The Human Load Balancer Protecting Your Team Without Burning Out

In this talk, Rebecca Anderson, head of engineering at Hedgehog Lab, discusses the often-overlooked invisible work that engineering leaders perform to support their teams. She shares a personal story about a significant incident on a client platform that required her to manage client communications, internal reporting, and team decision-making while the team focused on fixing the issue. Anderson emphasizes that this invisible work, which includes emotional and operational tasks, is crucial for leadership but can lead to burnout if not acknowledged. She introduces concepts such as the hero leader trap and offers strategies for leaders to delegate responsibility and share context with their teams, making leadership more sustainable. Ultimately, she encourages a shift in mindset where leaders can support their teams without bearing the entire burden of responsibility.

Uh moving into our last session of the day, uh Rebecca Anderson is the head of engineering at Hedgehog Lab. She's going to be closing today with something that doesn't get enough airtime, the invisible work that engineering leaders do, absorbing the pressure, shielding our teams, and carrying emotional strain. And it builds up and it's got a cost. So, Rebecca, please welcome and take it away. Thank you. Hi

everyone. What an absolute pleasure it is to be here today. I will spare you the very long and kind of drawn out introductions, but um I'm Becca. I'm head of engineering at Hedgehog Lab, which is a digital consultancy. And I have been um in this particular role for about five years now. And then I have an additional year or so of engineering management experience on top of

that too. Now, if I may, I'd just like to start today with a little bit of a story to give you some context for what I'm going to be talking about. So, just before Christmas, we had a pretty major incident on a client platform. I'm fairly certain it's probably something that most people in this room have experienced at some point in their career. We had a production

environment that was impacted. As a result of that, we had some incredibly anxious and incredibly frustrated clients and we had to stop the whole team doing what they were doing and focus instead entirely on fixing this problem. And they were fantastic. They were amazing. They they did an amazing job and we were really fortunate that by the end of the first day we did in fact have

a mitigation in place that ultimately stabilized the platform for us. But whilst they were hard at work doing that, I was kind of busy in the background doing what I suppose you could call a lot of supporting tasks. So I was monitoring their progress. Um hopefully without getting in their way too much, but you'd have to ask them that one. Um I was kind of regularly communicating

with our clients so that they were aware of the progress that we were making and what was going on. Similarly, internally within the business, I was reporting up the chain to our senior leadership so that they were aware of the situation and what the impact was. And finally, kind of more directly, I was supporting the team in making decisions and prioritizations. So, I was helping them to

decide what potential fix they should look at first or what potential root cause they should prioritize looking into. And once the platform was stable and we got to the end of the day, we said to the team, you know, kind of off you go, enjoy your evening, come back tomorrow ready and refresh to to really look into this root cause. So, they did. Uh I didn't. I

stayed behind. And I didn't do that because I had some sort of hero complex. Far from it. I stayed because I wanted to keep an eye on the situation and just be aware if anything degraded again. And I actually vividly remember it got to sort of 8 8:30 that night and my fiance walked into the room that I work from and I was just staring really blankly

at our uptime monitoring dashboard waiting for the next ping to say that the site was still up. And that was kind of the moment where I was like, you know, I should probably close my laptop too and and go and have a little bit of downtime this evening. And I wasn't asked to do that. I didn't get, you know, I didn't get a message from my line

manager at 5:00 PM saying, "You have to stay online to keep an eye on things and see what's going on." I did it because I didn't want our clients to be let down and I wanted to be able to respond quickly if there was another issue. But the team as a whole, they they weren't aware that I was doing that. They they weren't, you know, aware of

all of that work that was going on in the background, which is why for the purposes of this talk, I'm kind of referring to that as invisible work. And it's that kind of pattern. So, you know, the monitoring and worrying about what might go wrong and being nervous about potential issues. That's what I'm referring to when I talk about invisible work of engineering leadership. And it is

work that is absolutely essential to what we do day in and day out. But it is also work that very easily can build up and ultimately can burn us out. So, let's just take a minute to talk about what that work actually is. Um, when I talk about invisible work, I'm not referring to kind of soft skills or things like that. I'm referring to kind of very

real tasks that take up your time, your attention, or maybe your head space, but it's work that's really hard to track. So, no one's getting their schedule on a Monday morning and seeing this kind of listed there. It's not on your to-do list. And actually some of it is actually so invisible that I didn't realize until I sat down to write this talk that I was still

doing some of these on an almost daily basis. Now I find it's generally useful to think about the work in two kind of broad categories. So you have your emotional work and you have your operational work. Neither are optional. Both take up your time. So first up on the emotional side of things we've got maintaining composure. So as a leader you have got an entire team of

people that are looking to you for signals. So you have got to be constantly aware of and think about your tone or your words or your reaction. And you know it's not about pretending that there's nothing wrong or anything like that. It's just about making sure that the stress that you are experiencing doesn't become everybody else's stress as well. Next up we have taking the emotional hit.

So, this is where kind of that frustration or the pressure or the disappointment kind of gets aimed at you instead of at your team. Thinking back to the example that I've just run you through, justifiably so, we had some very angry clients. I was one of the people that was communicating with them regularly. So, a lot of that anger was being taken out on me. And that's

fine because that meant that the team weren't experiencing it and they were free to carry on doing their work in the background. But taking that hit every single time that is really draining carrying the risk. So this is where kind of you are that person that is sitting and thinking oh god but what if it does break again and you do worry about it but you don't

put that onto your team because you don't want them to shoulder that burden as well. And that's not a question of paranoia. We know things go wrong. We know things break. It does happen. It's about being accountable and responsible for for what happens when it does go wrong. Over on the operational side, we've got translating context. So this is where as a leader, you are the person

that is responsible for kind of taking messy and conflicting input and turning it into something usable for your team. So maybe in your organization, you're dealing with competing priorities or competing agendas or different levels of detail and you have to turn that into a clear direction. Uh protecting focus. So this is where you kind of have to be the bad guy sometimes and you have to say

no or no not yet or maybe no not like that. And it's really about making sure that work isn't given to your team when it's only halfformed. Maybe it's emotionally charged or maybe it's just really unnecessary noise. And with this one, when you do it well, nobody really notices that it's happening. But if you don't do it, people very quickly realize that it's not being done. And

finally, deciding so that others don't have to. So this is where kind of you are responsible for making a decision and making it early on. So you choose the directions and you accept the tradeoffs and you take on that risk and you just move things forward quietly in Every single one of those decisions probably saves your team time, but also costs you time at the same time.

Now, ultimately, none of this work is accidental, takes a lot of skill, and it takes thought, and it takes effort. But because it's hard to see, we very rarely talk about it. I have a one-on-one every week with my line manager, and nine weeks out of 10, he probably says to me, "Oh, what have you been working on for the past week? what's going on? What are

you up to? I don't think I've ever listed a single thing on this list to him when he's asked me that question. But because we don't talk about it, that means that we then don't acknowledge the load that it creates. And that's where we start to see a really common leadership trap show up, which I have affectionately and slightly cheesily for the purposes of this talk called

the hero leader trap. Now this is a trap that I have fallen into multiple times myself and it's where we kind of automatically step into situations we smooth the edges maybe we lift some of the pressure but ultimately we end up becoming a bit of a shield for our team and early on this behavior kind of gets rewarded. So things probably move faster. Your team probably feels

really safe and protected. they're probably having a great time and people will start to say things like, "Oh, you don't need to worry about that because Becca's got it. Becca will handle it. It's fine." And because it's rewarded, we keep doing it, often without realizing that that's what's happening. But the problem is the more that we step in and the more reliable we prove ourselves to be,

the more work just ends up getting quietly directed to us. So, you end up being the person that everything gets escalated to straight away. Maybe you become a bit of an emotional buffer. Maybe you do become the person that stays late to watch uptime dashboards. And no one's decided that. It's not in your job description. No one's just suddenly decided that it's part of your role. But

it's because we've proved that it works in the past. But over time, that creates a single point of failure. And if you are in this trap, then unfortunately that single point of failure is you. And that's because you end up carrying context that nobody else sees. You know, risk that nobody else is aware of. Or maybe you're just feeling immense pressure that kind of nobody else people

are oblivious to. And it's not a resiliency problem. It's not about how tough we need to be. It's just about how we've ended up working. But unless we change that, the load will just continue to build. So when you start to think about it like that, the question isn't, well, how do I cope better? The question actually should be, how do I lead without everything having to

depend on me? Now, I just want to take a minute to talk about burnout. And I think it's very easy when we talk about burnout to imagine something really dramatic. So, you know, maybe exhaustion, extended time off work and things like that. But for a lot of people, it doesn't actually show up like that and certainly not straight away. So maybe you kind of feel like even

when everything is stable, you're just constantly on the lookout for the next problem. So you are monitoring those dashboards or maybe you're checking your Slack messages and you only ever really half relax and maybe whilst outwardly you are still presenting yourself to be professional and calm that's maybe taking a lot more effort than it usually would do. And maybe you're really struggling with decisions as well. So

you take longer to make them or you put them off altogether and kind of bury your head in the sand a little bit. And finally, maybe you just end up each week on a Friday feeling really drained and not really being able to pinpoint a specific reason why. I'm really guilty of that last one. And I am really bad at just shrugging my shoulders and saying, "I

probably just run too much this week. That's why I'm so tired." But I I can assure you all I'm not an ultr runner. It's it's never the running. That's just me being in blatant denial. But this is what happens when that invisible work doesn't get acknowledged. So you don't get a very sudden and dramatic spike. What you get is a very steady accumulation. Thinking back to the

incident that I mentioned at the start, we did find the root cause of that problem and we did get a permanent fix in place. And even once we had done that for weeks afterwards, I felt a very real lingering sense of responsibility. I was just constantly waiting for the next problem and I just never really felt off duty. So, a question that I use now that really

helps me to kind of notice how much of that invisible work I'm doing and how much of it is building up is what work did I do last week that nobody else saw? And if you're sitting here and I've asked that question and you're kind of thinking about it right now and you've got quite a long list of oh well I did this that and the other

then that's maybe a sign that you kind of got quite quite a large load accumulating there. Now I think most of us as leaders we default to trying to just carry as much as possible for our teams. So you know we do we shield them from that noise and that pressure and that uncertainty and it's coming from such a good place. You know most people that I

know in leadership did not become leaders because they want power. They did it they became leaders because they want to help and they want to support people. But actually the very best piece of advice I have ever been given is um stop trying to do everything yourself. And now the very first piece of advice I give to any new or aspiring leader is learn to delegate. You

have to learn to let go of the things that do not need to sit with you. Because if we don't do that and if we continue with this kind of model of the absorbing and shielding that depends on one person being endlessly available. And if that person is tired, overstretched, really busy, or you know, god forbid, just off sick with the flu, that's when you start to

see the crack show. And that's when it becomes unsustainable. And I don't mean unsustainable from a business or an organizational perspective. I mean from an individual perspective. So when I was kind of learning how best to approach this, I had to really think about and really reframe my idea of what supporting the team actually means. So now instead of absorbing everything for them, I actually share more

context and I share it sooner. And instead of shielding people from the reality of situations, I actually focus on building clarity and just being more open about what is going on. Because at the end of the day, if you support people by protecting them from reality, you end up leaving them really unprepared for when things get hard. Now, moving to a new model, that does mean that

some things are going to feel really uncomfortable initially. Letting people see that risk earlier, that can feel very concerning. letting people on my team help make decisions that I would previously have made by myself that terrifying quite frankly. um especially when you're still responsible for the outcomes of those decisions and it's not about caring less about the outcomes you know it's just about wanting the processes to

be more and when I started to make this shift what I noticed was the teams actually that you know they developed more skills they learned more and ultimately the system just got stronger now to be clear you don't need to completely overhaul the way that you lead or your entire leadership style. I'm going to run you through just like a few small changes that have helped me

stop carrying everything by default. When I walk through them, you'll notice that I'll say I try to rather than I do. Uh that's because I'm a human being and I'm not perfect. And when you are in the habit of doing something, it can take a really long time to break that habit and it takes a lot of continued effort. Sometimes I do slip up. Sometimes I fall

back into old habits. But when you do have that awareness, it's so much easier to kind of just take a breath, pause, and then get back to leading in a way that is is sustainable. So the first thing that I do is that I name the invisible work that often goes unseen. So again referring back to the incident I mentioned at the start instead of talking only

about the technical fix and in I started talking about the other work that I was doing as well. So the time that I spent producing client updates or the out of hours and at the very least even if I didn't tell someone I was doing that I would make a note of it somewhere usually in my time logs but in doing that it meant that I could

actually see the work that I was doing where my time was going and it meant that it made it much easier for me to decide whether that work needed to sit with me or whether it could be shared with someone else. Next up, we have setting boundaries. Now, I think sometimes setting boundaries gets a little bit of a negative connotation, but it doesn't mean that you're stepping

away from your responsibilities. Instead, I just try to be much clearer about ownership. So, becoming explicit about what I own or what my team owns or what we share together. And that can mean that I'm now no longer the first point of escalation whenever anything goes wrong. or maybe I'm not solely responsible for monitoring a situation. With that one though, you do have to relinquish a little

bit of what can be perceived as control, which again that can feel really uncomfortable at first, but in the long run, that is the absolute right thing to do. And finally, I had to include this based on the advice on my last slide, but I delegate with purpose. So really, the biggest shift I made was treating leadership as something that we do together. So sharing that context,

rotating responsibilities, building peer support so that I stopped being the only person that was carrying risk. And when people understand the bigger picture, the load actually just naturally spreads and you find that the pressure doesn't sit in one place anymore. Now, none of these are going to make leadership easier overnight. There's no magic fix. Leadership is incredibly hard. But what it can do is make it more

survivable. And I think that matters probably more than a lot of people would like to admit. If I can leave you with one thing today, this talk wasn't meant to be about fixing teams or fixing organizations or fixing individuals. It was about taking care of the people that are doing the invisible work. possibly some of you in this room, possibly some of your colleagues, but it's so

that you can then lead in a way that is calm, fair, and consistent because you really don't have to carry everything to be a good leader. Thank you for your time today.