Being Busy and Being Frazzled Are Not the Same

And most of the time this has structural roots.

In the flow of information — work requests, replies, consultations — procedural, authority-based, timeline-based, and hierarchical policies come with the territory. Even so, performance is often evaluated as individual capability, diligence, and communication skills, so the root cause rarely gets solved. Teams form a life of enduring the hurdles that pop up each time; with vague or daunting issues, they come to rely internally on personal recognition (a "just quietly look the other way" kind of mutual-support relationship). Issues never cleanly resolved in this process naturally slide into silo phenomena (redirecting internal issues outward to re-solidify internal cohesion).

This is how a family-like company is gradually created. Arriving early and leaving late becomes proof of diligence, and this standard of diligence forces participants to passively perform emotional labor each time, meeting the "read-the-room" metric. In turn, those who can't "read the room" get the atmosphere of being "given a look."

This invisible "reading the room"
eventually becomes office politics.