Every company has a few names that come up in every meeting.

“Ask Jordan, they’ll know.”

“Run it by Aisha, she always fixes this stuff.”

“Can we get Miguel on this, just to be safe?”

On paper, these people have one job.

In reality, they have eight.

They do their actual role. Then they pick up seven invisible jobs no one scoped, no one staffed, and no one rewards.

Your whole operation quietly leans on those hidden jobs. Then leadership wonders why burnout keeps hitting the same people first.

Christina Maslach, the leading voice on burnout, has spent decades showing that burnout spikes when the work environment clashes with people’s values and effort stops feeling fair. Her research put language to what your best people are living every day.

The harsh truth is simple.

You’re not just overworking your top performers. You’re undercounting them.

The Hidden Second Job No One Talks About

Your best employees are not drowning in their job description. They’re drowning in everything wrapped around it.

When ownership is vague, they step in.

When a launch is about to go sideways, they step in.

When a teammate melts down after a brutal all hands, they step in.

Not because they’re weak. Because they care. Because they have standards. Because over time, the whole system has learned a dangerous rule.

If something matters, hand it to the person who never drops the ball.

That sounds smart until you zoom out.

Workplace’s own data across companies shows the same digital fingerprints when this pattern takes over. Late night messages climb. Replies get short and colder. Jokes disappear. Hedge phrases like “should be fine” show up more often. Those are not mood swings. They’re early signs that the hidden load is past the line long before surveys or exit interviews catch it.

So let’s name what that load actually is.

Because once you see the seven invisible jobs, you can’t unsee them.

The 7 Invisible Jobs Your Best People Are Doing For Free

1. The Informal Project Manager

This is the person everyone drags into the messy work.

“We just need someone to coordinate this.”

“Can you keep us on track, you’re good at that.”

They chase decisions that should already be made. They turn vague OKRs into actual checklists. They bridge the gaps between teams that refuse to talk to each other.

None of that is in their job description.

The cost is brutal. Their calendar fills with status meetings they never asked for. Their actual work shifts to nights and weekends. You call it “ownership.” They experience it as quiet suffocation.

Fix starts here. One directly responsible owner for every major initiative. Written. Public. If no one has time to play that role, the work waits. It doesn’t secretly land on the most responsible person in the room.

2. The Emotional Shock Absorber

You know this person. When a senior leader blows up in Slack, they’re the one who DMs the team to calm everyone down.

When a teammate is on the verge of quitting, they’re the one who listens for an hour and talks them off the ledge.

They translate harsh feedback into something survivable. They explain decisions leadership never bothered to communicate. They keep the human side of the company from cracking.

That’s real work. It consumes real energy. It’s classic emotional labor and almost zero leaders count it when they talk about workload.

Meanwhile, research on burnout keeps pointing to this gap between what people give and what the system recognizes as a core driver of exhaustion and cynicism. Maslach’s work spells this out, and you see it every time your “glue people” suddenly go quiet.

If you want to keep your culture from rotting under the surface, you need managers trained to absorb conflict and emotion themselves instead of outsourcing it to the nearest kind person. And you need to start talking about emotional load as part of capacity, not a personality trait.

3. The Culture Glue And Event Planner

Every offsite that actually worked. Every new hire who felt welcome their first week. Every internal group that keeps underrepresented employees from walking out.

Someone organized that.

Someone booked the rooms, ran the agenda, reminded leaders what to say, checked on quiet people, and cleaned up the mess afterward.

It wasn’t magic. It was free labor from the same handful of people who care enough to carry the social load of the company on top of their real job.

Your fairness problems start here. Jason Colquitt’s meta analysis on organizational justice showed that fairness in outcomes and process is a better predictor of engagement than any perk you can buy. His work is clear. When people see some folks doing unpaid culture work while others coast, trust falls off a cliff.

You don’t fix that with a bigger party budget. You fix it by scoping culture work as real work, spreading it across more shoulders, and tying it to performance and rewards.

4. The Urgency Shock Absorber

This one is deadly.

Anytime a senior exec says “this just came up” or “can we pull this in” you already know which names get tagged.

Your most reliable people become human airbags for every sloppy promise and every unplanned commitment. Products slip. Sales overpromise. Ops runs behind. Instead of killing or reordering work at the top, leaders fire off a ping to the same safe pair of hands and call it leadership.

The result is a permanent emergency for a tiny group while everyone else runs at normal speed.

The only way out is brutally simple. Every time something becomes “urgent” you name what slows down or stops. If leaders can’t say that out loud, it’s not urgent. It’s wishful thinking aimed directly at your highest performers.

5. The Shadow Manager

This is the senior IC who onboards every new person “because they know how things really work.”

They sit in on interviews, give backchannel feedback on performance, explain politics, and quietly mediate when two teams are at each other’s throat.

They’re doing half a manager’s job with none of the authority or compensation.

You see the fallout when promotion season hits. The shadow manager kept the team afloat all year, yet the official manager gets the recognition. Nothing poisons belief faster than watching invisible leadership work ignored while visible titles get all the upside.

Fix it fast. Either formalize the role with scope, time and pay or strip the expectations back. Stop pretending this is “just being a good teammate.” It’s leadership work. Treat it that way.

6. The Mission Translator

Executives love big talk.

“This is our moment.”

“We’re transforming the industry.”

Then the operating reality hits people with shifting priorities, vague roadmaps and conflicting goals. Someone has to stand in the gap and make that story livable.

That someone is usually a respected midlevel leader or senior IC who spends hours each week turning grand vision into concrete focus. They rewrite clumsy all hands messages into something grounded. They help people make sense of yet another shift in direction. They keep belief alive when the system keeps eroding it.

That sense making is draining. It’s also one of the clearest burnout drivers Maslach points to. When the story you tell people about work keeps colliding with the way work really runs, people fry emotionally.

The answer is not another rousing speech. It’s cleaner choices. Sharper priorities. Less mission guilt and more operational clarity so your “mission translators” can stop spending their nights rewriting your leadership mistakes.

7. The Quiet Fixer Of Last Resort

Then there’s the person you call when things are on fire.

You know exactly who that is in your company.

The launch that’s about to miss. The client that’s about to churn. The internal tool that keeps breaking at 11 p.m. The process no one owns that suddenly becomes critical.

You ping the same name. Again.

They pick up the mess, ship the work, and never complain. Over time, their day job becomes a thin cover over constant crisis response.

You celebrate their heroics in all hands.

Then act surprised when they burn out or walk across the street to a company that does not run on quiet sacrifice.

The grown up move is to treat every rescue as a root cause signal. If the same person keeps saving you, the system is broken. You don’t just thank them. You redesign the process that required them in the first place.

How To Stop Burning Out The People Holding You Together

Now the hard part.

Once you see these seven jobs, you see the pattern. The same names over and over. The same shoulders holding the place together while everyone talks about “headcount” and “engagement” at a safe distance.

Here’s what serious leaders do next.

1. Run An Invisible Jobs Audit

Ask every team one blunt question.

“What do you do here that isn’t in your job description but the team would feel immediately if you stopped?”

Collect the answers. Map them to names. You’ll see your shock absorbers instantly.

Then pull Workplace data on late night communication, tone shifts and who shows up in the most cross functional conversations. Those are your real load bearers, not your org chart.

2. Put A Price On The Hidden Work

For each invisible job, estimate the hours per week it actually consumes. Then make a decision.

Either you officially carve that time out of their role, redistribute the work, or kill something else. There’s no honest fourth option.

Every “they’ll just handle it” turns into a tax you pretend doesn’t exist until they quit.

3. Hard Wire Fairness Back Into The System

Colquitt’s research is clear. When people feel processes and outcomes are fair, performance and commitment jump. When they don’t, no amount of praise or pizza nights fixes it.

So connect the dots.

If someone is the emotional backbone of the team, that shows up in performance reviews and compensation.

If someone plays shadow manager, that counts as leadership, not “being nice.”

If someone keeps saving launches, that translates into scope, authority and real support, not just shoutouts.

Fairness is not a vibe. It’s how you match contribution to reward.

4. Change Who Your Heroes Are

Right now your informal heroes are the people who say yes to everything and keep bailing you out.

Flip that.

Start celebrating the leader who delivers without burning the same people.

Highlight the manager who hands work back when their team is at capacity.

Tell the story of the engineer who said “I can do this next sprint, not this one” and protected focus.

You get more of what you spotlight. If you glorify self sacrifice, your best people will copy it until they break. If you glorify sustainable excellence, you’ll still hit big goals without leaving burned out bodies along the way.

The Real Test For Every CEO And CPO Reading This

Here’s the uncomfortable question.

If your top three performers vanished tomorrow, how much of your real operating system would disappear with them?

Not the org chart. The real system. The invisible project management. The quiet conflict resolution. The culture care. The firefighting. The translation between grand vision and chaotic reality.

If the honest answer is “a lot” then burnout is not a surprise. It’s a design choice.

The good news is simple. What you designed, you can redesign.

Make the invisible jobs visible. Put a price on them. Share the load. Reward the people who have been holding you together. Use live signals in your communication data to spot burnout months before it hits your metrics.

Your best people are not asking for yoga classes. They’re asking for honesty about the work they’re actually doing.

The companies that win the next decade won’t be the ones with the loudest mission or the fanciest perks. They’ll be the ones where excellence does not quietly cost people their health.

If you’re a CPO, your job is to walk into the CEO’s office with that truth and a plan.

If you’re a CEO, your job is to stop using your best people as a shock absorber and start building a system that doesn’t need one.

The seven invisible jobs are already being done. The only question is whether you’ll keep pretending they’re free.