What does "rotate the pull" mean for a team?

It's a cycling idea applied to work. In a paceline, riders take turns at the front into the wind—each "pulls" for a set time, then drops back to recover in the draft. To rotate the pull on a team means naming your hardest, most draining work (on-call, incidents, escalations, glue work) and deliberately sharing it in turns, instead of letting it pile onto the same two or three people every time.

How is rotating the pull different from just delegating?

Delegation is usually one-directional and permanent—you hand work to someone and it stays there. Rotating the pull is cyclical and time-boxed: the hard job moves through the team on a schedule, and everyone, including senior people, takes a turn and then steps back. The goal isn't to offload work; it's to make sure no single person lives at the front of the pack indefinitely.

Isn't letting people "draft" the same as social loafing?

No—and the distinction is the whole point. Social loafing is free-riding with no intention of ever contributing. Drafting is structural recovery: the rider in the draft has a turn at the front coming, and the rotation is the system working as designed. The fix for loafing is accountability; the fix for hero culture is rotation. Confusing the two is how teams justify burning out their best people.

How do you rotate the pull on a remote or distributed team?

You make the front visible. In person you can see who's exhausted; remotely you can't, so the rotation has to be written down and tracked, not assumed. Keep an explicit owner and end date for each draining responsibility, review it regularly, and use a shared workspace where the current "rider" on each hard thing is obvious to everyone. Visibility is what lets a distributed team share the workload fairly.

How often should you rotate on-call and other "pulls"?

It depends on intensity, but the rule is that every pull needs an end time. High-drag, always-on duties like on-call usually rotate weekly so no one absorbs more than a few interrupted nights in a row. Project-level pulls—owning a hard initiative or mentoring—can rotate quarterly. The specific cadence matters less than the principle: nobody stays in the wind indefinitely, and recovery in the draft is protected, not refilled.

Rotate the Pull: Why Your Best People Burn Out

Here is a number that should change how you think about hard work—and why your best teams rotate the pull. A cyclist buried in the middle of a large pack fights as little as 5% to 10% of the air resistance a lone rider faces. That is not a typo. Wind-tunnel and CFD research from a 2018 study found that riders in the mid-rear of a peloton experience drag that "reduces down to 5%–10% that of an isolated rider"—an effort so small it corresponds to an equivalent cycling speed "4.5 to 3.2 times less than the peloton speed." The pack is fast because no one stays in the wind alone—they rotate the pull.

So the rider who looks heroic—out front, alone, into the wind—is the one paying for everyone behind them. And on most teams, that rider never gets to come back. The fix is a tactic every cyclist knows by instinct: rotate the pull. In this piece, you'll see the drafting math that breaks your intuition, why "everyone should pull their weight" is the wrong rule, and a concrete way to share the load so your strongest people stop quietly burning out.

The drafting math that breaks your intuition

In cycling, the person at the front "pulls"—they punch a hole in the air, and everyone tucked behind them rides in the calm pocket called the draft. The savings are enormous and counterintuitive. According to Cycling Weekly, sitting just 10cm behind another rider lets you "save 90 watts of that 250W," and a following rider "saved 65 per cent of the effort required to overcome aerodynamic drag at 45kph." Even ten meters back, "there's still a 33.5W energy saving."

This is why a peloton of 180 riders averages a faster pace than any single human could hold alone. It is not a collection of strong individuals trying hard at the same time. It is organized energy-sharing. When the 2026 Tour de France rolls out of Barcelona on July 4—opening, fittingly, with a team time trial where the rotation literally is the race—the winning teams won't be the ones with the strongest single rider. They'll be the ones whose riders trade the front most efficiently.

The mechanism is a paceline. As TrainerRoad describes it: "you pull for a period of time ranging from a few seconds to several minutes, before the next rider in the paceline moves to the front and does their share of the work. After completing a pull, you move to the side and drift back... eventually reentering the draft behind the last rider in the group." Nobody stays in the wind. The hard job is shared in turns, on purpose, by design.

Your team has a front of the pack, too

Every team has a "front"—the work that takes the most out of you. The 2 a.m. incident. The gnarly migration nobody understands. The exec escalation. The ambiguous epic with no clear owner. Onboarding the new hire. The on-call pager. This is the high-drag work, and someone is always in the wind doing it.

The problem is uneven workload distribution: it's almost always the same two or three people. As one engineer put it on Hacker News, "There are roughly 2-3 people on a team that carry 80% of the workload in a given period." The data backs it up. A 2025 CUPA-HR survey of nearly 3,800 employees found 53% "have taken on additional responsibilities from colleagues who have left" and 61% "have taken on duties outside the scope of their original job description." Supervisors are especially stuck at the front: 72% report working extra hours beyond full-time, versus just 36% of non-supervisors.

Why does it concentrate this way? Because competence is a magnet. Another Hacker News commenter, on a thread literally titled "the hero tax," nailed it: "People go to the most effective people with their problems and high-stakes projects. The reward for good work is more work." Pull well once, and you get handed the front again. And again. There is no rotation—just a single rider, slowly grinding down, while the pack drafts behind them.

Why "everyone should pull their weight" is the wrong rule

Let me steelman the gospel first, because it isn't wrong. Free-riding is real and corrosive. A team where people genuinely coast—contributing nothing while others carry them—is a broken team, and good managers should refuse to tolerate it. "Pull your weight" exists for a reason.

But here's the trap. Drafting is not coasting. In a paceline, the rider tucked in the draft isn't a freeloader—the rotation is structural, and their turn at the front is coming. "Pull your weight" quietly mutates into "everyone drills the front, all the time," and that is precisely how a peloton blows itself apart. If every rider takes long, repeated pulls with no rotation, every rider cracks. The counterintuitive truth is that pushing each individual to go harder makes the team slower, because you're burning the engines that have to last 21 stages.

This is the failure mode behind hero culture. A team that runs on heroics isn't strong—it's a peloton with one rider permanently stuck on the front, mistaking exhaustion for excellence. And the cost lands exactly where you can least afford it. Eagle Hill's November 2025 survey found 55% of the U.S. workforce is experiencing team burnout, that employees blame it equally on "the work itself (50%), including workload" and the people side, and that 71% say it hurts their job performance. Worst of all, burned-out employees are "nearly three times more likely" to plan to leave. Your front-of-the-pack riders—your best people—are the ones most likely to be in that group. Hero culture doesn't just exhaust your strongest people. It hands them their resignation letter.

"The reward for good work is more work." Treat that as a warning label, not a compliment.

How to rotate the pull on a real team

A peloton doesn't avoid the wind with willpower. It avoids it with a rule. Here's how to translate that rule—how to actually rotate the pull—into a team that can share the workload and hold a sustainable pace.

Name the front

You can't rotate work that's invisible. Make a list of the real "pulls" on your team: on-call, incident command, the hairy legacy system, customer escalations, interviewing, mentoring, the unowned glue work that holds everything together. Most teams have never written this down, which is exactly why it silently piles onto whoever did it last. Naming the front is the first act of workload management—and the precondition for being able to rotate the pull at all.

Set a pull length

In a paceline, nobody stays out front indefinitely—they pull "for a few seconds to several minutes," then peel off. Your team needs the same time-box. Rotate on-call weekly. Rotate the lead on the hard project every quarter. Cap how long any one person owns the draining thing before the next rider takes over. You can't rotate the pull if the pull never ends. A pull with no end time isn't a pull; it's a sentence.

Protect the draft

The whole point of dropping back is to recover. When someone rotates off the front, the worst thing you can do is fill their "draft" with a different fire. Recovery has to be real: lighter load, protected focus time, and permission to actually disconnect—the kind of deliberate cooldown that prevents you from ever needing a full safety stop after crunch. A draft you immediately refill isn't recovery. It's just a shorter pull.

Make the rotation legible

This is where distributed teams fall apart. In a room, you can see who looks wrecked. Remotely, you can't see that one engineer has been on the front for three straight months. The rotation has to be written and visible, not a vibe. This is the same lesson as dropping the baton—except a relay loses value at the handoff, while a peloton loses it when the same rider never leaves the front. Both fail for the same reason: the exchange was never made explicit. A shared canvas where the work and its current owner are visible during the call—paired with AI that follows both the board and the conversation, the way Coommit is built to—means the next rider can take the pull with full context instead of a cold start.

Reward the pull, not the heroics

If you celebrate the person who pulled an all-nighter and ignore the one who quietly handed off cleanly, you're coaching for heroics. Recognize taking turns. And close the incentive gap: the manager who assigns the front should feel its cost, or you've created a moral hazard where the person spending the energy isn't the person deciding how much to spend.

The texture of the unmanaged front is everywhere in the data. Microsoft's 2025 research found employees are now "interrupted every 2 minutes by a meeting, email, or notification," that "nearly half of employees (48%)—and more than half of leaders (52%)—say their work feels chaotic and fragmented," and that "meetings after 8 pm are up 16% year over year." That's a whole workforce stuck in the wind. Gallup pegs the bill for the resulting disengagement at "US$438 billion in lost productivity in 2024." Leaving the pull unrotated is not free. It's one of the most expensive defaults in management.

What the peloton knows that your org chart doesn't

A peloton is faster than its fastest rider—but only because no one is asked to be a hero. The strength isn't in any single set of legs. It's in the rule that the front gets shared. Your org chart shows you reporting lines and titles. It does not show you who has been into the wind for a quarter with no relief, getting buried in the weeds while the pack drafts. That's the chart you actually need.

As AI makes every individual faster, the temptation will be to ride harder, solo, off the front—to mistake raw output for a winning team. The teams that last won't be the ones with the strongest single rider. They'll be the ones that learned to rotate the pull. It isn't a perk—a real rotation is the cheapest form of preventing employee burnout you have. Start by naming your front this week, and put one rotation on the calendar. The first thing it protects is the person you can least afford to lose.