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Treat the end of a demanding period as work, not just relief.
A demanding period doesn’t have to end in exhaustion alone. What a team carries out of it, whether that’s strain or a stronger baseline, depends less on the period itself and more on what a leader does once the pressure starts to ease.
Demanding periods aren’t avoidable in higher ed. What is within a leader’s control is what happens once a demanding period lets up. Leaders often treat that moment as simply the point at which to move on, but how it gets handled shapes whether the team’s capacity for its next demanding period grows or shrinks.
Why This Moment Gets Skipped
Once a demanding period lets up, the instinct is usually just to move on to whatever’s next. There’s real relief in that, and after weeks of running, moving on can feel like the only thing worth doing. But skipping closure means that the team never gets a clear signal that the pressure has passed. A team that doesn’t mark this moment on purpose ends up carrying small pieces of it forward—whether that’s leftover tension between two people or lowered patience nobody’s traced back to its source.
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