Remember The Jeffersons?
George and Weezy were “movin’ on up” to that deluxe apartment in the sky. That’s how moving up has always been sold to us. Work hard. Prove yourself. Take on more responsibility. Get the promotion. Become the boss.
Then you arrive, and somewhere between the bigger title and the better office, you discover there was apparently another verse to the song. Nobody mentioned that everybody’s problems would eventually make their way upstairs too.
That’s worth laughing about because, for many of us, moving up was the goal. We wanted the opportunity. We worked for it. We wanted a seat at the table, the ability to make decisions, more influence over the work and perhaps the chance to do things differently once we were finally in a position to do so.
There is a lot that’s good about being the boss. But there is a cost too, and for some of us, that cost turned out to be more than we imagined.
Not simply longer hours or more work. Those were fairly predictable. It’s the other things: being the person who has to make the decision when none of the choices are particularly good; caring about someone and still having to hold them accountable; knowing something you can’t share yet; listening to everyone’s frustration when you’re frustrated too; having people assume you have the answer when sometimes you’re standing there thinking, I was hoping somebody else knew.
And then there is the responsibility that seems to multiply simply because you’ve proven you can handle it.
That’s the part I want us to take another look at. Not because moving up was a mistake. Not because leadership isn’t worth it. And certainly not because we’re looking for a way to stop being responsible.
Maybe we just need to look at what the role actually costs us, which costs truly belong to leadership, and which ones we’ve been paying simply because nobody—including us—ever stopped to question them.
When Everybody Needs Something From You
Leadership changes the direction in which things travel. Questions come toward you. Decisions come toward you. Problems come toward you. Someone needs approval, someone else needs clarity, and two people disagree and somehow you now own that too.
Meanwhile, you still have your own work to do.
What makes this tricky is that being needed can feel good. There is satisfaction in knowing people trust your judgment. There is meaning in helping someone grow or guiding a team through something difficult. Many of us became leaders precisely because we wanted to have an impact.
The issue isn’t caring too much. It’s forgetting that all of that caring is coming from somewhere.
You have a finite amount of attention, patience and energy just like everyone you lead. A title doesn’t change that. Neither does a salary. You can be grateful for the opportunity and tired at the same time.
Sometimes the person who needs a little consideration from the boss is the boss.
Capable People Have a Particular Problem
Once people discover that you can handle things, they tend to remember. A project starts wobbling and someone asks you to take a look. Someone isn’t sure what to do and wants your opinion. A deadline is approaching, something has gone sideways, or there is simply a gap between what needs to happen and who seems prepared to make it happen. Somehow, capable people have a way of finding themselves standing in that gap.
And sometimes nobody even has to ask. You see the problem and pick it up yourself.
That can make perfect sense in the moment. If doing something yourself will take fifteen minutes while teaching someone else might take an hour, fifteen minutes feels like the obvious choice. So you handle it. The next time it comes up, you handle it again. Six months later, you discover that you apparently have a new responsibility nobody remembers assigning to you—including you.
There are times when stepping in is exactly what leadership requires. The problem comes when stepping in becomes the way everything gets done. If you’re always the person preventing every ball from hitting the floor, the people around you may have fewer opportunities to learn how to catch. Meanwhile, you become so accustomed to carrying the extra weight that it can stop feeling extra at all.
That’s one of the hidden costs of being capable. Competence attracts responsibility, but not every responsibility that finds you necessarily belongs to you.
What Is Actually Yours?
This is where responsibility gets interesting.
Being the boss means some things really are yours. You make decisions, set expectations and address performance. You take responsibility for outcomes, including some you cannot personally control. But being responsible for the work does not automatically make you responsible for everything surrounding it.
You may need to have a difficult conversation without taking responsibility for making sure the other person feels good about what you had to say. Developing someone may require more of your time for a while, but development should eventually increase that person’s ability to carry the work rather than permanently transferring the work to you. And providing direction to a team doesn’t necessarily mean becoming the person who makes every decision for everyone on it.
These distinctions can be surprisingly difficult to see when you’re inside the role, particularly when being dependable has become part of how you understand yourself. If you’re accustomed to being the person who can handle things, carrying one more thing may feel more natural than asking whether you should be carrying it at all.
That’s one of the reasons I created the Responsibility Factor™. It gives us a way to look more closely at how we carry responsibility—not simply how much responsibility happens to be sitting on our plate.
Research on occupational well-being gives us another way to understand what may be happening. The Job Demands-Resources model, for example, looks at the relationship between what work continually requires from us and the resources available to help us meet those demands. High demands aren’t automatically harmful, but sustained demands without adequate resources can contribute to exhaustion and other negative outcomes (Bakker & Demerouti, 2007).
For the person who is accustomed to being capable, though, there is an even simpler question worth asking. Instead of automatically wondering, Can I handle this?, try asking, Is this actually mine to carry?
You probably can handle it.
That was never really the question.
Taking Care of Yourself Is Part of the Job Too
We tend to talk about caring for ourselves as though it happens after the important work is finished. We’ll rest when the project is over, recover after everyone gets through the crisis, and finally take care of ourselves once the team has everything it needs.
The problem is that leadership has an impressive ability to produce another important thing before the current important thing ends. Eventually, “when things settle down” becomes a date that never quite makes it onto the calendar.
This isn’t an argument for turning leadership into a spa day. Sometimes the work is hard. Some weeks really do require more from us. There will be emergencies, deadlines, difficult decisions and seasons when something important needs more of our attention than we would ordinarily want to give it.
But if you’re leading people, your condition affects more than you.
Sleep is a good example. Research on sleep deprivation has found effects on attention, judgment, decision-making and other aspects of cognitive performance (Killgore, 2010). You don’t need to know the research to recognize the experience. Most of us already know we are not necessarily our most patient, thoughtful or nuanced selves after too little sleep and too many demands.
The same principle applies more broadly. When every minute is spoken for, there is less room to think. When you’re constantly reacting, it becomes harder to notice what’s changing around you. When you haven’t recovered from the last difficult thing, the next difficult thing can feel heavier than it otherwise might.
Taking care of yourself, then, isn’t something separate from taking care of the people you lead and serve. It helps make that leadership possible.
What that looks like doesn’t need to become another elaborate wellness plan. It might mean protecting sleep more seriously, moving your body, taking a real day off or eating lunch somewhere other than over your keyboard. It might mean finally seeing your doctor about something you’ve been ignoring, protecting time to think, or having people outside the organization with whom you can be completely honest.
Sometimes it may simply mean admitting that something has become too much before your body or your attitude announces it for you.
None of that makes you less committed. It makes you human, which you were before the title and remain afterward.
Maybe We Should Look at the Bill
Maybe nobody sold us a lie about moving on up. Maybe they just showed us the apartment before they showed us the maintenance fees.
There is plenty to love upstairs. There is the opportunity to influence things that matter, open doors and build something. You may get to develop people and watch them become better than they thought they could be. You can make decisions that improve someone’s experience, serve people well and create change that may outlast your time in the role.
Those are real privileges, and the responsibilities that come with them are real too.
The goal isn’t to eliminate the cost of leadership. Some of it comes with choosing to lead. The opportunity is to notice what we’re paying, decide which costs genuinely belong to the role and stop automatically picking up every expense that appears.
That matters because chronic workplace stress is not simply a personal inconvenience. Burnout research has consistently pointed toward the interaction between people and their working conditions, including factors such as workload, control, reward, community, fairness and values (Maslach & Leiter, 2016). Sometimes the answer really is that we need to change something about how we are working. Sometimes something about the work itself needs to change. Often, there is a little of both.
For leaders, that makes the conversation especially interesting because we may have some ability to influence the conditions around us while also examining the way we personally carry responsibility within them.
And somewhere in that accounting, we need to put ourselves back on the list of people we’re responsible for.
Not above everyone else or instead of everyone else. Alongside them.
Because the people we lead and serve don’t only need us willing to work hard for them. They need us able to think clearly, listen well, make thoughtful decisions, remain curious, recover from difficult seasons and keep enough of ourselves intact to continue showing up.
George and Weezy can keep the deluxe apartment.
For the rest of us, moving on up may simply require remembering to take care of the person who made the climb too.
References
Bakker, A. B., & Demerouti, E. (2007). The Job Demands-Resources model: State of the art. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 22(3), 309–328.
Killgore, W. D. S. (2010). Effects of sleep deprivation on cognition. Progress in Brain Research, 185, 105–129.
Maslach, C., & Leiter, M. P. (2016). Understanding the burnout experience: Recent research and its implications for psychiatry. World Psychiatry, 15(2), 103–111.
Sources reviewed: August 17, 2026.