I want to share with you a pattern I keep seeing.
I’ve spent more than 25 years walking into organizations, sitting down with the people who work in them, and asking them honest questions about their experience.
And across all of that time, inside boardrooms and break rooms and borrowed meeting spaces, I keep meeting the same person.
They have a different name every time.
A different title.
A different industry.
But they are unmistakably the same person.
They are the person who figured out how to do their job — and then quietly figured out how to do the parts of everyone else’s job that weren’t getting done.
They are the person who absorbed the dysfunction without announcing it.
They are the person who held the team together through the difficult stretch without being asked to, and without being thanked for it.
They showed up again the next day and did it all over.
They are not the loudest person in the room. Not by a long stretch.
And they are rarely the person who gets the recognition.
And they almost never describe themselves as doing anything exceptional — because from where they sit, they’re just doing what needs to be done.
I call them the Load Bearers.
And I want to talk about what happens to them — and what it means for you as a leader — because I think this is one of the most underexamined risks in organizational life.
What Load Bearers look like
One of the services I offer is to conduct organizational and team cultural surveys.
The very first one I had the opportunity of working on was in COVID year, and since then I have conducted numerous others.
In one of the surveys I have been contracted to do, I remember interviewing a team member who had spent over a decade with her organization.
During that time, she had developed a multitude of programs, managed a wide range of external relationships with external service providers and partner contractors, and navigated multiple changes in leadership — all while managing a workload that grew as resources were cut.
When I asked her when she last felt truly valued, she had to reach back years to find a meaningful answer.
In the same organization, two colleagues had independently built an unsolicited report — a detailed analysis of efficiencies, space use, and programming — and presented it to senior leadership when their organization’s future went under the microscope.
Nobody asked them to do it and it certainly was not in their job descriptions.
They did it because they believed in the work, and because nobody else was going to.
Between the three of them, they had almost certainly kept that organization alive.
None of them had been formally recognized for it.
This is not unusual.
In my experience, it is often closer to the rule than the exception.
Why leaders miss them
Load Bearers are, almost by definition, invisible to the metrics most organizations use to measure contribution.
They do not escalate things – in fact many of them describe themselves as introverts.
They do not make noise.
The problems they prevent never appear on anyone’s radar because they were handled before they became problems.
And here’s the painful irony:
the better a Load Bearer is at their job, the less visible their contribution becomes.
A team that runs smoothly looks like a team that runs smoothly — not like a team that runs smoothly because of one or two people who are quietly extraordinary.
Leaders miss them for another reason too.
We tend to notice effort when it’s expressed loudly — through urgency, through requests for recognition, through visible struggle.
Load Bearers don’t express effort that way.
They express it through results.
And results, over time, get taken for granted.
What happens when they leave
Load Bearers leave in one of two ways.
The first is gradual.
They start job searching quietly. They begin setting limits they never set before. They stop volunteering for things outside their job description, because they’ve finally done the math on what it costs them and what it earns them. If you are paying attention, you will notice a subtle withdrawal — a version of this person who is still present but no longer fully invested.
The second way is sudden.
They get an offer, they take it, and they’re gone. Immediately. And only then does the full load of what they were carrying become visible — because now someone else has to carry it, and it turns out to be much more than anyone realized. Much much more.
Either way, by the time the departure happens, the decision has usually been made long before.
Load Bearers do not leave impulsively.
They leave after a long, private calculation in which they finally concluded that the gap between what they give and what they receive is no longer something they’re willing to close alone.
What you can do — starting this week
You do not need a cultural survey to find the Load Bearers in your team.
You just need to ask yourself one honest question:
Who on my team is carrying more than their job description requires — and do they know that I know it?
If the answer is that you are not sure, or that you haven’t said anything, then that is your starting point.
Not a program.
Not a recognition initiative.
Just a direct, specific, human conversation that says:
I see what you’re doing. I know what it costs you. And it matters.
That conversation is free.
It takes five minutes.
And for a Load Bearer who has been quietly holding everything up — sometimes for years — it can be the difference between staying and going.
The people who hold your organization together deserve to know that someone noticed.
Tell them.
If this message resonated with you, consider sharing it with a colleague or leader in your network who might benefit from a different way of thinking about leadership.
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This work is about helping people show up better—one conversation, one leader, and one workplace at a time.
Thank you for being here each time – I never take for granted the time you take to read me here.
I am passionate about Creating Incredibly Better Workplaces by focusing on the people, relationships, supervision and leadership in today’s workplaces…wherever they may be.
And perhaps I can be of service to you?
