How To Support Without Absorbing Everyone's Stress

Forbes

3 days ago

With so much emphasis on being an empathetic leader these days, it's easy to misinterpret emotional caretaking for empathy. When a leader becomes the support system for the entire team or company, the end result is burnout and employees who don't know how to resolve their personal and professional issues.
Critical feedback might get buffered into something more polite (or not given at all) to prevent hurting someone's feelings. A leader might prioritize an employee's stress load over their own because they over-sympathize; furthermore, they might absorb responsibilities or tasks to alleviate the burden of others.
If you're placing everyone else's needs before your own, it won't be long before you're frustrated, and your executive functioning isn't working like it once did. Decisions will become harder to make and your mind will lack clarity as it's been filled with the emotional toil of an entire workplace.
What's happened is you've started carrying people instead of coaching them. You've become everyone's fixer rather than building their capacity.
The Risk For Women In Leadership Roles
For women leaders, this scenario is particularly relevant as there's an unspoken societal expectation for women to be naturally empathetic, nurturing, and carry the emotional well-being of others. If you're a woman in a leadership position and you've internalized these expectations, rest assured they come with you into the workplace.
Recognizing that these expectations exist - societally and personally - is one thing, but rebelling against poses a catch 22 for women leaders. Research by social psychologists, Alice Eagly and Linda Carli, revealed that there's an expectation for women to lead with both strength and warmth, yet they may face criticism if they favor one style over the other.
Eagly and Steven Karau went a step further with their 2002 Role Congruity Theory, citing that the traits we associate with effective leadership (assertiveness, decisiveness, authority) don't blend well with those aforementioned societal expectations we have for women. In other words, because women are often expected to be nurturing and accommodating, it creates discomfort for others when they're more assertive and direct without also being nurturing simultaneously. If that sounds like a tall order, it's because it is.
Where does this leave a female leader who wants to be assertive and authoritative but also empathetic and nurturing? Very possibly, in an attempt to preserve their reputation and workplace harmony, they may overcorrect - consciously or unconsciously - by becoming emotional caretakers rather than assertive decision-makers.
The end result is burnout. If women lead with authority, they risk coming off as cold or unapproachable; yet if they lead with empathy, they risk being the emotional pillow for the entire workplace. When the latter happens, they can end up absorbing everyone's stress. They become the default mediator, endlessly assuaging everyone's concerns. The line between leadership and caretaker becomes blurred.
This can easily go undetected for a long period of time if you've been socialized to play the caretaker role. It will feel natural to listen to people's problems on a daily basis, try to help them through it, offer solutions, maybe take on some of their job duties to alleviate their load. Like the frog boiling in water metaphor, however, resentment will start to grow, as well as fatigue. You might wake up one day asking yourself who you are and what role you play.
Support Your People By Enabling Capacity
True leadership support doesn't mean solving everyone's problems for them. Rather, it's about enabling the other person's capacity. It involves building their resilience muscle.
The key is to replace the urge to rescue with helping people develop the skills necessary for navigating life's difficulties. It's the difference between coddling and coaching.
To give an example of how this might look in real time:
When you enable capacity like this, you're doing three things:
The shift here is granting them the gift of agency which, in the long run, builds self-confidence. Moreover, you've preserved the psychological safety of the culture by creating the space for someone to express themselves. In this environment, everyone walks away empowered. The employee feels emboldened and the leader feels supportive.
Getting Comfortable With Not Fixing Things
If fixing people's problems is your comfort zone, then there might be some initial discomfort as you learn to pause before rushing in to rescue.
Anyone who's even a little bit empathetic will be affected if they see someone struggle, personally or professionally. It's a natural human impulse to want to help and solve someone's problems for them. It might at first feel mean or disrespectful to let someone struggle a bit, but you're not being apathetic; you're showing them deep respect for their own capabilities. You're communicating this truth: I believe in your ability to navigate this.
For growth to happen, the one who's struggling needs to learn how to resolve their own issues; and the leader needs to learn to pause and empower, rather than fix and absorb.
The Emotional Load Doesn't Disappear Overnight
If you've been acting as the workplace panacea for awhile, the mental fatigue you might be experiencing won't leave your system as soon as you make the decision to empower rather than rescue.
Allow yourself some grace. There will be a transition period for the fatigue to dissipate and your professional identity to re-emerge. This is a good time to redefine not only what support for your team looks like, but for yourself as well.
When it comes to helping others, maybe there's room for improvement with boundary setting. Exercising that pause before rushing in to rescue will most likely take some practice.
When it comes to helping yourself, trust that others are capable. We so often promote high performers to leadership positions, but perhaps now as a leader, performance needs to be paired with trust. Trust in your people's self-efficacy will keep burnout at bay.
So What Does Supportive Leadership Look Like?
To reiterate, supportive leadership doesn't mean building a wall of indifference around you, sending a 'you deal with it' vibe out to the world. You're protecting your own energy and mental load so you can lead decisively, with clarity and empathy, while not getting bogged down with superfluous concerns. No one wins when their leader is drained from absorbing excessive emotional labor. If you can learn to switch from rescuing to reinforcing, you protect your own sanity while helping others grow all around.
Allow some growing pains with this process. It may feel against the grain at first if you've been the emotional rescue unit for a long time. In the long run, you'll be thankful you switched from caretaker to advocate. Your team will thank you too, though maybe not out loud.
[Studies cited:
Women Face a Labyrinth (2007), Eagly & Carli
Role congruity theory of prejudice toward female leaders (2002); Eagly, A. H., & Karau, S. J.]