(Yes, I’ve written about the Leadership Load before. Sometimes you just can’t get enough of a good thing. And sometimes, we just need the reminder!!)
You work hard. You deliver. You solve problems. You keep things moving. From the outside, your career probably looks like a success story.
So why are you so tired in a way that a good night’s sleep or even a fortnight off doesn’t seem to touch?
If that question feels familiar, you’re not imagining it, and you’re not alone. What you’re carrying has a name. I call it the Leadership Load.
What the Leadership Load actually is
The Leadership Load is the invisible weight that builds up when capable people, and in engineering that’s very often women, become the ones everyone quietly relies on. It isn’t one dramatic thing. It’s the accumulation of many small things that individually seem manageable and collectively become heavy.
It’s the meeting nobody assigned to you that somehow became yours to run. It’s the colleague you mentor because you know no one else will make time for them. It’s the emotional labour of keeping a team functioning day to day, on top of the technical work you were actually hired to do. It’s the constant translation between engineers, management, and organisational reality, a job that rarely appears on any org chart but that someone has to do.
None of these things are the problem on their own. The problem is what happens when they all land on the same person, year after year, without ever being named or measured.
Why engineering makes this worse
Most engineers start their careers because they love solving problems. The technical challenge is the draw: figuring out why something isn’t working, building something that does, seeing a fix hold under pressure.
But as a career progresses, the work quietly shifts. Coordination, reporting, stakeholder management, and performance reviews start to take up more of the week than the engineering itself ever does. At the same time, capable people become the unofficial glue holding a team together, not because anyone asked them to, but because they’re good at it, and because responsibility tends to flow toward whoever consistently delivers.
Over time the load grows. It’s rarely recognised as it happens, and it’s almost never measured, which is part of why it’s so easy to carry for years before you notice the weight of it.
Signs you might be carrying it
A few things tend to show up together when someone is carrying a significant Leadership Load. You’re the person everyone comes to first. Your calendar is full, but very little of what fills it feels meaningful. You spend more time clearing obstacles for other people than doing the technical work you’re actually good at. You’re relied on, but you don’t always feel valued for it. You’ve become indispensable, and somewhere underneath the pride in that, you resent it a little. And you keep coming back to the same thought: surely this shouldn’t be this hard.
If several of those sound like your working week, this post is for you.
Why it’s dangerous precisely because it looks like success
The hardest part of the Leadership Load is that from the outside, it looks like everything is going right. You get praised. You get given more responsibility. You become the person people trust with the difficult things. On paper, that’s a career going well.
But internally, something else is happening. The work that used to energise you starts disappearing under the weight of everything else. Your own priorities become secondary to everyone else’s. Your career stops being something you’re actively choosing and starts being something you’re managing, day to day, just to keep up.
This is usually the point where people start asking whether they need a new role, a promotion, a complete career change, or whether they should leave engineering altogether. Sometimes one of those is the right answer. More often, the real answer is more specific than any of them, and you can’t get to it until you understand what’s actually driving the exhaustion.
It isn’t a personal failing
One of the most common assumptions I hear from women engineers is that this exhaustion must say something about them. That if they were more organised, more resilient, or somehow better at boundaries, it would feel different.
In twenty-four years working inside engineering organisations, I’ve rarely found that to be true. The real issue is usually that no one ever taught you how to recognise the Leadership Load before it became overwhelming. You adapted. You delivered. You carried a bit more, and then more again, and at some point what started as capability quietly became burden.
Recognising that is the first step. It isn’t the whole answer, but it’s the one that has to come first, because you can’t decide what to change until you can see clearly what you’re actually carrying.
That’s what the next few weeks of this series are going to work through.
If you want a clearer picture of where your own load is coming from, the Leadership Load Diagnostic takes about five minutes and shows you which areas are carrying the most weight and where to focus first.
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