Heather (a pseudonym) was a senior leader at her firm, one level below the C-suite. And the C-suite had some really big personalities.
Heather was excellent at reading those personalities. She understood them, anticipated what they needed and often served as the go-between among these higher-ups, playing emotional regulator for them independently and as a group.
These roles made her indispensable, but they were not actually part of her job and they took up a lot of her time. The whole team functioned much better because she was doing these things. But it was never part of her performance review and never put toward her promotion, and in the end, it kept her stuck without credit for the work.
I see versions of this all the time in my work with women leaders—women who are “easy to work with” because they are doing a second, usually unrecognized and uncompensated, job.
Another classic example was Lucy (also a pseudonym), the only woman in leadership at her startup, who essentially became the workplace therapist for the male CEO. Every time there was a problem, whether interpersonal, product or logistical, she would get called in. While she liked helping and solving these problems, and was quite skilled at doing so, it didn’t contribute to her getting promoted. Instead, it started to interfere with her actual work and her home life.
We are getting better at talking about invisible labor at home and in caregiving. We understand that noticing, anticipating, smoothing, and remembering are real work and make everything else possible. Yet we are less likely to recognize how the same pattern plays out at work. We don’t always see where the cognitive and emotional labor of anticipating, translating, mentoring, preventing, regulating, and more makes everyone else’s visible contribution possible.
Invisible work at work
Recent research by Colleen Ammerman and Deepa Purushothaman at Harvard Business School found that more than 80% of women managers surveyed spent at least 30% of their workweek on caring tasks, and nearly 60% said that emotional labor had increased in the past year.
But emotional labor is only one piece of this invisible work. There is also the mental load: catching errors, anticipating hurdles, figuring out who needs what, and keeping things running behind the scenes without credit.
In my book Ambitious Mother, I talk about three specific patterns at play that help keep women stuck here: perfectionism, people-pleasing, and pretending. These patterns are shaped by gender socialization, and women are often rewarded for them, especially early on.
Women and girls are socialized to be perfect, to not make mistakes, to chase achievement and the A-plus over risk-taking. They are taught to put everybody else’s needs first while ignoring their own, and to do it all with a smile.
At work, perfectionism is noticing the detail that got missed and fixing it before anybody else notices. It’s stepping in when the presentation isn’t quite up to snuff and smoothing all the details. Nobody sees you do it, and someone else might get credit for the finished product.
People-pleasing is saying yes to everything that is asked of you and not pushing back, even if there’s a personal cost. In school, this girl might be called a “pleasure to have in class:” She is good at doing what she is told to do, anticipating what’s needed, and doing it without complaining. These patterns get us the grades, and then follow us into work.
Pretending means we’re not letting other people see us struggle. That can be rewarded at work. But it also hides all of the time, skill, and labor that went into making everything look easy.
We end up covering up other people’s mistakes, making everybody else feel good, and not letting anyone else in on how much work it causes us.
And this is where the issue becomes bigger than any one woman’s perfectionism or people-pleasing. Workplaces reward these behaviors, at least initially. These women are seen as dependable, calm and helpful. They make it look easy. And their reward for that competence is often that people both ignore it and ignore any limits to their capacity.
Historically, when we talk to women about these patterns, we tend to talk about them in silos and call them a woman’s individual problem to fix. We tell women to lower their standards, set better boundaries, or stop caring so much about what other people think.
None of that advice is necessarily wrong. Sometimes we do need to tolerate mistakes and recognize that 80% is enough. We need boundaries around our time.
But individual advice only gets us so far when workplaces are rewarding the very behaviors we’re telling women to change, and not recognizing the benefits to the organization.
When useful work isn’t promotable work (for women)
Being seen as helpful doesn’t necessarily translate into being seen as a leader for women. Shelley Correll, an organizational behavior professor at Stanford, and her colleagues studied performance reviews at a Fortune 500 technology company. Women were more likely than men to be seen as communal, including being helpful and considerate, but being seen as communal didn’t lead to the highest performance ratings.
Research on “office housework” found a similar disconnect. Women did more of this work overall, particularly social maintenance work, and while the relationship between doing office housework and promotion was significant for men, it was not for women.
Meanwhile, Linda Babcock, an economics professor at Carnegie Mellon, and her colleagues found that women were more likely than men to volunteer for tasks with low promotability. They were also more likely to be asked to do them and more likely to say yes when asked.
For a junior employee, maybe this is taking notes in a meeting, helping a new employee get settled, or being on a million committees. At senior levels, it can look more sophisticated: stabilizing a dysfunctional team, mentoring employees, keeping a CEO functional, or managing complicated relationships across an organization.
And sometimes the work becomes visible only when someone else gets credit for it.
One of my clients spent two years essentially doing two jobs. Alongside her formal leadership role, she developed an entirely new AI program for her organization. Eventually, leadership realized it was too much work for one person. So they took the artificial intelligence work off her plate, promoted one of her direct reports, a man she had mentored, to be her peer, and gave him the role she had created.
She had expected all of this additional work to either lead to her own promotion or become a role underneath her, with credit for the fact that she had essentially created it. But instead of getting a promotion for all the work she did, she got a new peer.
Not all invisible work is relational. It can also be catching errors, anticipating problems, or doing the work behind the work. That said, much of what I see women doing is relational—and we don’t always value relational work.
Relational work is leadership work
The irony is that much of this invisible work is incredibly valuable.
As a psychologist, I know that relational work is at the heart of how we perform. We do not work in independent silos. We work together as teams, and interpersonal relationships can be a valuable tool for productivity. Research from Harvard Business School backs this up. Jorge Tamayo and colleagues analyzed 88 million transactions across 62 restaurants and found that rapport between managers and employees affected training, flexibility, productivity and sales. Women managers were particularly effective at developing rapport in mixed-gender teams.
Organizations depend on relational work while continuing to measure what is highly visible: revenue, public wins, exposure, ownership of major projects.
In psychology, we talk about construct validity: Are you measuring what you think you’re measuring?
When it comes to leadership, I’m not sure workplaces always are.
A second issue is this: Sometimes the result is that something bad didn’t happen. With Heather, there isn’t a blowup between the CEO and COO. They avoid a fight, but no one gives her credit for having avoided it. Everything just appears to be going smoothly. Her organization wasn’t tracking her work because the outcome was prevention rather than cure.
Make the invisible visible
Yet the answer here is not that women should become less empathic or collaborative, make themselves harder to work with, or stop doing relational work. This work matters.
Instead, organizations have to get better at seeing it. There are four specific ways they can do that:
- Identify where the labor is happening. Who is mentoring employees, managing relationships across teams, mediating conflict or doing the work behind the work? How much time does it take?
- Define and assign it. Maybe some of this work gets rotated. Maybe it becomes part of someone’s actual role. Maybe it gets distributed among multiple roles. Sometimes we may discover that what someone has been doing informally is an entire job. If the work matters enough that somebody needs to do it, give that person credit and authority to do it.
- Make performance reviews connect relational labor to outcomes. Who was retained? What conflict didn’t happen? Who is collaborating better? What team navigated change and came out on the other side?
- Protect people’s time. When women become indispensable in this way, they lose access to time for strategic thinking, recovery, and planning. The organization loses access to that as well.
Being “so easy to work with” can feel like a compliment. But sometimes it means a woman is doing an enormous amount of work that nobody has learned to see.
Instead of telling women to be harder to work with or to just say no, organizations need to stop assuming they will always say yes, and start recognizing the invisible work that is holding everyone else together.
