4 Ways to Stop Burning Out Our Best People

October 24, 2026

Read Time - 4 minutes

“Soon helpful employees become institutional bottlenecks: Work doesn't progress until they've weighed in.”

~Rob Cross, Reb Rebele, and Adam Grant, “Collaborative Overload,” Harvard Business Review (2016)

When I worked on faculty committee assignments, I tried to weigh two things: each person's workload, and the skills and perspective they would bring. To complicate matters, I often received requests from the designated committee chair, or from other members of the committee, to add certain people. They tended to be the same small group of faculty every year: the ones who were reliable, easy to get along with, or even fun to work with. Everyone wanted them on their committee, and it was a challenge to keep their load down.

That pattern is more common than I realized. When Rob Cross, Reb Rebele, and Adam Grant studied collaboration in more than 300 organizations, they found that in most cases, 20 to 35 percent of the most valuable collaborative work came from just 3 to 5 percent of employees. In higher ed, Cynthia Guarino and Victor Borden found that women faculty do significantly more service than men, even after accounting for rank, race, and field. Most of that gap came from service inside the university: the department and campus committees we assign.

Over time, the reasonable choice to hand a task to the person we can count on becomes the way the unit runs.

Leadership Takeaway

Part of this is about us. Asking for someone's time and energy is uncomfortable. Going to a willing colleague takes one email. Going to a reluctant one is often more complicated. So we choose the path with the least friction.

That path runs through our best people. They say yes, so we ask again, and then again. Before long, the colleagues we depend on most become the ones we're wearing down. Some burn out. Some start quietly looking for a job somewhere else (I once coached a high performer who was run down by the workload and wanted time to pick up his kids from school and be with his family. He kept looking until he found a new position.)

The rest of the department pays for it, too. Colleagues who are never asked don't get the chance to contribute. They can become disconnected and lose a sense of ownership over what happens in the unit. And the people who've learned to do less see that they can get away with it.

We're the ones who hand out the work, so we're fortunate to be in a position to change how it gets shared. Here are four ways to do that:

Four Ways to Reset the Balance

1. Map the load where everyone can see it. List every committee, program, and standing responsibility in the unit. Add the informal work that never shows up on a roster: mentoring new faculty, covering classes, answering the dean's last-minute requests. Put a name next to each one. As a starting point, the American Council on Education's Equity-Minded Faculty Workloads report by KerryAnn O'Meara and colleagues includes sample workload dashboards and a service audit we can adapt. No list will make the work perfectly equal, but it makes the unseen work visible, and that's the first step.

2. Be curious about why the same people keep getting asked. Once the map is in front of us, ask why the work keeps going to the same few people. Think back to those committee chairs who request the same colleagues every year. Ask the chair what they need that person for. It might be a specific skill, like writing the final report, or simply knowing the work will get done. Then we can find someone else who can provide it, or pair the requested colleague with someone who can learn it. Ask the overloaded colleague, too: “What keeps sending this work to you?” The answer often points to something we can fix, such as an unclear role, a missing process, or a colleague who has never been asked.

3. Make the expectation clear before it becomes a complaint. Some colleagues aren't stepping up because no one has told them what that looks like. Start with the committees. Give each one a short written charge: its purpose, what it needs to deliver, the deadlines, and how often it meets. If it helps, here's my simple committee charge template to start from. When people can see the timeline and deliverables, they know what they're agreeing to. A clear request is much easier to say yes to than a vague hope.

4. Ask your most dependable people to teach the work. For the colleagues who carry the most, change the assignment. Instead of asking them to chair the committee again, ask them to co-chair with someone new so we can plan the handoff the following year. That protects their time, keeps the work in good hands, and gives them credit for growing someone else.

One caution: As we spread the work out, we may find that some of our most dependable colleagues don't want to give it up. Being the one who always comes through has become part of who they are, and the work gives them recognition, influence, or the sense of being needed. That deserves our respect. Still, a department that depends on one person has no backup when that person gets sick, retires, or changes jobs. Start by asking what they'd miss about the work, and honor that in whatever comes next. Then ask them to help build a backup: write down how it's done, train a second person, and make it something the unit owns together.

Try This Before Friday

Pull up your unit's committee and service list. Highlight every name that appears three or more times. Then make a second list of the people who appear once or not at all.

Pick one name from each list and schedule two 15-minute conversations for next week. Use the first to thank that person and take one thing off their plate. Use the second to ask for something specific.

The Bottom Line

There's an old joke that the reward for work well done is more work. It gets a knowing laugh because we've probably experienced it ourselves at some point. Now we're the ones deciding who gets asked next, and that's a real opportunity: we can give our best people some room to breathe and give someone else the chance to grow.

Each of those choices is small, but over time they add up. They build a unit where people take ownership of the work, and where the list of people we can count on keeps getting longer.

And that's a much better reward for work well done.

🗓️ Leaning on the same few people has one more cost. When the same five people carry every initiative, we only hear their ideas. On Tuesday, October 27, at noon Central, I'm hosting a free live session on drawing out a whole team's best thinking, with a live brainstorm on a real campus challenge. Register here.