When the Job Becomes Managing Your Manager

Why emotional labour isn’t in the job description—and what happens when we stop pretending it is

Managing someone else’s emotions was never part of the job.

You weren’t hired to soothe mood swings, tiptoe around egos, or mop up behind volatile leadership. You were hired to do meaningful work. But in too many values-led organisations, the emotional debris of mismanagement seeps into the job until it becomes standard. Quiet. Undocumented. Draining.

Fawning isn’t a soft skill. It’s a survival strategy.

When the cost of honesty feels higher than the cost of appeasing, people adapt. They go quiet. They start performing stability so the person with the title doesn’t unravel. That’s not professionalism. That’s self-protection wrapped in diplomacy.

I’ve been there.

In one role, I spent more time managing the emotional chaos of the person I reported to than delivering the work I was hired to do. My remit was strategy & leadership. What I delivered was crisis cushioning.

When I looked to the board for support, there was nothing.

Trustees in name only. Disengaged, absent, complicit through silence. Even when the Chair’s behaviour was erratic, no one stepped in.

She once said, “They’re only here because it’s required.”
It wasn’t a throwaway comment. It was the operating culture.

Leadership by ego.

Governance by absence.

Workplace by workaround.

It affected the work. It affected the team. It affected me.

There’s an unspoken rule in too many mission-driven spaces: If you care enough about the cause, you’ll tolerate the dysfunction That staying is resilience. That silence is maturity.

But that’s a lie.

Because the truth is: nothing undermines impact faster than emotional mismanagement at the top. It doesn’t matter how noble the mission is if your people are walking on eggshells to keep the machine moving.

And this isn't unique to the third sector.

I hear the same story from people in education, healthcare, philanthropy, social enterprise, tech, even local government. Emotional labour is invisible, unbudgeted, and disproportionately expected of those most emotionally literate—usually women, often those from marginalised backgrounds, almost always those lower in the hierarchy.

So how do we shift this?

We treat emotional regulation as a core leadership skill—not a personality trait, but a responsibility. We stop promoting based on charisma or comfort and start evaluating how leaders make others feel in rooms they supposedly lead.

Boards stop sleepwalking. They ask the hard questions: – What do we know about the culture beneath the delivery metrics? – Are we hearing honest feedback—or what people think we want to hear? – Who’s thriving here, and who’s just surviving?

We stop plastering over broken systems with mindfulness posters and “resilience” webinars. We deal with the cause, not the consequence.

And when emotional harm happens, we act. Promptly. Transparently. With real consequences. Emotional safety shouldn’t depend on who’s in the room. It should be built into the structure.

That role changed me.

It clarified that I wasn’t the problem. But I was in a system that confused coping for commitment and rewarded emotional suppression with vague praise about professionalism.

You weren’t hired to carry someone else’s chaos on your back.

You were hired to lead. To create. To change things.

So if you’ve ever caught yourself spending your best energy managing dysfunction instead of making a difference—add that to the list of things you’ll never tolerate again.

Because dignity isn’t a perk of good leadership. It’s the baseline.

And if it isn’t safe to tell the truth in your workplace, then it isn’t safe to stay.