Companies have spent years trying to address employee burnout with resilience programs, time-management strategies and encouragement to set better boundaries.
Metro Detroit leadership researcher and senior executive Natalie H. Luke believes employers may be overlooking an important part of the problem: how responsibility itself gets distributed inside organizations.
Luke calls the phenomenon the Trust Tax — the hidden cost that can develop when competence, commitment, and dependability become reasons to continually give the same people more work, more decisions and more unresolved problems.
“The people organizations trust the most can quietly become the people the organization depends on too much,” Luke says. “Eventually, being good at your job can become the reason you are expected to carry more of it.”
Luke is bringing that conversation to metro Detroit on Oct. 15 at Walsh College in Troy through “Rewrite Your Story,” an unconventional leadership experience combining an afternoon workshop with an evening live comedy show. Luke is presenting the event with Merit Kahn, a professional speaker, comedian, and creator of Optimistic Personality Disorder, using leadership development and comedy to examine the stories and workplace patterns that keep high performers carrying too much.
For ticket information, visit RewriteYourStoryEvent.com.
The workshop will examine workplace patterns Luke has identified through her Trust Tax work, including responsibility accumulation, accountability without corresponding authority, unclear ownership, unresolved problems that repeatedly migrate to dependable employees, and talented people who remain productive while no longer growing.
These patterns can be difficult for organizations to recognize because the employees experiencing them may continue to perform at a high level.
“Burnout doesn’t always begin when someone looks burned out,” Luke says. “Sometimes the warning sign is the person who keeps delivering while the organization gradually builds more and more of its work around that person’s ability to absorb it.”
Luke’s work asks employers to look beyond whether an employee can handle additional responsibility and ask a different question: Should they have to?
The October event also is connected to Luke’s broader Trust Tax Assessment, which examines responsibility patterns and burnout experiences among working professionals. The research is intended to help identify patterns that may develop before burnout becomes obvious to the employee or organization.
For metro Detroit employers, Luke believes the issue has implications beyond employee wellness. When organizations become overly dependent on a small number of highly reliable employees, they can create risks involving retention, leadership development, succession, productivity, and institutional knowledge.
“We’ve spent a lot of time teaching high performers how to become more resilient,” Luke says. “We also need to examine the systems that keep requiring their resilience.”
