Communions of Crisis: How “Fighting Fires” at Work Has Become the New Trust Fall

It’s a familiar feeling, whether you’re on the frontlines of service or tucked behind a laptop. That moment when everything falls apart. The ten-top that walks in twenty minutes before close, and suddenly everyone’s night just got longer. The client email that suddenly has all hands on deck. The scheduling snafu that leaves the team scrambling. You hear the collective groan, but simultaneously feel the quick recalibration, the unspoken decision to push through. Frustration turns to adrenaline; adrenaline turns to connection. You’re all exhausted, but strangely proud. You tell yourself this is what showing up looks like. And in a way, it is. But it’s also what exploitation looks like.

There’s nothing like a little chaos to make everyone feel indispensable. We pull together, stay late, and share gallows humor. The trauma bonding is real. But while teams and reputations are solidified, so is the structure that keeps those on the ground carrying the load.

In my research for Trust Fall: How Workplace Relationships Fail Us, I spent years inside workplaces that thrived on disorder: a restaurant, a marketing firm, and a tech startup. What I found was always the same. The people most burdened by constant crises were the least able to escape them, and the people most responsible for the chaos were often the ones least held accountable.

Here are three things I learned about how crises operate as a system of unequal exchange.

1. Not Every Crisis Gets Acknowledged

At The Jones restaurant, weekend brunch was a ritual of controlled disaster. Tickets poured in faster than the kitchen could keep up, the printer jammed, and the requests for coffees and mimosas never stopped. The intensity propelled the team. Chaos became choreography: servers calling “corner,” bussers shouting “behind,” everyone moving just fast enough to keep from colliding. New staff proved themselves not just by surviving but by stepping in to help others whenever a moment allowed. When we pulled it off, there was a rush of collective pride. Not everyone could handle the insanity, and that was part of the point.

Then one Sunday, a different kind of crisis hit. A table complained about Susan, a veteran server and one of the only Black women on staff. Their comments were laced with disgust, not detail: what they objected to wasn’t her service but her presence. The same manager who threw himself into the fray when the espresso machine broke or the line got backed up now shrugged. He comped part of the bill, reassigned the table, and moved on. Susan was left to absorb the moment alone. Where was that urgency, that “all hands” energy, when the harm was human rather than operational?

Many of us tried to rally around her. In our end-of-shift memos, we wrote that Susan deserved better. But the manager stayed distant, confused about why everyone was so upset. Susan tried to explain – perhaps as a white man he lacked experience with overt racism? He still didn’t get it. For Susan, that failure changed everything. The restaurant could mobilize to handle a slammed brunch service but not to confront bias in its own dining room. It could always save the shift, but failed to stand by one of its own. She left a few weeks later.

2. Crises Reward Those Who Create Them

At DTC, an experiential marketing firm, teams pulled off elaborate campaigns that turned advertising into theater: pop-up “Upside Down” portals for Stranger Things, Adidas installations that invited consumers to customize sneakers on the spot. These projects were thrilling, but they were also exhausting. Logistics were constantly shifting, expectations ballooned, and people wore their fatigue like proof of devotion. To “be in the trenches” was to be trusted: a badge of loyalty earned through sleep deprivation.

For managers, though, the trenches were more than a proving ground. They were a stage. Each new crisis was a chance to demonstrate leadership: to step in heroically, stay late with the team, and earn loyalty in the process. The cycle was self-reinforcing: every fire put out earned more gratitude. Left unsaid was the fact that only those at the top had the luxury of choosing when and how to get in the trenches (for everyone else, it was simply part of the job). And more to the point, those same individuals often had the authority and power to prevent the fire in the first place.

Jill, one of the few women in senior leadership, tried to change that. She wanted fewer fires, not better firefighters. Her efforts to improve planning and client communication went unnoticed by most of the team, and her absence from the trenches read as detachment. “She’s not very approachable,” one member of her team told me. Another said, “I don’t think she’d fight for us.”

It was a lose-lose position. If Jill entered the trenches, she reinforced the chaos she was trying to fix. If she stayed focused on prevention, she risked looking aloof. When I followed up months later, Jill had left DTC. Her departure was treated as just another staffing change, not the loss of someone who had tried to make the place sustainable. The firm carried on: more crises, more trench talk, more late-night heroics. In the end, the system didn’t just produce disorder; it depended on it.

3. Crises Become Stories of Redemption

At Disruption — a tech consulting firm perpetually teetering between breakthrough and collapse — every setback eventually became fodder for redemption. The CEO, Shane, often said the company’s hardest years were also its most defining. “You have to have lived the experience to get the benefits,” he told me, recalling the months of layoffs and financial strain that nearly tanked the business. In his telling, hardship wasn’t something to fix; it was the crucible that proved the company’s worth.

That faith in suffering shaped how people responded to real harm. When Logan, a member of the operations team, gave birth to her first child, Shane called to share the company’s financial woes, admitting they might not be able to keep paying her. The timing was brutal; she was her family’s breadwinner. Instead of confronting the injustice, Logan doubled down to prove her worth. She worked through her maternity leave, hosting meetings from her living room with her newborn beside her. Shane later recalled the moment as transformative: “That’s when I learned what she was capable of.”

What should have prompted reckoning — a violation of basic legal protections — became a tale of resilience. Logan’s devotion became the moral of the story, not the failure of leadership that put her in that position. Pain was reframed as progress, and her sacrifice was mythologized as a model for others to follow.

And in that retelling, her suffering did more than inspire. It redeemed. Logan’s loyalty proved that Shane was the kind of leader worth believing in and that the company could still be saved. The moment that should have exposed structural failure was instead framed as renewal: a crisis conquered, a culture restored. The story of exploitation became a story of transformation, absolving those in power and turning endurance into validation.

Crises bring people together, but not on equal terms. Susan’s manager ignored her crisis; Jill’s team mistook prevention for indifference; Logan’s endurance became mythos. Each moment felt meaningful, but the cost was always borne by the same people, while those who created the chaos profited instead. In workplaces built on perpetual urgency, the ones who hold everything together are rarely the ones who get to rest.

Like trust falls, crises create moments of interdependence and vulnerability that feel profound. But the trust they build flows upward, not outward. We keep catching each other as the ground keeps giving way, while those at the top remain standing. What feels like unity is really exploitation: we hold the system together just long enough for the next collapse, and those responsible never have to answer for it.