When 'Holding Our Own' Isn't Enough

Fifty-one years ago, the Edmund Fitzgerald went down in Lake Superior with all 29 men on board. More than 6,000 shipwrecks have occurred on the Great Lakes, but the Fitzgerald remains the most famous. Countless books, documentaries and podcasts have covered her story. And while the exact circumstances of her sinking remain debated, the lessons from that night changed how ships were inspected, loaded and operated.

I think there's another lesson worth considering, particularly when we talk about building sustainable teams and workplace cultures.

The Fitzgerald didn't suddenly become vulnerable on November 10, 1975. The risks had been accumulating for years. Decisions that made sense individually, changes that gradually reduced the margin for error, and warning signs that didn't necessarily seem significant at the time eventually converged on one tragic night.

You don't have to work in shipping to recognize the pattern. A lot of businesses have the same kind of hidden cracks in how they treat their people. They hold up fine in calm water, right up until the right storm finds them. And by most measures, the water is getting rougher. Gallup's latest State of the Global Workplace report found that global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, with manager engagement dropping from 27% to 22% in a single year.

First, a little context.

The pride of the American side

When the Fitzgerald launched in 1958, she was the largest ship ever to sail the Great Lakes. More than 15,000 people showed up to watch her slide into the water. A few years ago, our family joined thousands of others to watch a SpaceX launch in Florida. It's the best comparison I can think of for how big an event it was, and how fascinated the public was with what was, at the end of the day, a cargo ship.

She quickly became a record breaker, setting seasonal haul records six different times and earning nicknames like the Pride of the American Side and the Toledo Express. She was admired by sailors and the public alike. She was big, productive, successful and, by all appearances, built to handle the demands placed on her.

But there were risks that weren't nearly as visible.

Some of those risks were built in from the start. The Fitzgerald had an all-welded hull, which was faster and cheaper to build, saved weight and made room for more cargo. But welds don't handle stress the way rivets do. On a riveted hull, the overlapping plates absorb some of the pounding, and a crack usually stops at the edge of a plate. On a welded hull, the stress goes straight into the steel, and a crack can run from one plate right into the next. A few years before she sank, inspectors found hairline cracks in some of her welds. They were patched, and she kept sailing, although the underlying cause was never resolved.

Over the years, regulations changed to allow freighters like the Fitzgerald to carry heavier loads. The ship itself didn't change, but the additional weight meant she rode lower in the water, leaving less clearance between her deck and the waves. And while depth finders were available at the time, they weren't required, and the Fitzgerald was never fitted with one, leaving her more vulnerable to hazards like Six Fathom Shoal, a shallow reef that some believe played a part in her fate.

For all those risks, on paper she was still a safe, seaworthy ship.

On November 9, 1975, the Fitzgerald left Superior, Wisconsin, with more than 26,000 tons of taconite for her final run of the season.

Captain Ernest McSorley was a 40-year veteran. As the weather deteriorated, he took a longer northern route along the Canadian shore, which offered some protection for much of the journey. But the final stretch put the ship in the path of near hurricane-force winds and waves that had built across roughly 350 miles of open lake. With her deck sitting only about 11 feet above the waterline, more than three feet lower than when she was first commissioned, she was now facing waves of 25 feet, with reports of rogue waves as high as 60.

We'll never know exactly how McSorley weighed the risks. What we do know is that some captains waited out the storm in sheltered waters, while the Fitzgerald pressed on. By the next afternoon, she was listing, taking on water faster than her pumps could keep up and had lost both radars. McSorley described it as one of the worst seas he had ever been in.

Around 7:10 that evening, the trailing ship, the Arthur M. Anderson, checked in one more time. McSorley's reply was five words:

"We are holding our own."

Minutes later, the Fitzgerald was gone. No distress signal was ever sent. She broke in two and settled 530 feet down, just 17 miles from the shelter of Whitefish Bay. All 29 men were lost, none were ever recovered, and exactly what happened remains a mystery to this day.

So what are the parallels?

If you've spent any time in corporate America, some of this probably sounds familiar.

Overconfidence. A long history of success makes it easy to believe that a team can handle anything. We do the same with our best people. They're dependable, experienced and consistently deliver, so we check on them less, all while giving them more to do. Their ability to overcome problems becomes a reason not to address them. Their dependability becomes the reason they get handed the most important work.

Cost cutting. Leaner operations, fewer resources and greater efficiency can look great on paper. But what happens when there's no margin left? When every person is already operating at capacity, there's nowhere for additional pressure to go except into the people themselves.

More with less. The expectations change, but the resources don't. Higher revenue targets, additional responsibilities, no backfills and another initiative added to an already full plate. Eventually, the gap between what's expected and what's realistically achievable becomes something employees are simply expected to absorb.

Patchwork. Someone starts missing deadlines. A top performer becomes unusually quiet. Sunday night emails become more frequent. Mistakes happen that never used to happen. We respond with a day off, a conversation or a temporary adjustment, then move on without asking what's creating the problem in the first place.

Underinvestment. The tools, training and support that could help people do their jobs better are treated as optional expenses. We ask people to rely on experience and instinct to navigate increasingly complicated environments, then wonder why execution becomes inconsistent.

No direction. A reorganization, a change in strategy, shifting priorities or a leader who is drowning too. People keep moving because that's what they're expected to do, but they don't necessarily understand where they're going or what matters most.

No safe harbor. The vacation that keeps getting pushed. The deadline that could move but doesn't. The end-of-quarter push for new orders even though delivery is already behind. There's always another reason why now isn't a good time to slow down.

None of these things necessarily sinks a team on its own. The problem is how they compound.

A lean team creates more pressure on the people who remain. Those people work harder to compensate. Because they continue to deliver, leadership assumes the model is working. Additional responsibilities follow. Training, support and investment get pushed further down the list. Eventually, the team becomes increasingly dependent on individual effort just to maintain the same level of performance.

If there's no room for error, it isn't really capacity. It just looks like capacity on paper.

A team might have enough people to meet its current goals, but does it have the ability to absorb an unexpected departure, a difficult customer situation, a new initiative or an unanticipated market change?

What happens when one person is out? What happens when two things go wrong at the same time? What happens when your top performer decides they've had enough?

A team can look perfectly healthy under normal conditions while having almost no margin for error.

There's a reason "too big to fail" is said with irony. We can work for big, respected organizations with incredible products and really talented people. But when the workload continually exceeds the support available, when people are operating below their own personal waterline, and when the resources and direction aren't there to help them navigate, eventually something gives.

It's rarely one decision, one bad quarter or one person. It's a series of decisions and conditions that come together at exactly the wrong time.

Until then, everyone appears to be holding their own.

It shouldn't take a sinking

It shouldn't take a ship going down to realize something is wrong. And it shouldn't take a lost client, a lost colleague or a team quietly falling apart to realize a culture is sinking.

One of the most important lessons from the Fitzgerald is that the response wasn't simply to tell the next crew to be more careful or better prepared to handle rough water. The shipping industry as a whole had to look at the conditions, equipment, inspections and operating standards that contributed to the risks in the first place.

Modern business leaders can and should take a similar approach.

"Resilience" has become both a solution and a scapegoat. Too often it's framed as the individual's problem to solve, even when the conditions that keep demanding it never change. And resilience is about bouncing back, not bouncing back over and over with no end in sight. We offer wellness programs, encourage people to take vacation, provide access to resources and remind managers to check in with their teams. Those things matter. But we can't build sustainable workplaces simply by teaching people to better tolerate unsustainable working conditions.

At some point, we have to look at the operating environment itself. The workloads, expectations, staffing levels, tools, training, leadership and support systems that determine whether people can actually sustain the work they're being asked to do.

And the stakes are higher than they might look. The World Health Organization and International Labour Organization estimated that long working hours contributed to 745,000 deaths from stroke and heart disease globally in 2016. Researchers at Stanford and Harvard have estimated that workplace stress contributes to approximately 120,000 deaths annually in the United States alone.

For many people, the consequences of an unsustainable working environment are very real. They just happen slowly enough that we don't always recognize what's happening in real-time.

Most of us have said "we're holding our own" at some point, and most of us have heard it from someone on our team.

Sometimes it's true. But if the Fitzgerald teaches us anything, it's that holding your own isn't the same as being okay.

The warning signs are usually there long before the storm. The question is whether we're paying attention, whether we're willing to acknowledge what we're seeing, and whether we're prepared to change the conditions before it's too late.

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If you want to go deeper, John U. Bacon's The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald is a great place to start. And of course, there's Gordon Lightfoot's "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," which has done more than anything to keep her story alive. If you're interested in a different angle, I also wrote about what the Edmund Fitzgerald still says about men and their feelings.

Most of all, 51 years later, the loss is still felt by the families and loved ones of the 29 men who didn't come home.