The pressure to always be moving faster echoes the Red Queen Hypothesis, a concept originally from evolutionary biology. The idea comes from a scene in Alice in Wonderland where the Red Queen tells Alice that in her world, you have to run as fast as you can just to stay in the same place. Applied to modern work culture, it describes a competitive environment where individuals must continuously upskill, produce, and perform — not necessarily to get ahead, but simply to avoid falling behind.
I wanted to understand how to bridge the gap between academic models and the 2026 labor market, so I spoke with two professionals living in the heart of management: Erika Schroth, a consultant with 20 years of HR leadership across the automotive, IT, and medical sectors who focuses on how leadership culture drives innovation, and Stanislava Savova from ASSESS. She specialized in Social and Sports Psychology, and brings a background in crisis management and elite performance coaching for professional athletes.
Together, they dismantle the idea that constant speed equals success.
Something a paycheck cannot guarantee
In the lecture halls of universities all over the world, we often discuss Great Minds in Management by Ken G. Smith and Michael A. Hitt. It is considered a revolutionary work because it chronicles the shift from treating employees as mere tools to viewing them as complex psychological systems. However, a theory is only proven if it is visible through the normal Monday morning.
According to the Great Minds lineage, performance usually relies on two things: Interactional Justice (how people are treated) and Communication. In a market where competitors are constantly poaching talent with higher paychecks, Erika Schroth believes that resilient organizations offer something money can’t buy: social currency.
“I’ve seen that money is a transaction, not a bond,” Erika explains. “People stay because of collective experiences. To keep up a business, you have to use structured communication. It’s the only way to keep the social glue from dissolving.”
When I asked her for the one must-have piece of equipment for a successful team, her answer wasn’t a tech tool.
“It is the mental stability and availability of the leader,” she says. “The IT sector has mastered this because they use rituals like hackathons to build social currency. Manufacturing still has a long way to go to catch up to this human-centric reality.”
The myth of constant progress
Stanislava Savova takes this further by challenging the “motivation myth” often found in soft-focus management journals. Instead, she views organizations through the lens of biological and neurological resilience.
She argues that hustle culture misinterprets how the brain actually achieves elite performance.
Cognitive science shows that growth is not linear or constant but rather depends on cycles of stress and recovery, effort and integration. When we learn a new skill — be it a language or a complex software — our brains build new neural pathways. At first, those pathways are flimsy. During what looks like a “plateau,” the brain is performing neurological integration.
If you do not take time to look around and analyze what you have accomplished and what the next steps are, the system is bound to eventually fail.
Why stagnation is a lie
Within the mindset of hustle culture, any plateau is seen as something to escape as quickly as possible. But Stanislava reframes these phases as a “Foundational Pour”.
Think of it like construction: you cannot keep building floors upward if the wet concrete of the foundation hasn’t had time to set.
What looks like stagnation is actually the necessary period where skills consolidate and deeper capacity is built beneath the surface. These periods of apparent inactivity are essential phases where knowledge becomes automatic. They are the groundwork for future jumps in performance.
However, a human being is a complex system, and as Erika points out, you cannot separate the executive from the human. “I consult in a holistic way because you have to develop leadership culture and people management simultaneously,” Erika notes.
“You have to have time to pay attention to people individually.”
The red flag of silence
Stanislava also drops a bit of a paradox regarding organizational health: “An organization with zero reported problems is actually a massive red flag. It’s a sign that the ‘collective organism’ has stopped detecting threats. If no one is complaining, no one is paying attention.”
”A workplace with no friction is a workplace with no movement. Real resilience isn’t the absence of conflict, but the quality of how you handle it and how fast the organization detects obstacles.”
When we revisit the Great Minds philosophy, we must acknowledge the individual as a complex system. As Erika and Stanislava show, managing that system requires the discipline to value friction and the wisdom to see a plateau not as a failure, but as the moment the foundation finally hardens so the next level can be built.
