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Everyone in every workplace has a version of this person, no matter the size or nature of their team. You can name this person in your organisation right off the bat as soon as I say "who": the person with an open time slot on their calendar for the conversations that do not fit into anyone else's schedule; the person whose presence in a tough spot immediately changes the atmosphere in the room before he/she says a word; the person who seems to have a sixth sense as to when someone needs something before they realise it for themselves. This person isn't necessarily the most senior person in your organisation. And it's almost never the person you see first when you walk through the door. However, if you were to suddenly remove this person from your environment, you would quickly begin to notice something different about the fabric of your workplace. It could be weeks, maybe months, before you really grasp what has changed and years (if ever) before you fully recover.
The Invisible Cost of Being Indispensable
It is often those who provide the social glue for an organisation, in a manner so smooth and seamless as to appear natural and unforced (and therefore do not prompt others to check in), who suffer the greatest tolls from being unreplaceable. Those individuals whose struggles are visible have prompted colleagues to offer support and solicit feedback on how they might assist; however, when someone appears as though they are managing the difficulties of their colleagues with ease, they generate an entirely different response from those same colleagues. They receive additional requests for support, increased levels of trust, and even greater responsibility for the burdens that cannot be shifted elsewhere, simply because their continued reliability has led their colleagues to assume that this individual is somehow exempt from the normal costs associated with their daily work.
In a Deloitte Workplace Mental Health study conducted in 2023, researchers found that employees in positions requiring prolonged emotional labour were 2.4 times more likely to exhibit severe burnout symptoms than their peers, despite never disclosing any stress-related issues to either a coworker or supervisor. However, the most compelling figure here is not the rate of burnout but rather the underlying reality: These individuals suffered silently at the hands of their own exhaustion, unbeknownst to those surrounding them. Their own exhaustion developed under the radar due to the exact skills that make them so valuable, namely, their capacity to endure while caring for others, becoming the mechanism through which their own invisibility remained intact until it could no longer remain concealed.
What Does Loneliness Really Feel Like From the Inside?
This kind of loneliness is unique. It feels quite different from the lonely feeling we get when we are ignored or cut off from others. People who experience this type of loneliness have many connections. People seek these individuals out for support. Many rely on them. In fact, they are often truly valued by those around them. This type of loneliness is not due to a lack of people in one’s life. Rather, it results from an absence of reciprocal interaction. There is a growing recognition among these people that virtually all the emotional energy expended in their working relationship flows in just one direction. As such, the individual that others see (and appreciate) is usually the able, available, "holding together" aspect of the self. The aspects that are tired, unsure, and sometimes overwhelmed, however, rarely find safe spaces within their work environments to be honest about how they feel.
No one has yet clearly identified the structural reality of this phenomenon.
Mostly, people like this are not fulfilling some role as defined in their formal position. Rather, they are doing this simply because they are inclined toward noticing what people need. Over time, the surrounding environment recognises this quality and organises itself around it in much the same way that water organises itself in response to gravity (i.e., at the lowest elevation). Thus, eventually, there develops an informal structure in which everything that is too much for the formal structures to handle will begin to flow into this person.
When the group loses this person, they usually do not realise what they lost until a long time after she/he is gone. The reason for this is simple: what they were providing did not fit into any job description; nor was it adequately represented in their performance evaluations. And it certainly could not be identified on any organisational charts. Their provision existed solely in the quality of the work environment that they created. The quality of their presence only reveals itself when they leave and the climate of the workplace has changed in subtle yet unquantifiable ways, i.e., ways that can’t easily be restored to their original condition by hiring someone else equally talented but with a different orientation.
The Leadership Activity Most People Never Get To Experience
What you may find most interesting about checking in on the person who always checks in on others is that there are some qualities required for checking in, which are less common than we think within the majority of working environments: to see beyond the surface level of the competent and composed person and at the possible humanity existing beneath the surface. This involves asking what this person needs as an individual at this moment, prior to another team member arriving at your door to request support.
This question, when asked honestly (and not rushed), is not a 'soft' form of leadership activity. In many organisations in 2026, while the human complexities being managed by teams have reached new levels, and the formal systems designed to help those navigating these complexities remain woefully underdeveloped, the act described above will likely represent one of the few structural actions that leaders can take. Yet, it is also likely one of the least frequent.