If you're doing their job, who's doing your job?

Photo by Andreea Ch.

The guy on the phone has a hard job. And while it would be a hard job for anyone, he's particularly underequipped. He's doing this role for the first time. It's a senior job and has him in regular contact with the exec team. But the org has never had this position before. So the expectations around what's possible and what's reasonable are all over the place.

"The entire team is burning out," he tells us. "It's showing up in engagement surveys and exit interviews and manager meetings. Everywhere. And I'm the one who is supposed to fix it. Well, I'm the one who is tasked with coming up with a plan to present to the execs to be able to put some things in place to hopefully address it."

We are the worst kind of foils on calls like this. People call for advice. But often they don't actually want advice. They want someone to agree with them. So they offer a conversational gambit aimed at shoving us to accept their read on the situation. That gambit generally starts with the same three words.

Don't you think?

Don't you think healthier options in the kitchen will make the team more resilient? Don't you think what I'm doing is correct and everyone else in my org is incompetent? Don't you think my employees are being overly sensitive? Don't you think my workplace is just totally fucked up and seems beyond hope?

There is social awkwardness in saying, "No, we don't think that." Really for any of them. But especially that last one. There are a lot of broken workplaces out there. But few where you literally need to shut the whole thing down and start over.

So when the guy on the phone asks if we think the deeply complex, multi-pronged approach (including a new snack program!) he's outlined to help everyone feel better about the burnout will work. We take a beat. And then we ask, "Um, why are we building a plan to make people feel better about burnout? Rather than simply telling the exec team we need to do less."

He stumbles, "We...we...we can't do that. People don't do that. No one will take me seriously."

The keys are right next to each other on the keyboard

In most orgs, the words we can't do that and we won't do that are identical. So when a senior leader tells us the only cure for org-wide burnout is to keep going with plan A, there's not much room to disagree. Leaders have a strong sense of what will and won't fly within their orgs. And in terms of what it means for the humans working there...faced with an opportunity to advocate for sustainable workloads or new fruit in the kitchen, the exec team never even sees the first proposal.

This happens. So much of business writing and WorkTok imagines cackling villains conspiring to make work crappy. But it's somehow worse than that. It's all the things we could do to make work better that we talk ourselves out of before we even make the case.

It happens with executive teams (like our fruit-based friend above). And it happens with individual managers throughout the organization. You know you should hand things off, but you also know how hard your teams are working. You look at the overloaded team and say "I can't hand off." And so you don't hand off. There's no cackling villain trying to make your team suffer, you just don't believe you can make the case for doing less. So you figure you'll help carry the load. Which would be great. Except it doesn't work.

The easy version

Like, okay, maybe it will work. Some teams are overwhelmed for simple reasons. Sometimes you have a very junior team full of people spending days on a project that should take an hour. When you take that work on yourself, and apply your expertise to it, you find obvious optimizations. You can save a surprising amount of manual labour and heartbreak with a well-built spreadsheet.

(And sometimes by removing one. We know a customer success team that was trying to use spreadsheets to manage ballooning case loads. When they switched to zendesk, the team openly wept with relief.)

If the root of the overwhelm is skills gaps, or ambiguity of expectations, or outdated tooling, that's pretty great news. We have a solution for that. It's you. It's your immediate sense of mortification that the wonderful people you work with have been struggling under this thing needlessly. It's your authority to spend money, reconfigure work, make it make sense. Get in there, clean it up, and hand it back to them in a better state than you found it. They'll throw you a parade.

But most overwhelm isn't that easy.

The hard version

See the real trouble with overwhelm is when you've already done all that. Your team's overwhelm isn't a symptom of a tooling issue or a training gap. It's structural. Your team is just straight up being asked to carry more than they can. And you know it. You hear about it in 1:1s, you see it on their faces in team meetings.

We both encountered the term "crispy" at Mozilla. It refers to the stage before you're burnt out, but when you're running very hot. Where there is no wiggle room, everyone's irritable, and every new piece of information or change in direction feels like a burden. Not burnt out. Recoverable, maybe. But crispy.

When your people are crispy, the idea of putting more on their plates is anathema. Sure, you're crispy too. But at least if you do it, none of them have to. There's a quality of quiet service to that, which maybe rhymes with martyrdom, but still feels like the easiest of the available options. And anyhow, you are very fast. You know the most about this problem. And this other one. And actually that one you should take too because we did something like it four years ago. And these three are really just the same problem that you've been meaning to get to. You can work late this week and get that to a better spot.

But now we have an overwhelmed team working for an overwhelmed boss. This is where cheap problems go to get expensive. You are chronically unavailable because you're slammed. Your team can't get your attention on a thing so they make their best guess. Their best guess turns out to be wrong. All the work needs to get redone. Your already-stretched team thought they were at the finish line and now they need to start over. And just when you think it can't get worse, one of the strongest members of your team announces they've taken a role at a major competitor.

The problem is that while you help your team do their jobs, no one is doing the rest of your job.

To dig out you have to put down your tools

As a manager at any level in an organization, a key part of your job is figuring out how to get the most important things done for the organization. Yes, the hard part of that job is sometimes the doing, and you can pitch in. But when your team is overwhelmed, when there is structurally too much to do, it's your job is to figure out what's most important. Where is that work happening?

That work looks like talking with your peers about how they see the work and where your teams intersect. It looks like talking to executives about the priorities for the organization, and whether your team's work aligns with those bets. We have watched marketing teams burn themselves out to build collateral the sales team doesn't use. We have seen engineering teams sprint to make a deadline on a product that won't ship. Those teams don't need a manager working alongside them, they need a manager to stop wasting their time on dead-end work. But a manager in the weeds with their people doesn't have the time to notice, nor the intellectual distance to make that call.

We see you, tender-hearted bosses who really don't want to bury your people. It's lovely to want to take care of your team and we're not trying to push you off of that. But you can't solve burnout with fruit. And you can't fix overwork with one more all-nighter.

The cure for a structurally overwhelmed team is a better structure. It's clarity about what matters most, and permission to hand off or put down the work that doesn't. There are many ways to address a crushing workload and a crispy team. But not if you decide they won't or can't work before you even try.

— Melissa & Johnathan