I carry an older sibling role with me everywhere including, it turns out, into every office I’ve ever worked in. In my family, I spent years being the one who set the standard, anticipated everyone’s needs, and became the person people came to when things got complicated. Those same traits were the same ones labeled as “leadership potential”. Useful, right?
For most of my management career, I treated this as a neutral fact about myself.
Sure, I had opinions about most people’s decisions (and most other topics) and I was ok to share them if asked.
Sure, my instinct when something went wrong on my team was to be the one who figured it out, or at least the one who made sure it got figured out.
Sure, I felt a particular protectiveness over the people who reported to me that I could not quite explain in strictly professional terms.
That’s just how I’m wired, I told myself. Over time I came to understand that being wired this way was both:
one of my greatest management strengths and,
a reliable way to burn myself out, without the right guardrails
The Backstory
On a team I managed, several of the employees happened to fall into roughly the same age range as my younger sibling. They were funny, trusting, and free with the details of their lives, which I genuinely liked hearing about.
There’s nothing wrong with building a more detailed picture of the people you work closely with. Knowing that someone is navigating a difficult family situation helps you understand why they seem off in a one-on-one. Knowing that someone is worried about an upcoming move to a new apartment explains the distracted energy on an otherwise low-stakes Tuesday. Context helps.
But I noticed, slowly and then all at once, that I had started operating less like a manager and more like a family member. Did I need to be the person who helped talk through what to do when an appliance malfunctioned at an apartment complex? Was it on me to coach someone through negotiating better lease terms on a car? Should I actually be the person helping a direct report work out how to allocate their paycheck to a retirement plan?
Maybe that’s just mentorship, life advice, general goodwill. Maybe.
But in a role where the demands on my problem-solving capacity were already relentless, I was spending a meaningful amount of that capacity on questions that were not mine to answer. And the more I said yes to those questions, the less capacity I had left for the ones that actually were mine to answer.
Older sibling is a worthy, awesome role to hold. It’s also one I already have - outside of work. And it is not part of my actual job description.
The Re-route
What I did not do was close the door.
I have always believed, especially in situations where someone might be on a path toward real harm, that you have to at least hear someone out before you decide what comes next.
The core principle of staying open is non-negotiable for me, it hasn’t changed.
What changed was what happened after someone walked through my door - in person or virtually.
I got educated on the resources my workplace actually offered.
Employee assistance programs, mental health benefits, financial counseling, legal resources — benefits packages have more in them than most people realize, and I had not been pointing people toward them as deliberately as I could have been.
I started building that resource map, for myself and for my team, so that when someone came to me with something that was bigger than what I was qualified to give them, I had somewhere real to send them.
And I developed this sentence, which I’ve used variations of ever since:
“As managers, we’re trained for a lot of things, but providing therapeutic care or navigating life decisions is something I’d want to connect you to an actual expert for. That way, you have a better chance of getting exactly the right tools for your specific situation, not just the best guess I can offer. Adding an expert to your care team is always a good idea.”
These strategies don’t close anyone out. They position expert support as additive, not as a rejection. And they protect the time and energy I need to do the parts of my job that no one else can do for my team(s).
Because here’s the thing about oldest sibling instincts in a management role: they are genuinely useful and I didn’t want to lose that utility.
The same pattern that made me want to help negotiate someone’s lease is what makes me a Shield and a Ladder when my team needs it.
It’s what makes me pay attention to whether someone has what they need, whether they’re being set up to succeed, whether the conditions around them are working in their favor or against them.
It’s what makes me take seriously my responsibility to connect people to resources when they need them, and to meet someone where they are when they’re struggling, without losing myself in the process.
The instinct isn’t the problem; the instinct without a boundary around it is the problem.
The work is knowing which version of yourself the moment actually calls for. Sometimes it calls for the oldest sibling. Sometimes it calls for someone who can say, clearly and warmly: that one’s not for me. Let me help you find who it is for.
Managers come from all different family backgrounds / structures: I’m curious to hear about your experience being leaders and also people who are older, middle, younger, or only siblings (or being led by people with those identities). I’d love to hear more in the comments! I read every one :)
See you next Tuesday,
This was fun to read! I’m not a manager anymore but I am an oldest sister. This dynamic plays out in interesting ways I think