THE GREAT CORPORATE BAKE OFF: Week 2 : Why We Blame the Bakers for a Bad Recipe
I’ll be completely honest and put my hand up. As a manager, when the pressure rises and things go wrong, I have absolutely looked around the room and thought, "Who is to blame here? Whose fault is this?"
I remember finding myself in exactly this position earlier in my career. We were experiencing a high rejection rate on strategic plans being submitted to the board. My immediate instinct at the time was to blame the person writing the plan for simply not meeting expectations. To solve it, I introduced a new internal checkpoint, a compliance filter where a team member reviewed every single plan before it moved up the chain.
On paper, the results were spectacular: our acceptance rate skyrocketed to over 90%. Great result-right?
Wrong! I was so busy focusing on compliance and celebrating that quick fix that I didn't question the structure at all. I hadn't actually fixed the root cause of why the work was missing the mark; I had just built a permanent, time-consuming hurdle into our daily routine to catch the errors.
This is exactly what happens in the corporate kitchen when we operate on stress-fueled autopilot: we focus on masking the symptoms instead of fixing the recipe.
In my first article last week, we looked at a harsh reality: if your underlying operational recipe requires a 60 hour workload to hit a 40 hour contract baseline, the cake is fundamentally raw in the middle.
But when things taste bad, our default instinct under stress is to look at the baker.
We treat systemic exhaustion as an individual performance or wellness issue. We send people to resilience training and ask them to "prioritise effectively," as if they can magically wish away an overflowing inbox. New Zealand executives care deeply and work under immense pressure, which is why they invest heavily in these cultural fixes.
But this series is about bringing visibility to the real culprit: the formula itself.
When you give a talented, dedicated employee a broken operational recipe filled with conflicting KPIs, fragmented communication channels, and unrealistic capacity models they cannot bake a masterpiece. If the measurements in the bowl are wrong from the start, the cake will fail every single time.
We need to stop asking our people to change their attitude, and start looking at how we can design a truly sustainable mix.
What ideas do you have to shift the focus from individual burnout to fixing the structural recipe? Let's start a conversation in the comments.
Originally published on Linkedin
