Systemic management · Marie-Anne Perrey

The manager who wanted to help too much

Supporting the team, being available, not leaving a colleague to struggle: these behaviours seem to define a thoughtful, caring approach to management. But what happens when, in trying to protect the team and deliver results, a manager starts making up for work that others have not done? A response that works in the short term can quietly redistribute responsibilities and exhaust the very person who wanted to help.

“I can’t just leave them to struggle”

Marc is a project manager in a research laboratory. When he comes for a consultation, he says he is exhausted. He sleeps badly, thinks about work in the evenings and at weekends, struggles to put his computer away, and feels as though he never gets through everything he needs to do in a day.

He leads a team that includes young professionals who are new to his field, while also pursuing his own operational objectives set by his superiors. Projects have to move forward, deadlines have to be met, and results are expected.

Marc describes himself as an attentive, available manager. He cares about maintaining good relationships with his team and does not want to put his colleagues in a difficult position. When a team member does not know how to proceed, he helps. When a task might not be finished on time, he steps in. When someone seems overwhelmed, he takes on some of their work.

“I can’t just leave them to struggle,” he explains.

But one situation is particularly frustrating and exhausting for him.

For several months, Marc has been waiting for a member of his team to complete certain tasks. They are not urgent and do not directly affect day-to-day operations, but they are necessary and clearly fall within this employee’s responsibilities.

Marc regularly reminds him about them. The employee does not dispute that they need to be done. Yet the months go by and nothing happens.

When they discuss it, the employee explains that he has other priorities. In particular, he prefers to spend time helping his colleagues with their laboratory procedures. As he sees it, the tasks Marc has asked for can wait.

Marc reminds him. He explains. He follows up.

And he waits.

Until a familiar solution comes to mind: “I’ll end up doing it myself.”

After all, these tasks have to be done.

In the short term, the solution looks excellent. The work will be finished, Marc will stop chasing his employee, and one more worry will finally disappear from his list.

But what will happen in the relationship?

When each person learns something from the other

There are several possible explanations for this situation that focus on the individuals involved.

Perhaps Marc is not good enough at delegating or setting limits. Perhaps his employee lacks autonomy, diligence, or respect for instructions.

These hypotheses are not necessarily without value. But they share one feature: they look for the cause of the problem inside the individuals.

A systemic approach suggests shifting our attention. It invites us to look at what each person does in response to the other, and how those responses eventually shape the relationship.

Marc’s employee makes choices. He gives priority to certain activities, particularly helping his colleagues, and puts off the tasks his manager asks him to do. So far, making those choices has not prevented him from continuing in this way.

Marc, for his part, makes the request, waits, reminds him, follows up, and eventually considers taking on the task himself.

Each person’s behaviour gradually becomes information for the other.

The employee may learn through experience that some of his manager’s requests can, in practice, be postponed, even when this has never been explicitly agreed. Marc, meanwhile, may learn that when a task has not been done, the surest way to get the result is still to take it on himself.

If Marc ends up doing what he has been asking for over several months, the immediate problem will indeed be solved.

But the relationship will also have learned something.

One person will have learned that it is possible not to do the work. The other, that he may ultimately have to do it.

Watzlawick, Weakland and Fisch (2014) showed how certain “attempted solutions”, seemingly effective or logical, can help maintain a problem when they are repeated.

Here, the loop might be described as follows: a task is not completed; Marc follows up; nothing changes; the need to complete the task grows; Marc eventually makes up for what is missing; the problem disappears; but the distribution of responsibilities that produced it remains.

The question is therefore no longer simply: “Why doesn’t this employee do what he is asked to do?”

Nor is it: “Why does Marc do too much?”

It becomes: how has the relationship come to be organised in such a way that a managerial request can have no effect for months, until the person making it eventually considers carrying it out himself?

Supporting autonomy does not mean giving up on expectations

This situation raises questions about what we mean by caring management.

Marc does not want to put his colleagues in difficulty. This intention strongly influences the way he carries out his role.

But does protecting someone from difficulty always help them?

Research in organisational psychology on autonomy support offers a useful perspective here. Supporting autonomy means neither leaving employees to fend for themselves nor removing expectations of them. It means creating conditions in which they can see themselves as active participants in their work and capable of influencing it.

The meta-analysis by Slemp et al. (2018), covering 83 samples and more than 32,000 people, identifies positive associations between managerial autonomy support, autonomous motivation, and well-being at work.

Research on empowering leadership extends this perspective. Empowering leadership seeks, among other things, to encourage participation in decisions, the sharing of power, and employees’ ability to act for themselves. The meta-analysis by Lee et al. (2018) particularly highlights the role of psychological empowerment and trust in the manager.

But autonomy does not mean that each person decides alone what is or is not worth doing.

This is precisely where Marc’s situation becomes interesting.

His employee already exercises a form of autonomy: he weighs up tasks, sets his priorities, and chooses to spend time helping his colleagues.

The difficulty may therefore not simply be a lack of autonomy.

It also concerns the relationship between autonomy and responsibility.

Being autonomous at work does not mean being released from what one is accountable for. A manager can leave considerable room for manoeuvre in how the work is done while clearly maintaining what remains each person’s responsibility.

Supporting autonomy can therefore mean holding two messages together:

“I recognise your ability to decide how to do your work.”

And:

“This responsibility remains yours.”

Structure and autonomy are then no longer opposites. A clear framework can become what makes autonomy possible.

Can caring get in the way of setting a clear framework?

For Marc, however, holding this position is not easy.

Asking someone to account for their work can make him uncomfortable.

Maintaining an expectation when someone explains that they have good reasons not to meet it can make him feel rigid.

Refusing to take over a task when he knows perfectly well how to do it can seem unhelpful.

And when caring for others is central to the way we manage, the boundary between “not leaving someone to struggle” and “taking on what belongs to them” can gradually become blurred.

Yet setting a clear framework is not necessarily the opposite of caring.

The difficulty may even lie in the reverse: by continually shielding someone from the consequences of what they do not do, a manager may end up taking away some of their responsibility.

The paradox then becomes clear.

The more seriously Marc takes his responsibilities as a manager, the more he risks, by consistently making up for others, allowing them to take their own responsibilities less seriously.

This obviously does not mean that a manager should deliberately let the team fail.

It means noticing the point at which help changes its function.

Am I giving the other person the means to act? Or am I acting in their place?

In the first case, the manager is providing support. In the second, he is compensating for what is missing.

And repeatedly compensating is never neutral for the system.

The system rewards what exhausts people

One essential difficulty remains: Marc does not compensate so much solely because he wants to be caring.

He, too, is accountable.

Projects have to move forward. Deadlines exist. His superiors expect results. His own objectives as a project manager remain, whether or not his team does what is expected.

Developing autonomy takes time.

Letting someone work things out takes time.

Returning to a responsibility that has not been fulfilled takes time.

Setting a framework, following through on it, and accepting disagreement take time.

Doing it oneself can sometimes be much quicker.

The organisational system can therefore reward, in the short term, precisely the behaviour that undermines the manager in the long term.

Marc compensates, so the project moves forward.

Because the project moves forward, the difficulties remain relatively invisible.

Because they remain relatively invisible, the organisation does not necessarily have a reason to question how workload or responsibilities are distributed.

And because nothing changes, Marc continues to compensate.

What initially looked like a personal characteristic — “he does too much” — then takes on another dimension.

His overinvestment serves a function: it allows the system to keep working.

When the person absorbing the strain becomes exhausted

Work psychology helps shed light on the cost of this way of regulating the system.

In conservation of resources theory, Hobfoll (1989) proposes understanding stress in terms of the resources people seek to acquire, preserve, and protect. The threat or loss of those resources contributes to the stress process.

Marc continually draws on his own resources to absorb the system’s difficulties: his time, attention, energy, and cognitive and emotional availability.

Each intervention seems minor.

A file taken over here.

A task finished there.

An extra hour to catch up on a delay.

A problem solved in the evening because doing it himself will be quicker than returning to it yet again.

But the accumulation matters.

The Job Demands-Resources model also helps us understand the risk of exhaustion through the relationship between the demands a person faces and the resources available to meet them (Bakker & Demerouti, 2007).

For Marc, one thing makes the trap particularly hard to spot: his strategy produces results.

Projects move forward.

Problems are solved.

The team can keep functioning.

Marc is not becoming exhausted because his strategy fails. He may be becoming exhausted precisely because it works.

It keeps the system going.

Until the person absorbing its difficulties can no longer keep going himself.

Giving back to each person what belongs to them

What would happen if Marc stopped compensating?

The question is deliberately uncomfortable.

Perhaps some tasks really would remain unfinished.

Perhaps a delay would become visible.

Perhaps the employee would have to be asked to choose between spontaneously helping colleagues and the duties for which he is directly responsible.

Perhaps a disagreement would emerge.

Perhaps the team’s actual workload, its resources, or the priorities set by the organisation would also have to be questioned.

But these difficulties already exist.

Marc’s compensating simply allows some of them to remain invisible.

Stopping doing things in someone else’s place does not necessarily mean disengaging.

On the contrary, it can allow the difficulty to be returned to where it can be addressed.

To the employee, what falls within their responsibility.

To the manager, the responsibility for defining priorities, setting the framework, and following up on whether it is respected.

To the organisation, any contradictions between objectives, resources, and the work that can realistically be done.

A systemic approach thus invites us to resist two overly simple explanations: that of a manager who does not know how to delegate, and that of employees who lack autonomy.

Between the two lies a system of relationships, expectations, constraints, and responses that influence one another.

Caring management may therefore not always mean easing someone’s burden.

It can also mean accepting that the other person will encounter a difficulty, maintaining an expectation despite the discomfort it creates, and not systematically taking over what has not been done.

In other words, helping does not necessarily mean carrying more.

Sometimes, helping means giving back to each person what belongs to them.