When you're the one holding the team together — and it slowly empties you

“You talk to him. He’ll listen to you.”

Your manager says it in passing, in the corridor, coffee in hand. And you do talk to him. Just as you talked last week to the colleague who was crying in the toilets, and the month before to the new colleague who couldn’t work out why nobody on the team ever asked him to lunch. You are the one who notices that something is off in the air before anyone says a word. You are the one who translates your manager’s vague instructions into something the team can understand. You make sure there is cake on someone’s birthday and that the two people who can’t stand each other don’t go for each other’s throats in the meeting.

And then you come home and have no words left. Not because the day was especially hard, but because all day you were carrying something nobody saw — not even you, entirely.

This post is about that: about the role of the “glue” in a team, about why it falls to particular people, and about why it can slowly empty you out, even when you do it gladly.

The glue nobody sees

In 1983, in her book The Managed Heart, the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild described something that came to be known as emotional labour: the effort you put into managing your feelings in the way your job requires. She studied flight attendants who had to stay pleasant even with rude passengers. She estimated that roughly a third of American workers had jobs that demanded a substantial amount of this kind of work — and among women, almost half.

Hochschild was writing about emotional labour directed outwards, towards customers. But there is also a second, quieter version: emotional labour within a team, directed inwards. Nobody asks for it, nobody measures it, yet without it many teams would fall apart quite quickly.

In 1999 the organisational researcher Peter Frost and his colleague Sandra Robinson gave the people who do this work an unflattering but precise name: toxic handlers. People who, within an organisation, voluntarily absorb the pain, anger and confusion of others so that the work can carry on. Frost described them as the quiet heroes of organisations — and at the same time as their casualties. Precisely because of what they are able to carry, they are among the first to burn out, and nobody connects that with the work they had been doing.

A workplace is a system, not just a group of people

In marriage and family therapy we see the family as a system: a whole in which each member affects all the others, and the whole tends towards balance. I have written more about this in The family as a system: why one member’s change moves the whole family. The same lens turns out to be surprisingly useful at work.

A team, too, has its unwritten roles, alliances and rules. A team, too, tends to stay as it is — even when that doesn’t serve it. And in a team, too, tension that isn’t resolved by the two people between whom it arose moves somewhere else. Often to whoever is most willing to take it.

When you look at it systemically, the question changes. You no longer ask only “why am I the kind of person who takes everything on”, but also “what job am I doing for this system — and what would happen if I stopped?” The role of the glue is not just a personality trait of yours. It is a response to a need the team has but doesn’t say out loud: someone has to carry what the others won’t touch.

Where you learned to do it so well

People who become the glue at work are rarely practising the role for the first time. Often they already know it from home.

Perhaps you were the child who calmed your mother down when your father was in a bad mood. Perhaps you translated between parents who couldn’t talk to each other. Perhaps you noticed early on that home was easier if you had no problems — and so you became the one who solved problems for everyone else. In family therapy we call this parentification: a child takes on emotional responsibility that belongs to the adults. I have written about how such roles get handed out among children in Roles in the family: the hero, the scapegoat, the invisible child. Which was yours?

Relational family therapy, in which I am training, holds that we find our way very precisely in systems that resemble the ones we come from. Not because we want to, but because there we know what needs doing. A team with a tense manager and silent colleagues is almost home ground for someone who grew up with an irritable parent. They know straight away where to stand, what to say and whom to calm.

That isn’t a weakness. It is a very refined skill that you once needed. The trouble is simply that the skill has stayed while the need has changed — and that now nobody on the team sees it as work that costs something.

Triangles in the office

One of the most recognisable forms of this work is triangulation. When there is tension between two people, one of them — or both — turns to a third. Not to solve the problem, but to make the tension easier to bear. The third becomes a go-between, a confidant, a buffer. Between the two of them, nothing changes.

In a family, the third is often a child. At work, it is often the glue. It might sound like this (the scene is composite and not about a real person):

“Can I tell you something? But don’t pass it on.”
“Of course.”
“Mateja corrected me in front of everyone again in the meeting. I can’t take it any more. You get on well with her — could you mention it somehow?”
“I’ll try … Have you ever told her it bothers you?”
“No, you know what she’s like. She’ll listen to you.”

In this short conversation something very typical happens. Your colleague gets relief, Mateja is left without the information that her behaviour is hurting someone, and you get a task that isn’t yours and a secret you have to carry. Next week Mateja may complain to you about the colleague. And you’ll be in the middle again.

Triangles are tenacious because they bring short-term relief to everyone except the third person. That is why they don’t resolve themselves. They resolve when the third slowly stops taking on the role of go-between and hands the conversation back to where it belongs.

Why it slowly empties you

At first glance the role of the glue is rewarding. People trust you, they need you, you often hear that “it wouldn’t work without you”. Why would that be exhausting?

Research points to at least three reasons. In 2005 the psychologists Mark Bolino and William Turnley showed that a willingness to work “beyond the job description” is linked with greater role overload, more job stress and more conflict between work and family. The extra work isn’t free — it’s just that nobody writes it down.

The second reason is that it runs one way. In the early 1990s the organisational researcher William Kahn closely observed an organisation whose very mission was caring for others, and described how care can stop at the people who give it: when everyone gives downwards and outwards and nobody looks after them, the system slowly wears itself out. The glue rarely gets any glue for itself.

The third reason is the most personal. When you spend all day regulating other people’s emotions, there is no room left for your own. The anger you feel because someone is asking you for a favour yet again goes into a drawer. The tiredness goes into the drawer. And the drawer fills up — until resentment, cynicism or your body speaks up in its place.

I have described how this path can continue all the way to burnout in Why it is the most responsible and reliable people who burn out. Here I would like to stay with something narrower: how the role comes about and why it keeps itself going.

A loop that won’t stop by itself

The role of the glue doesn’t set all at once. It forms through small repetitions, each of which is perfectly reasonable on its own.

The most insidious part of this loop is steps four and five. When you step in, the others don’t get the chance to learn. Your manager doesn’t learn to say clearly what they want, because you translate their instructions. Two colleagues don’t learn to talk to each other, because they talk through you. The team never finds out that it is short-staffed, because you patch the holes as they appear.

The family therapist Murray Bowen described this pattern as a pairing of overfunctioning and underfunctioning: the more one person in a system takes on, the less the others are able to do — and vice versa. Neither of them plans it. The balance simply establishes itself. And because a system tends towards balance, it also resists change: when the glue stops gluing, the first reaction from the others is not gratitude but surprise, or even reproach.

Who gets this role more often

The role of the glue isn’t handed out at random. The economist Linda Babcock and her colleagues showed in a series of experiments that women more often take on tasks that benefit the organisation but don’t lead to promotion — and that others also ask them to do so more often. Not because they are more gifted at it, but because it is expected of them, and they sense the expectation.

Something similar applies to people who have been used to being pleasant and non-confrontational since childhood. If you recognise in yourself a strong need for others to be content, you may find People-pleasing: when your worth is in other people’s hands worth reading. Being the glue and people-pleasing aren’t the same thing, but they often meet: both rest on the feeling that you are safe when others are all right.

And one more thing: the role often goes to precisely the people who are most stable on the team. That sounds like a compliment — and partly it is. But it also means the team is offloading its instability onto you. If you want to think more broadly about this invisible layer of work, read the post on invisible work in a team as well.

Exercise: a map of your role

For this exercise you need a sheet of paper and fifteen minutes. Do it in the evening, when your working day is behind you.

1. Write down what you did for the team today that isn’t in your job description. Everything, including small things: a message you softened, a conversation in the corridor, a coffee you brought to someone who was in a bad mood.
2. Next to each item, write whose task it really was. Your manager’s? A colleague’s? Or perhaps genuinely yours? Don’t judge, just write it down.
3. Circle the ones you did before anyone even asked. It often turns out that you take on most of the role yourself, because you sense the tension before others do.
4. For the circled ones, ask yourself: what would have happened if I hadn’t done it? What would I have felt? What would have happened in the team? Would it really have been so bad — or just uncomfortable?
5. Choose one single item for tomorrow that you will leave with its owner. One. Not all of them. And watch what happens — in the team and in you.

Most people who try this notice two things. First, that there are far more items than they thought. And second, that at step five the discomfort is mostly their own — the team often copes better than they expected.

How to step out of the role without leaving the team

Stepping out of the role of the glue doesn’t mean becoming cold or no longer caring about people. It means that the care stays, but the load gets shared. A few steps that often help:

• Hand the conversation back to where it belongs. Instead of “I’ll tell her”, try: “I think you’re the one who should tell her. I can help you think about how.” You stay a support, but you don’t become a go-between.
• Don’t promise secrets that put you in the middle. “Don’t pass it on” is often a ticket into a triangle. You can listen and at the same time say that you won’t carry messages.
• Name the role with your manager. Not as a complaint, but as information: “I notice I spend a lot of time coordinating between people. I’d like you to know, because it affects my other tasks.” A good manager hears that as information about the system.
• Set boundaries around time, not around the relationship. “I can’t right now, but I’ve got ten minutes at three” is a different message from “I don’t have time for you”.
• Find a place where someone looks after you. In the helping professions that is supervision or peer consultation; elsewhere perhaps a colleague outside the team, a friend, a partner or a therapist.

Expect the system’s first response to be resistance. Someone will say you’re “not yourself any more”. Someone will clearly feel awkward. That isn’t proof you are doing something wrong. It is proof that the balance is shifting.

In therapy we often don’t work only with the job. When someone starts stepping out of their role in a team, the question almost always opens up of where they learned that role — and who in their life looked after them while they were looking after everyone else.

Where this doesn’t apply

I want to be fair: not all care for a team is a sign of an old wound, and not every glue is in danger.

Sometimes it really is your job. If you are a manager, in HR or a coordinator, looking after relationships is part of your role. Then the question isn’t whether you do it, but whether you have enough time, recognition and support for it — and whether it is also written into your job description and your appraisal.

Sometimes it fulfils you. Some people experience caring for others as meaning rather than burden, and don’t burn out from it. The difference is usually not in the amount but in the choice: whether you can also say no without guilt eating away at you.

Sometimes the problem isn’t you but the organisation. If the team is chronically understaffed, the manager absent and the tensions a result of poor working conditions, your role only masks a systemic problem. I have written about where individual responsibility ends and the organisation’s begins in System or individual: who is responsible for burnout. If it is a matter of long-term bullying at work or a breach of your rights, it makes sense to turn to a trade union or legal help; psychological work doesn’t replace that.

Sometimes the exhaustion is already more than tiredness. If you have been sleeping badly for weeks, nothing brings you joy, anxiety is wearing you down or thoughts come that it would be better if you weren’t here, see your GP first. In acute distress you can call the mental distress helpline in Slovenia on 01 520 99 00 (every day from 7 pm to 7 am) or the Samaritans helpline in Slovenia on 116 123 (24 hours a day), and in an emergency 112.

What to remember

• Emotional labour in a team is real work: easing tension, translating, listening and covering — even though nobody counts it.
• A team is a system: tension that isn’t resolved by the two people it arose between moves to whoever is willing to carry it.
• You often know the role of the glue from home — as a child who calmed or translated between the adults.
• The more you take on, the less the others learn; that’s why the role doesn’t stop by itself.
• Stepping out doesn’t mean you stop caring — it means handing the conversation back to where it belongs and looking after yourself too.