Danila Mignardi, Client Manager at Hermes Consulting, and Giulia Terracciano, Occupational Psychologist at Hermes Consulting, for Harvard Business Review Italia
The Global Resilience Report 2025 highlights a clear trend: 54% of the global workforce is “functioning but fragile”.
Not due to a lack of talent, but because of prolonged internal activation pushed beyond threshold, which reduces clarity, active listening, and the quality of cooperation.
In complex environments, this condition becomes a critical variable in execution.
As management consultants at Hermes Consulting, we often observe that fragility does not emerge during crises, but in day-to-day operations: when pressure becomes constant, teams begin to lose momentum. Expertise remains, but access to that expertise becomes intermittent. People know what to do, yet they cannot always do it with the same fluidity, presence, and capacity to converge.
A recent case involved a financial services company. Executive leadership alerted us to a slowdown in communication.
Our initial diagnosis revealed a state of prolonged hyperarousal: team members were present, but physiologically past their threshold for continuous stimuli. When this condition becomes chronic, it is not the strategy that weakens, but the physiology required to sustain it: attention becomes fragmented, listening diminishes, and alignment slows down.
To address this scenario, we deployed our Team Intervention approach—our suite of interventions designed to meet the most common challenges teams face—tailored specifically for this context: The Essence of Wellbeing, a short, modular format designed to restore the physiological conditions for focus, presence, and collaboration.
It is structured around five Corners—Conscious Breathing, Thinking that Counts, Beliefs & Habits, Visioning & Movement, and Energy for the Community—each dedicated to a different level of rebalancing, restoring continuity, operational clarity, and more stable collaboration even under pressure.
The effects of these Corners are immediate: reactivity decreases, the ability to stay focused on goals increases, and both openness to others and self-awareness improve.
Within a few weeks, leadership observed tangible indicators: fewer emotional escalations, faster time-to-alignment, and greater operational reliability.
The team regained access to the capabilities they already possessed. The expertise had always been there, but pressure had made it harder to reach.
This is precisely where the value of Team Intervention lies: they remove friction, restore continuity, and enable people to perform at their true level, rather than one compromised by cognitive fatigue.
