Why the Most Capable Person on the Team is often the Most Overloaded at Work

Oct 8

4 min read

In most teams there's someone who says "leave it with me". They say it in meetings when a problem has no obvious owner, to a colleague who's stuck, and in reply to emails they were only copied into. They're often also the person who knows where last year's figures are saved and why the reporting spreadsheet breaks every March.

Because they follow through, people keep leaving things with them. If you're that person, you may have noticed that being good at your job hasn't made your job any easier. Mostly, it's made it bigger.

Being reliable is part of what makes you good at your job, which is why the usual advice to "just say no" doesn't quite fit.

A man in glasses rubs his forehead while looking at a computer screen, working late at a lamp-lit desk in a dark office.

Why capable people end up overloaded at work

Work tends to flow towards reliability. When something needs doing quickly and properly, the safest option is the person who never drops anything, so that's where it goes. Each request makes sense on its own; the trouble is that nobody is adding them up.

A set of studies from Duke University points the same way: people described as having more self-control ended up with more tasks. In a workplace study, employees who rated themselves high in self-control said they made more sacrifices and felt more burdened by them. Their supervisors and co-workers noticed the sacrifices, but not the burden.

As researcher Gráinne Fitzsimons put it, "What looks easy from the outside may not feel that easy on the inside."

Capable people also absorb work before anyone asks. They take the notes, tidy the slides and follow up with the client. Each job might take ten minutes, but together they can become a second role that never appears in a job description.

Because nothing gets dropped, the cost stays hidden. it shows up somewhere else: the lunch eaten at your desk, the evening spent catching up on the "real" work, and the to-do list still running in your head after you've logged off.

There's an identity piece too. Being the dependable one becomes part of how others see you, and often how you see yourself. Saying no can then feel less like a workload decision and more like a threat to who you are at work.

What helps if you're the one everyone relies on

If you're overloaded at work because everyone relies on you, the answer isn't to become less reliable. It's to find where your capacity is quietly leaking and make the pattern even 5% more sustainable. A few places to start:

Pause before "leave it with me" When a task has no obvious owner, notice the urge to offer, let one slow breath out, and see what happens in the silence. Sometimes someone else picks it up, and sometimes it turns out it didn't need doing at all.
Make the invisible work visible For two weeks, jot down everything that lands on you because you're reliable rather than because it's your role. A list is far easier to discuss with your manager than a vague sense of being stretched.
Renegotiate rather than refuse "Happy to, but what should move to make room for it?" keeps you dependable while handing the trade-off back to the person who can decide it.
Teach it once instead of fixing it every time
When someone keeps bringing you the same problem, show them how to solve it. It takes longer the first time and saves you every time after that.

If you lead a team

If you manage people, you probably already know who your "leave it with me" person is. It's worth checking how much of their week is the job you hired them for, and how much has drifted their way simply because they're dependable.

Research on collaborative overload by Rob Cross, Reb Rebele and Adam Grant found that in the organisations they studied, up to 35 per cent of value-added collaboration came from fewer than 5 per cent of employees. That's a lot of weight resting on very few people, and often the ones you'd least want to lose.

Handing your best person more work can feel like a vote of confidence, but after a while it rarely feels like one to them. Sharing the small tasks around protects them, and it gives others the chance to step up, which is hard to do when someone else always says yes first.

Reliable doesn't have to mean overloaded

Being capable isn't the problem. The more useful question is whether the way you're carrying it is something you could keep doing for the next five years, or just something you've managed to keep doing so far. I've written more about that difference in Sustainable Capacity: The Question most Overloaded People aren't Asking.