My Substack bio says “I managed a team, a team of teams, and 18 months of terrible sleep.”
I wish that last part was a joke. 😵💫
When I moved from managing individual teams to managing teams of teams, I walked into a pressure cooker that was building for years. Fractured trust. Personnel concerns that went unaddressed. Wave upon wave of interpersonal tension, team-level struggles, and unique trauma that I was now responsible for helping to navigate.
I’m not going to get into the specifics. What matters is the emotional math of it: every single day, in multiple conversations, I was showing up to help people work through hard things. And I was doing it without a plan for what happened to my brain and the toll it took on me.
Where did all of that tough stuff go, once the conversation was over? Nowhere, it turns out. It just built up, layer by layer of emotional sediment piling up and slowly crushing me.
For the first 12 months, I didn’t have the luxury of thinking deeply about it. I was fighting every fire as it came up (which, in a team environment that fractured, meant that more things were on fire than were not). I was running on adrenaline, caffeine on an empty stomach, and very little sleep. My body was screaming and I wasn’t listening.
By the end of that first year I was emotionally and physically spent. Not burned out in the catastrophic sense but hollowed out in a quieter, more insidious way. The kind of exhaustion that a good night’s sleep or even a week of vacation doesn’t even touch. My family and friends were worried about me and said as much, multiple times. And they were right to be.
What I learned slowly, imperfectly, over the next 6 months (and every month since then) is that emotional availability doesn’t work without a release valve.
I use the phrase “wring out the sponge” because that’s what it felt like I needed to do: actively squeeze out everything I’d absorbed before I could take anything else in. More importantly, I needed to recognize that being a “sponge” wasn’t inherently bad or something I needed to alter about myself but something I needed to approach intentionally, establishing clearer guardrails to help make sure I didn’t get over-saturated.
For me, “wringing out the sponge” looks like:
Physical movement (running, hiking, yoga, skiing when the snow is good)
Mindfulness practices (not just meditation in the formal sense, but breathing exercises, short visualization practices, the deliberate five minutes where I’m not thinking about work)
Hobbies that occupy my hands and give my brain somewhere to go (puzzles, baking, books that have nothing to do with leadership).
And, not glamorously but very seriously: sleep. My body needs at least 7 to 9 hours to function like a real human being, but your mileage will vary based on your needs
What “wringing out the sponge” looks like is different for everyone. The specifics matter less than the act itself: some deliberate thing that you do, after the absorbing, to let some of it go.
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The harder part to overcome was that I had a lot of internalized guilt in those first years as a leader. A belief that my job was to take away my team’s pain. To make things better. To absorb what they were carrying so they didn’t have to carry it alone (or at all).
This is a noble idea. But it’s not the help I was being asked to / called to provide as a leader.
I think about it this way now: imagine a group of people hiking up a mountain together, each person carrying their own backpack.
My role as the leader is to hike alongside them. To offer encouragement, make sure people have enough water and something to eat at the right times, help clear obstacles on the trail when those arise. These are useful actions that help each person succeed.
But if I try to carry everyone else’s backpack on top of my own, we don’t summit faster. We (the team, including me) don’t summit at all. One person carrying all that weight will not make it to the top, no matter how much time they spend in the gym training ahead of time. And the team doesn’t benefit from me collapsing on the trail.
My job is to create the conditions for people to carry their own backpack and summit the mountain as a whole team, successfully. Not to carry everyone’s backpacks for them.
In this analogy, we aren’t accounting for injuries or a case where someone has brought a backpack with an elephant inside, but I acknowledge those hazards might happen and it’s part of my job as a leader to work together with the team to figure out what we do next, together.
This all sounds obvious to me now but it was not obvious to me in practice, when I was running on 5 hours of sleep and two cups of coffee on an empty stomach. I’m hopeful you all will learn from my mistakes and put guardrails in place far before the 18 month mark of terrible sleep. 😅
I’d appreciate your support at any level - free or paid - as it helps more leaders find Altitude! Thank you for being a reader and part of this community. You mean a lot to me.
The impulse to take something away from someone who is struggling (to fix it, to absorb it, to make it stop) is instinctive, especially if emotional attunement is one of your genuine strengths. It takes active work to stay present with someone in a hard moment without trying to ease that moment for them.
You can sit across from a team member who is going through something tough and be fully present (listening, supporting, helping them identify the next step) without absorbing their struggle as your own. You can hike beside someone without carrying their backpack. That is not a lesser form of support, it’s sustainable.
Emotional availability is one of the most important skills you can develop as a leader. I believe that and I’ll keep saying it. But emotional availability can and should have guardrails. It has to, otherwise it’s a liability.
I’d love to hear what wringing out the sponge looks like for you. The specific thing, not the category. What actually works? Leave a comment, find me on Notes, or send me a message. I read everything.
See you next Tuesday,