorbing its rules and identifying what can be discussed before proposing something different (Telfener & Doumit, forthcoming). This adjustment helps make cooperation possible.

The risk arises when agreement can no longer be revised. Disagreement becomes a sign of disloyalty, a question resembles an attack, and doubt becomes betrayal. Initiatives may even create an impression of movement while remaining so closely aligned with the group’s expectations that they change nothing. Solidarity then becomes confused with agreement.

This agreement has often protected the team. It has helped people get through difficult situations, contain anxiety and preserve a sense of belonging. In a large London hospital in the late 1950s, it was already observed how the fragmentation of tasks and constant rotations primarily served to keep the anxiety of caring at a distance, at the cost of impoverished work that the most committed nurses eventually left (Menzies, 1960). The problem begins when the bond seems to depend on silence: speaking about what is wrong risks weakening the group. This is where collusive exhaustion begins. What helped people keep going becomes an additional difficulty, because they must continue working while giving up discussion of what wears them down.

Collusion is all the harder to recognise because we participate in it. Elkaïm’s concept of resonance (1989) provides a useful starting point: what we feel can help us explore the encounter between our own history and the relationships in which we take part. A service manager who is always irritated by the same colleague, the one who asks a question at the end of a meeting, can take an interest in that irritation. What does this question touch in her? What room does the team allow for disagreement? Emotion becomes an invitation to formulate hypotheses.

We also observe a pattern repeating across organisational levels: senior management gives managers little room for manoeuvre; they give teams little, and teams give little to the people they support. This repetition requires everyone to examine their own contribution to what they criticise.

When doing your job well becomes impossible

‘In any case, we’re not the ones who decide.’ This phrase often recurs in the teams I meet, sometimes said as matter-of-factly as a remark about the weather. It signals a loss of influence over the organisation: people stop looking for ways to influence the rules and experience them as entirely imposed from outside. Together with Umberta Telfener, we propose understanding this as a loss of strategic thinking (Telfener & Doumit, forthcoming), and it is one of the quietest forms of exhaustion.

Workload matters, as does the possibility of doing work in which one can recognise oneself. The ‘impeded quality’ described by Clot (2010) illuminates this suffering: knowing what ought to be done without having the conditions needed to do it. Overload and ethical suffering often reinforce each other. A social educator asked to ‘work on relationships with families’ in two meetings a year faces the gap between her mission and the means to fulfil it. Suggesting that she manage her diary better leaves the problem intact.

For those who lead, this means acting both on the organisation and on the possibility of discussing what constitutes work well done. Clearly stating what takes priority, what cannot be done and with what resources enables the team to face its choices and assess their consequences, instead of bearing alone a gap that no one names.

Some organisations complicate these decisions with contradictory demands: asking for autonomy while removing the latitude needed to exercise it, valuing relationships while assessing only what can be counted. When these contradictions cannot be discussed, difficulties are often met with ‘more of the same’ (Watzlawick et al., 1974/1975): more meetings, spreadsheets and procedures. Attempted solutions then make the problem they were meant to solve more burdensome.

Gradually, other ways of working become difficult to imagine. Inviting the team to change is no longer enough: discussion must be reopened about what it now regards as self-evident or impossible.

Reflexivity in supporting teams

In my supervision practice, no one comes to talk to me about collusion. People come because the team is exhausted, absences are multiplying, conflict with management has become entrenched, or because they need to ‘improve communication’.

I think of a very close-knit child protection team that shared a conviction: the families they supported would not change. This conviction had a history, shaped by distressing situations and court decisions experienced as a repudiation of their work. It had helped them keep going. But every new colleague who still believed in change eventually fell silent or left, and the professionals most attached to the families were the ones who became ill.

I also think of a newly appointed manager who, to prove himself equal to the role, had added a meeting, a monitoring spreadsheet and two procedures. At first, he said the team was ‘going through a difficult period’; a few months later, it was ‘a difficult team’. His way of bringing the team together and making decisions for it had also become rigid.

Before exploring the cost of an agreement, I try to acknowledge what it has helped preserve. Telling a team too quickly that it is dysfunctional risks discrediting what helped it keep going. I prefer to ask: what has this agreement helped you get through? Who would be worried if someone expressed disagreement in a meeting? What would happen if we stopped doing this? Who has fewer opportunities to exercise their judgement because they are being protected so much?

The work continues through modest steps: putting forward hypotheses, welcoming a different idea, turning a complaint into a request on which action becomes possible. I must also remain attentive to my own position: do my questions open up possibilities, or lead the team towards the answer I expect? Reflexivity begins with this attention to what my presence produces.

These steps require a setting in which people can ask a question, flag a problem or acknowledge an error without being humiliated. Discussion of the quality of work, in Clot’s sense (2010), then becomes a resource for the collective. In meetings, this may mean reserving time for objections before deciding, asking what each person would do differently, then revisiting a decision to examine its effects. Disagreement is more useful when it concerns the work and the available choices, without putting membership of the group at stake.

With the managers I support, I often return to two questions: does the way I work make the team more autonomous or more dependent on me? What should be able to continue without me? These questions concern both how authority is exercised and how much room is left for each person’s judgement.

Conclusion

An institution becomes rigid when it can no longer find room to contradict itself. Collusion gives this silence the appearance of harmony: agreement seems to go without saying, while some voices have ceased to be heard. Collusive exhaustion is the price of this harmony, and it is often the most committed who pay it, because their work is, in Gibran’s words, love made visible.

A team does not have to sing in unison all the time. Polyphony requires different voices, some dissonances that people agree to hear, and someone to keep time without drowning out the others. This may be the most delicate task for those who lead: to carry their team a little less and question it a little more, making it possible once again to discuss the questions it has learnt to avoid, just enough for it to rediscover the pleasure of thinking differently without feeling abandoned.

The situations described have been anonymised and reworked; none refers to an identifiable team or organisation.