A conversation with Meghan French Dunbar, author of This Isn’t Working, reveals how the modern workplace is failing everyone and what leaders can actually do about it.
The Moment Everything Broke
There’s a particular image that stays with you after reading Meghan French Dunbar’s book. She’s on the floor, screaming into a pillow. Her husband rushes in and tells her he can’t watch her suffer like this anymore. It’s a scene that feels uncomfortably familiar to a lot of high-achieving professionals, even if most of us haven’t quite hit that floor yet.
Meghan had co-founded a media company, launched a print magazine in 2015 that got picked up by every Whole Foods in the country almost overnight, raised $750,000 in angel funding, and built something genuinely meaningful. Conscious Company Magazine told the stories of impact-driven businesses, with Patagonia as the poster child. She loved the work. And yet she was destroying herself doing it.
“My entire sense of self-worth, my entire identity, it was all wrapped up in being an entrepreneur, being successful, being a speaker,” she told me during our interview. “Everything was about work.” The panic attack came while she was staring at six months of runway left and trying to decide whether to raise again or sell. They sold, but she stayed on as CEO for another two years. Then she had a baby, came back from parental leave running on fumes, and finally stepped down on March 13, 2020. Four days before the COVID lockdown.
What followed, including bed rest during a complicated second pregnancy, postpartum depression, and forced stillness she never would have chosen, became the crucible for her book. She finally had time to ask a question she’d been too busy to sit with: was this just her, or was something bigger going on?
The answer, as she’d eventually discover through years of research and interviews, was that the system itself was broken.
A Workplace Designed to Fail Us
The central argument of This Isn’t Working isn’t that individual women are struggling because they’re doing something wrong. It’s that the workplace was never designed with them in mind, and honestly, it wasn’t designed with most humans in mind either.
Meghan draws a straight line between our core psychological needs as humans and the way most organizations actually function. Autonomy is a fundamental driver of well-being, yet most workplaces operate under hierarchical, compliance-driven, command-and-control structures. Social connection is essential to mental health, yet individual performance metrics pit employees against one another. The math doesn’t work, and the data backs it up: of nearly four billion people in the global workforce, the vast majority are dealing with chronic stress on a daily or weekly basis.
For women, the picture gets sharper. The United Nations has determined that nine out of ten people worldwide still hold fundamental gender bias. Workplace design, temperature standards, performance expectations, and leadership archetypes have all been shaped around a male default. Meghan cites one study showing that increasing office temperature by 5 degrees significantly improved women’s cognitive performance, while lowering it by 5 degrees nearly halved their performance. Though they might seem trivial, these are actually symptoms of a structural issue.
Meghan explained further, “Everyone I know who’s succeeding, regardless of gender identity, [is] doing it against the odds.” But rather than asking why so many people are struggling, the more honest question is why we keep expecting people to thrive inside systems that were never built for them.
What Holistic Leadership Actually Looks Like
One of the most powerful moments Meghan describes in the book is an interview she did for the third issue of her magazine with Eileen Fisher, founder of the fashion brand that bears her name. Meghan was 30, nervous, expecting to meet a version of Miranda Priestly. Instead, she walked into a home draped in silk fabric and found a quiet, curious woman who spent the interview asking Meghan questions rather than answering them.
When Meghan finally got to ask what leadership capacities had driven Eileen’s success, the answer stopped her cold: vulnerability, listening, intuition, creativity, compassion, and authenticity. Not confidence and decisiveness. Not bold strategy and aggressive execution. The so-called soft skills that professional culture still treats as secondary.
That conversation helped Meghan develop what she calls holistic leadership, a framework that strips away the gendered labels we’ve put on human traits and asks instead whether those traits are healthy or toxic. Confidence isn’t inherently masculine. Compassion isn’t inherently feminine. They’re human, and effective leaders draw from all of it, with enough discernment to know what a moment actually calls for. “The most effective leaders I’ve ever met carry that gorgeous broad range of all of them,” she said. “And they don’t rely too heavily on just one.”
The Cost of Being Overextended
Ask most people how they’re doing these days, and you’ll hear some version of the same answer: busy, exhausted, stretched too thin. Meghan’s research suggests this isn’t just a personal problem or a time management failure. Instead, it’s what happens when we measure leadership by output volume rather than quality of presence.
The leaders she interviewed who seemed consistently effective and energized weren’t doing more; rather, they were doing less, more intentionally. She calls this optimization rather than overextension, and it rests on a few practices that sound simple until you actually try to implement them.
The first is what she calls essentializing, a deliberate pruning of your time, relationships, and inputs. Essentializing time means making real decisions about what you say yes to, filtered through two axes: energy and impact. Things that fill your cup and things that are genuinely meaningful get priority. Things that drain you and things you’re only doing out of obligation get reconsidered. “I am a bit of an ambivert,” Meghan told me. “Going to events with tons of people I don’t know and trying to network, I hate it, and I know that. So I just don’t say yes to those things anymore.”
Essentializing relationships means being honest about which connections are reciprocal and which are running on fumes. And essentializing inputs means auditing what you let into your head, because the volume of content most of us consume daily has a real effect on our mental clarity and emotional well-being. “Which wolf are you feeding?” she said. “Are you feeding a world you want to see, or are you allowing content in that isn’t good for your heart and your soul?”
The second practice is boundary enforcement, not as a passive wish but as an active leadership behavior. If you’re responding to emails at 2 a.m., you’re training your team to expect that. Modeling healthy behavior is part of the job.
From Hero to Unified Leader
Perhaps the most counterintuitive shift Meghan describes in the book came late in her tenure as CEO. Eight months pregnant, running on empty, and trying to plan a three-month maternity leave while keeping an eight-person company afloat, she finally did something she’d resisted for years: she asked for help, but not in a vague, performative way. She opened the books, shared the P&L, laid out the financial projections, and said, essentially, “I might be wrong. What do you think we should do?”
The results surprised her. Her graphic designer of five years, Sia, turned out to be an expert at spotting inefficiencies in the budget. In a single meeting, she identified cuts totaling roughly 5% of their annual costs. Meghan had never thought to ask her. “I had pigeonholed her,” Meghan said. “I [had] only asked her for graphic design help.”
That micro-experiment pointed toward something bigger. The unified workplace model she profiles in the book is built on a shift from “I” to “we,” from individual performance to collective intelligence, and from opaque decision-making to transparency that actually helps people do their jobs well. After all, employee ownership, profit sharing, collaborative strategy sessions, and genuine autonomy correlate with sustained financial performance.
She points to Torani syrups, a 100-year-old Bay Area company that has grown more than 20 percent year over year for 34 consecutive years, as a prime example. They’ve done it by actively investing in their people’s financial security, physical safety, and psychological well-being.
Rewriting the Script on Success
The final section of the book draws a distinction that cuts close to home for many high achievers. Meghan separates what she calls social success, which are the titles, income, prestige, and external validation most of us were raised to pursue, from soul success, the kind that includes purpose, autonomy, and work that genuinely matters to you.
The story of Allison and her granola company, 18 Rabbits, illustrates what happens when you follow the conventional growth script without asking whether it actually fits. She scaled aggressively, entered major retail chains, and overleveraged on a single supplier. When that supplier collapsed, so did the company. The business case for perpetual growth at all costs eventually produces a stopping function, whether that’s a company closing, a mental health crisis, a physical breakdown, or a divorce.
“Most of us break,” Meghan said simply. “And then we reimagine our idea of success after we’ve broken.”
The alternative she proposes is built around three intrinsic motivators: higher purpose and meaning, passion and mastery, and the freedom to invest in the other parts of life that matter. These motivators are the architecture of careers and organizations that actually hold up over time.
She closes the book with a quote from futurist Libby Rodney, who argues that we’re often so focused on solving large-scale problems that we overlook the small, everyday actions within our control. Yet those small actions are often where meaningful change begins. “I am not going to solve these humongous issues by myself or in my lifetime,” Meghan told me. “But what I can do is show up, every single day, with the greatest quality of being, really intentionally, really focusing on the things that matter?”
That question, planted daily, compounds.
Lessons Worth Carrying Forward
The workplace was built for a narrow definition of productivity, and it’s harming nearly everyone inside it. Holistic leadership draws from the full range of human capacity, not just the traits we’ve arbitrarily labeled as strong.
Optimization matters more than volume; the leaders who sustain performance are the ones who protect their energy. Transparency and collaboration produce better outcomes than unilateral decision-making. And the conventional success script, built around external achievement and perpetual growth, tends to produce a stopping function sooner or later. Fortunately, it’s never too late to put the pen down and write something different.
Brandon Laws is a workplace culture and leadership enthusiast, host of the Transform Your Workplace podcast, and VP of Marketing and Product at Xenium HR.