Saturated Sponge

Pressure: Some strain only shows up in the people carrying it.

There is a particular kind of tiredness that comes from being the only person holding two opposing forces together. On one side is what the business needs. A competitor moves, the market shifts, a customer commitment comes due. On the other is what the people, the tools, and the current state of the system can actually produce. Neither side is wrong, and you are standing in the gap.

In most organizations, leaders are the ones who close it. Take the force in, make sense of it, hand the team a version they can act on. That is much of the work, but we often underestimate how much work it really is.

I spent a year at the top of a large version of this. A competitor announced something we did not have, the market changed complexion in a week, and in response we had committed to more than our resources could reasonably produce. Closing that distance became my week, every week. Which initiative to protect and which to let slip. What to say to investors. What to say to the board. How to keep the teams on the work in front of them and off what they could not control. Partway through, due to additional business headwinds, I paused hiring, right at the point the team most needed help.

I was not carrying the hardest part. Leaders throughout the organization ran the programs with far less room to move than I had. When I decided what could flex, they found out whether it actually could. When I passed a date down, they stood in front of a team and made it make sense.

Each week asked for one more week, and one more surge seemed manageable. That is how it ran for nine months. We met ninety-six percent of our delivery goals, and the reviews were good.

That is the story the year told. But here is what I got wrong. I watched the same numbers the board watched, they kept looking fine, and I did not ask hard enough what producing them cost the people producing them. They were running on fumes. A couple of people told me afterward, later than I would have wanted, that the organization had never learned to prioritize well, and that it made the year harder than it needed to be.

A leader in this kind of position works the way a sponge does. It takes what is on the surface and keeps it inside itself, and it can do that because it has room. The counter gets dry because the sponge gets wet, which means the absorbing is not a side effect of the job. It is the job.

The counter gets dry because the sponge gets wet, which means the absorbing is not a side effect of the job. It is the job.

But a sponge has only so much room. When it runs out, nothing announces it. No sound. No change in shape. Water stops going in and starts going straight back out, and you find out by wiping and watching the spill spread instead of disappear. A saturated sponge does not fail loudly. It stops buffering, and whatever it was supposed to pick up goes back where it came from.

Which is why the useful question about a sponge is not how much it has held. It is how much room is left. Sponges are not evaluated by how much water they hold. They are evaluated by how well they clean up messes.

Pattern: A gap left unresolved gets resolved by whoever is standing in it.

Identify the Pattern

Many times, what is being asked and what is possible roughly agree, and the position is unremarkable. But when the two stop agreeing, the gap does not close itself. It gets closed by whoever is standing in it, one decision at a time, usually without anyone having decided that this was their job. These disagreements rarely have an author, either. Sometimes it forms out of people each advocating well for what they are responsible for, with the sum sitting outside all of their sight lines. That is what makes it durable. There is often no decision to reverse and no obvious person to persuade.

There is a name for that position. Aldrich and Herker called it a boundary role, and described it as existing to process information and to buffer the organization from outside influence.^[1] The absorbing is the function. What an org chart calls a management layer is, where two sets of expectations fail to meet, a layer that holds them apart so the rest of the organization can keep working. There is no gauge on that layer. What an organization has instead is output, and output is the one thing the layer exists to protect.

It is not only a work position. The eldest sibling coordinating a parent’s care stands between what the doctors advise, what the parent wants, and what the other siblings are certain should happen. So does the teacher between what the district requires and what this year’s classroom can do. Wherever someone stands between people who expect and people who deliver, the shape is the same.

The research splits in a way that took me a while to accept:

• Role conflict shows up reliably in the person. Tension, anxiety, lower satisfaction, more thinking about leaving, a finding that goes back to Kahn and his colleagues in 1964 and has held since.^[2]

• Role conflict shows up barely at all in the work. Pooled across decades of studies, the correlation between role conflict and job performance comes out at −.07, effectively nothing.^[3]

Those two results only look contradictory until you have lived a year like the one I told you about. The output held because someone paid for it privately. The organization is measuring the cleanup, and the cleanup looks fine, but the people are paying the price.

Which means the correction has to come from inside the position, or from the people beside it. A dashboard will not flag it, and the people around the table have little reason to ask, because from where they sit the plan is working. That includes the person running the place. I know, because I was that person.

There is a second cost, and it does not land on you. Absorbing turns a decision into a private act. The people around you see what came out of it without seeing what went into it: a date that moves, one program protected while theirs slips, two roles that stop being open. The results are in plain view. The reasoning is inside you. People do not leave that gap empty. They experience an absence, and they fill it, often with something worse than the truth. An unexplained pattern gets explained anyway. Just not by you.

The tell is not exhaustion, which arrives late and has too many possible causes to be useful. It is not the translating either, since shaping the message for what each room can act on is the job working correctly. The tell is repetition. Look at what you decided this week and ask how much of it you also decided last week. A decision made once is a decision. The same decision made week after week is a gap you are standing in.

Reframe the Mindset

Two readings get in the way, and they fail in opposite directions.

The first is that the strain means you are not good enough for the job. This is the most common and the most expensive, because the position is built to produce it. A gap between what is asked and what is possible produces tension in whoever holds it. Change the person and the tension stays. And you are usually not the only one holding it. Several people are often doing the same reconciliation from different seats, and they have not compared notes.

The second is the opposite: that because the strain is structural, it is permanent, and the remaining work is to get better at carrying it. Absorbing is useful and often exactly right. Someone who holds ambiguity steady while a decision gets made by whoever owns it is doing real work that deserves more credit than it gets. The problem was not the absorbing. It was absorbing with no end date and a lack of support from others. It’s a difficult job to be in the middle.

Transform the Tension

Three moves. None requires the contradiction to be resolved, which matters, because most of the time it will not be.

Name the trade-offs specifically, then say what decision they add up to. “We are stretched” is a feeling, and feelings get absorbed. Trade-offs get decided. Say what gets slower if this gets faster, what gets thinner if this gets covered, and roughly by how much. It is rarely two clean options, and presenting it as two makes you sound naive to the people who know the terrain. Lay out the real shape, uncertainty included, then do the harder half: name the decision the trade-offs are actually asking for, and who you think owns it. If you lead leaders, this is the thing to teach them, because most people can feel a tension long before they can describe it, and an undescribed tension has nowhere to go but into the person feeling it.

Connect with others who are absorbing organizational tension. Role conflict isolates, because from the inside it often presents as personal inadequacy rather than as a property of a seat. One conversation with someone standing in the same place corrects more than anything else available, and it takes about ten minutes. If you are the one people report to, you go first, because the person below you is unlikely to raise it while the numbers look good.

Put an end date on the absorbing. Not on the contradiction, which you do not control, but on how long you will keep holding it before you escalate differently or change what you are protecting. Absorbing for a defined stretch is a plan. Absorbing with no end date is an arrangement you likely didn’t sign up for.

Shift: What gap am I closing by hand, a decision at a time, that has not actually been decided?

Reflection (Questions to Ponder)

• What did I decide this week that I also decided last week, and what is keeping it from being settled?
• If I stopped closing this gap tomorrow, what would become visible, and to whom?
• Who else is closing the same gap from a different seat, and when did I last check?

Connection (Questions to Discuss)

• What are we currently treating as a temporary surge, and how long has it been temporary?
• Who here is absorbing a contradiction on the rest of our behalf, and have we ever said so out loud?
• What is the real gap between what we have committed to and what we can do with the people and hours we have, and who owns that decision?

Subtraction (Things to Stop)

• Stop shrinking the gap to fit the mood of the room. Deciding how much detail a room can act on is judgment. Changing the size of the number so the conversation goes easier is a different act, and only one of the two survives being written down.
• Stop reporting strain upward as context. Context gets absorbed. Named trade-offs with a decision attached becomes something a person can act on.
• Stop reading a good number as an answer to a question about how much people are absorbing. It reports on the work.

Action (Things to Try)

• This week, write the gap down in one sentence with the tradeoffs it requires. Say that sentence, unchanged, in the next two conversations where it is relevant. You might be surprised how simply naming gaps and tradeoffs brings clarity to the people absorbing the work.
• Take one tension you have been carrying and write out the trade-offs underneath it, including the parts you are unsure of. Then write the sentence that starts “the decision this is asking for is.” If you cannot finish that sentence, you have found why it has stayed with you.
• Find one person in a comparable position and ask them two questions: what are you currently holding that was not assigned to you? And if there was one thing that would fundamentally change how it feels to hold this tension, what would it be?

Looking back on those nine months, I would not change the absorbing. It was the job, and the work got where it needed to go. What I would change is how little of it any of us could see in each other. The position was going to produce the pressure either way. The choice I did not know I had was whether to stand in it deliberately, with a few people who knew what I was holding and could tell me when my read of it had started to drift. That is available whether or not anybody reports to you, and in positions like these it may be the most grounded thing we can do.