The Cult of Urgency
Somewhere along the way, we've convinced ourselves that everything is urgent. The result? Constant interruptions, manufactured stress, and organisations that mistake panic for progress.
Read →The People You Don’t Worry About
Every workplace has them.
The people you don’t worry about.
You give them something and it gets done. They don’t need three reminders, a follow-up meeting and a colour-coded action plan. They don’t regularly appear in escalations. Their name doesn’t cause anyone to sigh when it appears in an inbox.
They’re reliable.
And reliability is wonderful.
Until, occasionally, it makes you invisible.
The squeaky wheel
Attention naturally gravitates towards problems.
That’s not bad management. It’s human nature.
If you’re responsible for a team and one person is struggling, another has missed a deadline and somebody else has managed to turn a relatively straightforward task into an incident requiring seventeen emails and an emergency Teams call, that’s where your attention is going to go.
Meanwhile, somewhere else in the team, someone is quietly getting on with it.
They’re fine.
You know they’re fine because they’re always fine.
So you don’t worry about them.
The problem is that “I don’t need to worry about them” can very easily become “I don’t need to check on them.”
Those aren’t quite the same thing.
Reliability has an interesting side effect
When somebody repeatedly demonstrates that they can handle things, we tend to give them more things to handle.
Again, this isn’t necessarily sinister.
Quite the opposite.
It’s usually a sign of trust.
Something important needs doing? Give it to the person who always delivers.
Something complicated has landed? They’ll figure it out.
Something has gone sideways and needs rescuing? We know who can sort it.
It’s a compliment.
But there is a strange point at which a reputation for being capable can start generating its own workload.
The more someone proves they can carry, the more we tend to give them to carry.
And because they continue carrying it, the system appears to work perfectly.
Until it doesn’t.
Not everyone breaks dramatically
When we talk about people becoming overwhelmed, we tend to imagine something visible.
Stress. Absence. Missed deadlines. A difficult conversation. Perhaps eventually a resignation.
But people don’t always fall apart spectacularly.
Sometimes they just become quieter.
The person who used to suggest improvements stops suggesting them.
The person who would happily take something on starts waiting to be asked.
The person who used to challenge an idea because they thought there was a better way decides it isn’t worth the argument.
They still turn up.
They still answer their emails.
They still do their job.
If you looked at the usual measures, everything might appear completely normal.
But something has changed.
They’ve started conserving themselves.
And that’s remarkably easy to miss.
The dangerous word: “fine”
There’s another possibility, of course.
They actually are fine.
Not every quiet employee is secretly planning their escape. Not every dependable colleague is three emails away from throwing their laptop out of the window.
And if they are, hopefully they’ll have the good sense to put it in flight mode first.
Sometimes the person you don’t worry about really is perfectly happy.
But there’s an important difference between knowing somebody is fine and assuming they are.
And reliability makes assumption particularly tempting.
We don’t ask because they’ve never given us a reason to ask.
Which, when you think about it, is a slightly strange qualification.
This isn’t just a management problem
I’ve written this in the context of work, but it happens everywhere.
There are people in families who become the organisers.
Friends who become the listeners.
Colleagues who become the fixers.
People gradually acquire roles because they’re good at fulfilling them.
And once someone becomes the reliable one, we start treating reliability as a characteristic rather than something requiring effort.
We forget that the person who always knows what to do occasionally doesn’t.
The person who looks after everyone occasionally needs looking after.
The person who can handle almost anything doesn’t necessarily want to handle everything.
None of this requires a villain.
Nobody needs to be deliberately taking advantage of anybody.
Sometimes we’ve simply become comfortable.
So, how are you?
I’m suspicious of complicated solutions to fundamentally human problems.
I don’t think this needs another dashboard.
I’m fairly confident the answer isn’t a quarterly Reliable Employee Wellbeing Matrix.
And please, for everyone’s sake, don’t create a mandatory e-learning module.
Perhaps it starts with something considerably less sophisticated.
Ask.
Not because somebody’s performance has dropped.
Not because they’ve complained.
Not because an HR system has reminded you that it’s time for a scheduled conversation.
Ask precisely because you’ve had absolutely no reason to worry about them.
“How are things?”
“Is there anything getting on your nerves?”
“Have you got too much on?”
“Is there anything you’d like to be doing that you aren’t?”
And then actually listen to the answer.
Because the people who require the least attention can sometimes deserve a little more of it.
Not because they’re fragile.
Not because something must secretly be wrong.
But because reliability shouldn’t make somebody invisible.
The people you don’t worry about might be absolutely fine.
It’s still worth knowing.