Leading inside systems designed for over-carrying
Leadership is not the same as carrying everything a system fails to hold. Leading with integrity means knowing what is yours to hold, what needs to be addressed, and when stepping back may be necessary for real change.
I know people were disappointed when I chose to save myself (and my relationship with my kiddo, because I was a single parent at the time).
There was the colleague and senior administrator who supported me with her words but stopped talking to me when I resigned. The doctoral students I could no longer advise. The new master’s students who wanted to work together in my areas of specialization.
I had built some lovely work and a community of learning. I left proud of what I had created and how, by the end, I had transformed my relationship to my career in ways that allowed me to show up more whole, authentic, and creative.
I may have disappointed others, but I did not disappoint my inner core self for the first time in my academic work history.
Before I move into the bigger systems question, I want to pause here.
Not to rush past the discomfort of this story or turn it immediately into a lesson, but to notice what it brings up.
How does this sit with you? What do you notice in your body? What in my story stirs something in your own? What scares you, repels you, or excites you?
Because what I’m naming here is bigger than my own story.
I think many of us are exhausted not just by the work itself, but by the illusion of a responsibility to care for and carry the work, workplace, and colleagues. It’s the Rescuer pattern of the Drama Triangle on overdrive.
Leadership asks us to operate within systems that are incomplete, under-resourced, or misaligned with the values they claim to uphold. In those conditions, it is easy to confuse responsibility with over-responsibility.
But professional integrity is not the same as absorption. And leadership is not the same as emotional or energetic containment for an entire system.
There is a meaningful distinction between holding and carrying:
Holding space for someone’s experience and taking responsibility for managing it.
Responding to harm and absorbing the consequences without change.
Supporting people through difficulty and becoming where all difficulty gets deposited.
Acting with care and becoming the system that compensates for the lack of care elsewhere.
When we blur these distinctions, we can unintentionally stabilize dysfunction.
So what does it look like to lead with integrity inside systems that expect you to carry in addition to caring?
It begins with a shift in orientation:
From “How do I carry this?” to
“What is actually required here?”
Sometimes what is required is support, escalation, boundary-setting, communication, documentation, or accountability.
Other times, what is required is saying no when you are safe to do so. It may mean refusing to compensate for a gap that is systemic or structural. Sometimes it means allowing discomfort to surface so the system can finally be seen clearly.
Because guess what: if you keep doing the extra work and invisible labor, the system will not reward you with less work, more money, or more time off.
One of the most counterintuitive truths in systems work is this: Your over-functioning can delay transformation for others and the organization.
When we step in too quickly, smooth things over too consistently, or absorb too much without naming it, we reduce the system’s feedback signals. Without feedback, systems do not evolve.
This is why integrity sometimes looks less like helping and more like not rescuing. Not because you don’t care. But because you do.
We care enough not to become the mechanism that allows dysfunction to persist.
A different kind of leadership practice
Leading with integrity in systems that are not yet well-designed requires a different set of questions:
What is mine to hold, and what is not?
What am I being asked to normalize that should actually be addressed?
Where am I compensating instead of confronting?
What would it look like to let the system feel its own gaps?
These are not easy questions. But they are clarifying ones.
Ultimately, you don't need to become better at carrying everything. You may need to become more discerning about what is yours to carry, what needs to be released, what needs to be grieved, and what is worth carrying forward together.
That discernment is part of the work: not learning to care less, but learning to care without disappearing inside what a system asks of you.
Next week, I get to continue this conversation in person at an institution, where I’ll be offering a keynote and leadership training around these questions. I’m looking forward to being in a room with people willing to examine what they’re carrying, why they’re carrying it, and what might become possible if some of it is finally allowed to be put down.
