There is a weight that comes with seniority which leadership programmes rarely address: the felt sense of being responsible for other people’s livelihoods. Their income, their career, their ability to pay rent and plan a year.
An earlier version of this article described that weight confidently and cited two studies that had nothing to do with it. One was on psychological safety in teams, which concerns how people around a leader behave, not what the leader carries. Both citations were decoration, and they are gone. There is research on exactly this, and it says something more specific than the article was claiming.
The Study That Asked These People Directly
Clair and Dufresne published a qualitative study in Human Relations in 2004 on the people who plan and carry out a downsizing, whom they call downsizing agents. They conducted “in-depth interviews with 40 DAs” about a month after a redundancy programme at a single financial-services company, across levels from CEO and COO down to individual contributors.
What the people who empathised reported is listed plainly: they “expressed sadness, guilt, anger, concern and worried feelings”.
Then the observation that does the most work here. Comparing their participants with people in other emotionally heavy roles, the authors write: “unlike workers who help trauma victims, DAs may feel responsible for causing others’ distress. This could make DAs even more likely to experience negative personal consequences.”
That is the structural difference between this and other hard jobs. A crisis worker arrives after the harm. A senior person deciding a restructuring is the proximate cause of it, and knows the names.
The Reaction Goes the Other Way
An earlier version of this article said the weight shows up as hesitation over hard decisions and as over-communication designed to manage guilt. That was a guess, and the one study that asked these people directly, by Clair and Dufresne, found the opposite direction of travel.
Their finding: “when the work of carrying out a downsizing becomes emotionally taxing, downsizing agents react by cognitively, emotionally, and physically distancing themselves from their roles”. They group three things under distancing: emotional detachment, cognitive normalising, and distancing behaviours.
Normalising is the one worth sitting with, because it sounds like perspective. The authors define it as “framing BSO’s downsizing as an inevitable part of corporate life”, which allowed participants “to appease feelings of personal responsibility or concern for causing harm to others”. One of them put it this way: you chose the business world and this is what you get.
Said in a certain tone, that is wisdom about markets. Said often enough, it is a method for not feeling something.
The limits on this evidence are the authors’ own words: “the research was exploratory”, conducted “at one organization, and concerning one downsizing”, and “only replication and extension of this study can show which responses we found are unique only to BSO”. Forty interviews at one company establishes that these reactions occur and how the people having them describe them. It establishes nothing about how common they are.
Where That Connects to Burnout
This is where the burnout literature earns a place in the article instead of sitting at the top of it.
Maslach and Jackson identified three dimensions of burnout in 1981: emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation, and a reduced sense of personal accomplishment. Depersonalisation is distance. Treating the people affected by your decisions as a category rather than as individuals is one of the three things the measure was built to detect.
Which puts the usual reading of these two literatures in an awkward position. The coping response that makes the job bearable is also one of the markers of the state you are trying not to reach. No study here connects those two things causally, and that connection is not being claimed. It is a reason to notice distancing rather than to be reassured by it.
Worth stating precisely, since burnout is usually described loosely: the World Health Organization lists burn-out in the ICD-11 under code QD85 as an occupational phenomenon, and states that it is not classified as a medical condition.
Who Carries It Harder
An earlier version attributed this to “a high degree of what psychologists call relational attunement”. That term was not looked up and is not used here.
What the research does distinguish is narrower and better evidenced: the participants who reported sadness and guilt were the ones who empathised with the people being let go. That is a difference in response, not a personality type, and the study makes no claim about who tends to have it.
Beyond that, a reading rather than a finding. People who built the thing themselves, and people who remember being on the receiving end of a decision like this, seem to find it heavier. That is offered because it is recognisable, with nothing measured behind it.
Responsibility and Burden Are Not the Same
This distinction survives the corrections, and it is the part of the original article worth keeping.
Responsibility is bounded: you own the decision, you make it as well as the information allows, you carry the outcome. Burden adds something to that, namely the belief that you are personally culpable for every consequence, including the ones you could not influence. The second is not a stronger version of the first. It answers a different question, about what the outcome says about you.
Crocker and Wolfe gave that question a name in Psychological Review in 2001: contingencies of self-worth, the specific domains in which a sense of being worthwhile is staked on how things turn out. In those domains, they write, “people typically have the goal to prove themselves rather than the goal to learn, grow, or improve themselves”. They describe the arrangement as “a trade-off between increased motivation and increased emotional vulnerability”.
Stake your worth on other people being all right, and a redundancy you did not cause and could not avoid still arrives as evidence about your adequacy. The motivation is real. So is the exposure, and the two come together.
An earlier version claimed that most executives carrying this weight have let responsibility collapse into burden. Nothing measured supports a figure like that, and it has been removed.
What Follows From This
Three things, each kept to what the evidence allows.
Watch for normalising rather than for distress. The sentence to notice is the one that makes the harm structural and nobody’s doing. It can be perfectly true and still be doing a different job in the conversation.
Separate what you decided from what you caused. A decision can be correct and still produce harm. Owning the decision is accountability. Owning the whole causal chain behind it is a claim about your own power that does not survive examination.
Do not aim at caring less. The empathising participants in that study were the ones who reported guilt, and they were also presumably the ones treating the affected people as people. Distance solves the feeling by removing what produced it. That is a trade, and it is worth making knowingly instead of by drift.
And if what you are carrying has stopped looking like a question about the job and is affecting how you sleep or function, that belongs with a licensed professional. Nothing here substitutes for one, including the assessment below.
The weight changes shape when the team grows faster than the role does, which is what happens in the player-coach trap.
Where Your Worth Is Currently Resting
If other people being all right is one of the places your own sense of worth is staked, that is worth knowing explicitly. The Executive Identity Profile is a confidential assessment of where your sense of worth currently rests across five dimensions, and which of them is carrying more than it should. It takes about ten minutes, and it opens a conversation rather than closing one. Begin your profile here.
References
- Clair, J. A., & Dufresne, R. L. (2004). Playing the grim reaper: How employees experience carrying out a downsizing. Human Relations, 57(12), 1597–1625.
- Maslach, C., & Jackson, S. E. (1981). The measurement of experienced burnout. Journal of Occupational Behavior, 2(2), 99–113.
- World Health Organization, ICD-11, code QD85, which classifies burn-out as an occupational phenomenon and not as a medical condition.
- Crocker, J., & Wolfe, C. T. (2001). Contingencies of self-worth. Psychological Review, 108, 593–623.
Further Reading
- Emotional Agility by Susan David. On treating your own reactions as information instead of something to override.
- Daring Greatly by Brené Brown. On vulnerability and shame, and what projected invulnerability costs.
- The Fearless Organization by Amy Edmondson. On psychological safety in teams. A different subject from this article, listed because it is the question most leaders turn to next.
Related reading
- The Obsolescence Anxiety: What AI Is Really Threatening in High Achievers
- Quiet Cracking: The Burnout That Still Shows Up to Work
- Impostor Syndrome in Female Executives: Why Women Leaders Doubt Themselves More
If this was worth your time, there is a letter. One short piece a week on identity, self-worth and the arithmetic of senior work. It costs nothing, and leaving takes one click. See what arrives.