We’re spending a few weeks talking about the Leadership Load, the invisible load that builds up over years of building expertise and supporting your teams. Today, we’re talking about the Carrier.
There’s a version of this you’ve probably lived.
A colleague comes to you, not with a technical question, but with a feeling. A frustration. A worry about the team dynamic. A venting session about a decision that’s been made above their heads. And you listen, and you help, and you send them away feeling better.
And then someone else comes. And then another.
And by Friday afternoon you realise that you’ve spent a significant portion of your week managing other people’s emotional states — and that the actual work, the work that has your name on it, is still sitting on your desk, waiting.
This is what it looks like to be the team therapist. And I want to be very clear: it is not your job.
How this happens
It usually starts with a genuine strength. Women in engineering who carry this load are typically highly emotionally intelligent — they read the room well, they notice when someone is struggling before anyone else does, and they have an instinct for smoothing tension before it becomes conflict.
These are real skills. Valuable skills. Skills that took years to develop.
The problem is that organisations are extremely good at noticing these skills and extremely bad at compensating people for them. Instead, they simply rely on them. The team learns, usually without ever consciously deciding to, that this person is safe. That she will absorb the difficult feelings. That she will keep the emotional temperature of the group stable.
And so they come to her. Again and again.
Nobody asked her if she wanted this role. Nobody put it in her job description. Nobody is going to bring it up in her performance review, except perhaps to note, in a vague and complimentary way, that she is ‘a great team player’ and ‘very supportive of her colleagues.’
Which is lovely. And which changes absolutely nothing about the fact that she is doing unpaid emotional labour for an entire team.
What it actually costs
Emotional labour has a cost that is difficult to quantify and very easy to dismiss — including by the person doing it.
It’s not dramatic. It doesn’t feel like a crisis. It feels like tiredness. Like a vague sense of depletion at the end of the week that you can’t quite attribute to anything specific. Like running on a lower battery than you should be, constantly.
Over time, it also does something more insidious: it blurs the line between where you end and where other people begin. When you’ve spent years absorbing other people’s emotional states, it becomes genuinely hard to locate your own. You lose track of what you actually think and feel, separate from what the team needs you to think and feel.
And there is the opportunity cost. Every hour you spend regulating someone else’s emotions is an hour you are not spending on work that builds your career, grows your expertise, or raises your visibility. The Carrier often looks, from the outside, like someone who is brilliant with people. She is. But she is also often invisible in the ways that actually move careers forward.
What to do instead
I want to be careful here, because the answer is not ‘become less caring’ or ‘stop being good with people.’ Your emotional intelligence is genuinely valuable. The goal is not to destroy it. The goal is to stop letting the system consume it for free.
- Notice the pattern before you respond to it. When someone comes to you with an emotional need, you have a split second before you slip into helper mode. Use it. Ask yourself: is this mine to carry? Do I have capacity for this right now? Is this person’s manager aware this is happening?
- Redirect where appropriate. You don’t have to absorb everything that comes your way. ‘That sounds really frustrating — have you had a chance to talk to [manager] about it?’ is not a rejection. It’s a boundary, and it’s also the right answer for the person in front of you.
- Set time limits, even informally. Agreeing to listen for ten minutes is different to agreeing to carry something indefinitely.
- Name the load to someone who can help redistribute it. If you’re noticing that team members are consistently coming to you rather than to their manager, that’s a management problem — and it’s worth naming it as one.
None of this is about becoming cold. It’s about recognising that sustainable leadership requires you to have something left in your own tank.
The reframe that matters
Emotional labour is a habit the system trained you into, not a permanent feature of who you are as a leader.
You can lead with warmth. You can be the person who notices things, who creates psychological safety, who builds real trust in a team. These are extraordinary qualities.
But you can do all of that and still put down what was never yours to carry.
If you’re recognising yourself in the Carrier pattern, the Leadership Load Diagnostic is a good place to start understanding how this load is showing up for you — and what to do about it. It takes about 4 minutes and it’s completely private.
EngineerHer 
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