The Cost of Holding Everything Together
Author’s Note
I write for women who keep things running long after others have logged off. This piece explores The Competence Tax, the quiet tax paid by leaders who make work smoother for everyone else. It asks a simple question: what is the real cost of holding everything together? And it answers with honesty. Over-functioning becomes identity. High performers become high absorbers. Organizations become dependent on the people who quietly prevent collapse. There is a better way, and it begins with naming what has been taken for granted.
Introduction
By 9:12 a.m., the day had already slipped sideways.
A VP I work with sent me a screenshot of her calendar. The first three meetings had shifted overnight. Two quick questions were now urgent. Her team chat was a string of check-ins that somehow all required her attention. She wrote, “It’s like the day started before I arrived.”
Most women know that feeling. The sense that you are playing catch-up on a day you did not schedule.
Burnout rarely announces itself with drama. It builds in the margins. In the friction of being the person who steadies everything. In the quiet calculations about what you can take on now and what you will deal with later. The cost of holding everything together begins long before anyone notices it.
The Performance of Holding It All Together
There is a way women show up at work that looks effortless. You smooth the group chat. You reframe the tense comment in the meeting so the conversation stays productive. You jump in when a project starts wobbling because letting it fall would create even more work, and it will probably land back with you anyway.
Most of the labor is invisible. All of it is essential.
McKinsey’s research shows women leaders do far more of this stabilizing work than men at the same level: emotional support, workload help, mentorship, and culture maintenance.¹ Yet only a small percentage of organizations formally recognize this labor.¹
So the workplace begins to lean on you the same way a household leans on whoever always knows where the batteries are.
At first it feels like trust. Then it becomes expectation. Eventually, it becomes infrastructure.
The cost of holding everything together is that people stop imagining what the workplace looks like without your constant intervention.
The Competence Tax
The Competence Tax is simple. The better you are, the more the system hands you, and the less it notices it is doing it.
Here is how it unfolds:
You deliver.
People rely on you.
You quietly absorb complexity.
The system assumes you can keep absorbing.
Your workload doubles.
Your influence does not.
High performance gets mistaken for high capacity. High capacity gets mistaken for endless capacity.
This dynamic lands particularly hard on millennial women, who came of age in a culture that taught us capability and self-sufficiency were the same thing.³ Pop culture reinforced it everywhere. Destiny’s Child had us belting out “Independent Women,” a song that was meant to celebrate autonomy but often landed as a reminder that handling everything yourself was the expectation. And Christina Aguilera’s “Fighter” suggested that strength was something you proved by enduring more, not by asking for support. It felt empowering then, though looking back, it also nudged many of us to push past our limits without asking for help.
There was another layer too. Once independence became the standard, comparison was the soundtrack. The culture that praised doing everything yourself also rewarded doing it better, faster, and with less visible effort. Self-sufficiency slid easily into competition, especially among women who were all trying to meet the same impossible expectations.³
Yet the research is clear.
Studies show that when women are encouraged to compete with each other, to be very competitive at work, their careers and relationships suffer. A more supportive environment for women is one where there is a sense of collaboration and mutual support, where everyone is less focused on what they can do to improve their individual prospects.³
Competition taught women to carry more quietly. Collaboration would have encouraged us to share the load. And once you make something look easy, people expect you to keep doing it.
The cost of holding everything together is that excellence becomes a reason to give you more, not a reason to support you better.
How Over-Functioning Becomes Identity
Over-functioning starts as protection. You respond quickly so tasks do not pile up. You take the meeting because you know what happens when no one does. You fix the draft because sending it upward in rough shape will just send it back to you.
Eventually, these behaviors shape how people see you and how you see yourself.
An analyst featured in HBR’s boundary research described how she started her day at 7 a.m. so she could think clearly, only to find her household still treating her as partly available. Her work rhythms did not look like work to anyone else. It all blurred.²
That is how identity forms. Not because you sought it out, but because you became the person who could be counted on.
The cost of holding everything together is that you lose the ability to be seen as someone who might need support too.
The Burnout Equation
Burnout does not begin with collapse. It begins with subtraction.
A little less rest.
A little less mental space.
A little less room to say no.
Research on boundaries, including HBR’s guidance on setting and maintaining them, emphasizes that they only stick when we reinforce them consistently. People take their cues from what we actually do, not what we say once.² But women hesitate to reinforce them. Not because we lack conviction, but because we understand how our refusal might ripple through the system.
So the burnout equation builds:
Unspoken expectations + visible reliability + lack of structural support = exhaustion that looks like dedication.
The cost of holding everything together is that your well-being becomes an afterthought, even to you.
The Pandemic Stress Test
During the pandemic, women became the emotional architecture of remote work. McKinsey found that women leaders were significantly more likely to support employee well-being, help people navigate work-life challenges, and maintain team cohesion, even while experiencing much higher burnout themselves.¹
Yet when review season arrived, only a quarter of organizations formally credited this additional labor.¹
The Competence Tax thrives in moments like these. The better women were at keeping teams afloat, the more invisible their effort became.
The cost of holding everything together is that people assume you are fine simply because you appear functional.
The Cost of Being the Default Helper
Every team has a person whose inbox becomes the unofficial suggestion box. You become the one people check with before decisions. You scan drafts for issues before others notice them. You sense tension in the room before anyone else acknowledges it.
These are leadership skills. But skills deployed without structural support become strain.
Women do not burn out because they are poor planners or overly accommodating. They burn out because they have been positioned as the default helpers while still being measured by the same metrics as everyone else.¹
The cost of holding everything together is that your capacity becomes the catch-all solution for problems you did not create.
How to Lead Without Holding Everything Together Alone
Sustainable leadership requires design, not endurance.
Name the Competence Tax. Make invisible labor visible. Acknowledge the coordination, emotional support, mentoring, and conflict smoothing that keeps teams functional.¹
Separate performance from over-functioning. Performance creates outcomes. Over-functioning fills systemic gaps. They should not be rewarded the same way.
Redesign workloads with actual capacity in mind. Shorten meetings. Remove low-value routines. Audit who is absorbing the side work of keeping everything running.¹
Make boundaries a team norm, not a personal workaround. HBR notes that boundaries succeed when framed as improvements to collective efficiency and clarity, not as a personal preference.²
Shift sponsorship from goodwill to structure. Women are oversubscribed emotionally and undersupported strategically. Closing that gap reduces the tax.¹
The cost of holding everything together is high. The solution is shared responsibility, not more resilience.
A Personal Note on Competence
If you have been the person holding everything together, it is probably because you were competent long before anyone realized how much they were relying on you. Competence tends to work like gravity. People drift toward it without thinking. They assume the person who can handle something should handle it, and they rarely stop to ask what it costs.
You did not become the go-to person by accident. You learned to anticipate problems before they surfaced. You learned to finish what others started. You learned to create calm in spaces that were anything but calm. At some point, this stopped being a skill and became a default setting, a role others depended on before you ever agreed to it.
That is the hidden edge of competence. It attracts responsibility faster than recognition.
If you recognize yourself in that pattern, you are not alone. Many leaders quietly inherited roles they never formally accepted, simply because they were capable and willing at the moment the system needed them. Competence became a signal flare: visible enough to draw work in, subtle enough that few people questioned where the limits were.
Competence, in its healthiest form, does not require carrying everything alone. It creates room for support instead of replacing it. It sounds like:
"I can lead this, and I want to make sure we distribute the work in a way that sets us up for success."
"Here is what I can take on. Let’s decide together what needs to shift or be shared."
"I want to give this the attention it deserves. For that to happen, I need clarity on priorities."
“This is important, and we will move it forward in a way that is sustainable for the team."
"I can handle my part. I will need support on the following pieces."
"My role is to contribute, not to carry the entire load. Let’s align on a realistic plan."
"I can absolutely move this forward, and I want to ensure we have the right resources around it."
These are not signs of fragility. They are signs of a leader who understands how competence should work in a healthy system: as contribution, not depletion.
The real cost of holding everything together is that it narrows your own possibilities while expanding everyone else’s expectations. The opportunity is to reclaim your competence as a resource, not a reservoir. Something valuable, not bottomless.
Designing for that possibility is not idealism. It is leadership.
Try This Week
Small moves that interrupt The Competence Tax.
Notice one thing you usually fix quietly and do not fix it alone. Name it to the team and ask, “How do we want to handle this together next time”
Practice one support script in real time. For example:
“Here is what I can take on. Let’s decide together what needs to shift or be shared.”Turn one unspoken expectation into a spoken agreement. If people always come to you first, say, “I am happy to help. Let’s loop in the full group so this does not live only with me.”
Track your invisible work for one week. Keep a simple list of the check-ins, conflict smoothing, mentoring, and last-minute saves you do. Share a short summary with your manager or a trusted peer.
Ask one question in a team setting that shares the load. For example:
“Who else has capacity to own a piece of this” or “What is one task we can move or drop so this is realistic”
These are not about refusing to help. They are about teaching your system how to function without assuming you will carry everything by default.
For Executives
Culture changes when responsibility and recognition change.
Map your default helpers. Ask senior leaders, “Who do people go to when something is stuck” Look for patterns in gender, role, and identity. Use that map to rebalance ownership and make invisible work visible.¹
Add collaboration and load sharing to performance criteria. Make it clear that good leadership includes distributing work, not funneling it into the most competent person’s lap.¹
Require tradeoff conversations for new priorities. When something urgent appears, ask, “What will come off the plate to make room for this” and document the answer.²
Build formal recognition for emotional and stabilizing labor. Include mentoring, culture work, and crisis smoothing in promotion packets and talent reviews.¹
Ask managers to identify and protect capacity, not just fill it. In one-on-ones, have them bring a list of what their teams will not do this quarter and why that choice supports sustainable performance.¹
This is how you reduce the cost of holding everything together. Not by asking the most competent people to be more resilient, but by designing a system that does not depend on them to hold it all alone.
References
McKinsey & Company. The state of burnout for women in the workplace (Women in the Workplace 2021 podcast transcript).
Harvard Business Review. The Essentials: Setting and Maintaining Boundaries (Women at Work podcast transcript).
McKinsey & Company. Author Talks: How pop culture pitted millennial women against each other at work (interview with Sophie Gilbert).
