Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
You're the one everyone comes to when things go wrong. And you have nowhere to go when you're the thing that's going wrong.
That's the particular bind of leading a team while your own mental health is coming apart. People treat you as the thermostat. When they're anxious, you absorb it. When they're frustrated, you manage it. When they're overwhelmed, you contain it. Your own temperature keeps climbing, and there is no one whose job it is to notice.
Every day you walk in and perform being okay. Not only competent. Okay. Stable. The person who can take the crisis, the conversation, the deadline that should have been impossible.
You've got so good at it that the performance has started to feel like personality. The team sees unflappable. The people above you see reliable. The people you manage see supportive. Underneath that, you are barely holding the shape together.
You stay late finishing other people's emergencies. Your own life sits in a pile you never get to. You listen at 4pm and lie awake at 3am. You have become skilled at other people's feelings and clumsy with your own.
The labour nobody counts
A lot of leadership is not the decision. It is living with the feeling the decision leaves in the room, so nobody else has to. You deliver the bad news. You fire someone and stay kind. You try to move a team that you cannot, that day, move yourself.
When the budget goes, you have to sound steady while you break the news. When a project dies, you take the hit so the team can keep a bit of confidence. When the organisation wants something inhuman, you become the buffer. That work does not show up on a job spec. It is still the job.
Nobody tells you this part. You cannot dump on the team about the people above you without doing something to morale. You cannot tell the people above you that you are struggling without wondering what that does to their confidence in you.
So you spend the day surrounded and take the stress home alone. Everyone brings you their problem. You have nowhere to take yours. You are supposed to have answers while privately failing at the same kinds of problem.
Each promotion thins the list of people you can be ordinary with. Another layer of the act. Another version of yourself to keep polished.
You are meant to be human enough to be relatable and superhuman enough to be depended on. Open enough to seem real, solid enough to reassure. Available, and boundaried. These are sold as leadership qualities. They are a psychological contortion.
You perform availability while you are empty. You talk about balance while you work a sixty-hour week. You look after everyone else's state and lose track of your own.
When you run like this, decisions get worse. Patience goes. You have less left for other people's mess, which is most of the job.
The usual move is not to look at what is underneath. It is to try harder. Longer hours to make up for the drop in quality. More control, because feeling out of control is unbearable. The worse you feel, the more convincingly you perform fine. The more convincingly you perform fine, the worse you feel.
A lot of people in these roles stay out of the room because walking in feels like admitting they cannot do what they are paid to do. Like the capability other people believe in was a mistake.
Staying out does not make you stronger. It leaves you with no place to put the cost of being responsible for other people's livelihoods and states of mind. You keep going on will, and will is not a method.
This is not a course in management technique. The useful question is why you feel responsible for everyone else's emotional life and so little for your own. Why competence has to be performed even when you feel none of it. Why it is easier to fix someone else's problem than to admit you have one.
The work is about getting some tolerance for being imperfect in a role that seems to demand you never are. Not so you can sell "authenticity" as a leadership upgrade. So you can stop using other people's need as the way you avoid your own.
You do not have to be the container for every institutional failure. You can be struggling and still do the job. Those two facts can sit in the same week. The pattern to look at is the one that says they cannot.
