High-performing employees are valued by organizational leaders for good reason. They’re reliable, adaptable, and willing to step in when something needs to get done. When responsibilities are unclear or processes break down, they figure it out. When a team is stretched thin, they pick up the slack. And because they consistently deliver, leaders learn that they can give them more.
However, Lauren Cohen, JD, founder of Cohen Leadership Group, a boutique leadership advisory firm that helps fast-growing companies build scalable leadership systems, says herein lies a paradox: These capable employees can also mask organizational weaknesses. As the most reliable people take on more and more work, they allow companies to keep operating despite underdeveloped leadership systems. What initially looks like an individual strength can therefore become an organizational liability and, over time, a recipe for burnout. I spoke to Cohen about the idea.
JW: Why do the most capable people often end up carrying the burden of organizational dysfunction?
LC: Because they can, and they do, and people continue to put that burden on their shoulders.
My practice used to be focused entirely on individuals who came to me for executive coaching. Something I learned very quickly was that you can help one person, but when they’re trying to solve problems created by the system they’re working in—and then they return to that same system—your impact is pretty limited.
A lot of times, capable people take on the burden of insufficient or underdeveloped leadership systems. And those capable people can actually mask underdeveloped systems for a long time. The cracks go unnoticed because people just keep piling that work onto their own shoulders.
Being capable is valuable for a long time in your career, but as you elevate into leadership, it becomes much more about building capacity around you. At some point, capability can become a liability—not only because that person becomes overloaded and burned out, but because the system never develops in a way that supports organizational health.
JW: And organizations themselves can reinforce that dynamic. What needs to change?
LC: Competence is often a hiding place for organizational dysfunction. We leave it to the individual to solve burnout, but then they come back into the exact same working environment and the same system, which just reinforces it.
I don’t think this is an HR problem. I think it’s a leadership problem. Organizations need to ask: How are we overburdening capable people? How are our leadership systems underdeveloped in ways that disproportionately impact those people?
I talk a lot about “leadership debt,” which is basically the gap between a growing organization and the leadership systems that exist to support that growth. When an organization is small, you can mask some of that for quite a while. But as it grows and becomes increasingly complex, individuals become more and more burdened if the system doesn’t develop along with it.
The incentives matter, too. If you say you care about reducing burnout, but your compensation, performance reviews, and feedback celebrate the person who works 24/7 and never takes a vacation, those things are misaligned. We need to think about leadership systems as a critical business system, not an HR program.
JW: What if you’re the burned-out employee inside one of these organizations and don’t have much power to change the system?
LC: I think about it in terms of three things: What can you control? What can you let go of? And what can you influence?
Starting with yourself is important because it helps you regain a sense of personal control. But there’s also that bucket of influence, which I think we sometimes forget about. We often have more influence than we think we do.
Think about where you sit in the organization, what relationships you have, and what conversations you might start. Maybe it’s with a peer. Maybe it’s with your leader. Maybe that inspires someone to have another conversation with a leader at a higher level who has more control over the system. I always urge people to lean into that bucket of “What can I influence?” because there’s typically more there than we tend to think.
JW: Can an employee actually recover from burnout while remaining in the system that produced it?
LC: Maybe. I think maybe. But if the system itself is contributing to the burnout, something about the system—or your relationship to it—ultimately has to change. If you’re going to stay in a system that is producing burnout, you have to define what healthy looks like for you in relation to your work and what unhealthy looks like, and then set some very clear boundaries and parameters around that.
Where people get tripped up is that they set the boundary, but they’re not willing to enforce it. When you’re in a system that is used to you showing up a certain way, people typically don’t react very well when you set a new boundary.
The easy part is actually setting the boundary. The harder part is reinforcing it as people keep asking more and more of you while they learn your new habits. And in some organizations that are truly toxic, that boundary may not be acceptable. You have to be willing to navigate that and decide if and when you’re going to hold those boundaries firmly.
