Dealing With Chaos: A Guide for Leaders Feeling Overwhelmed at Work
Many engineering leaders’ work can be best described as “everything happens so much:” All your work is urgent; there are no clear solutions for anything; you sprint from meeting to meeting, only to get notifications about another issue during your meetings, and you feel like you barely have space to breathe. These situations can accumulate over time and lead to overwhelm. You experience a flood of thoughts, emotions and physical sensations or might even feel like you’re shutting down.
These feelings are very common in technical leaders and people leaders alike, but they aren’t often talked about. Many leaders feel isolated and alone with these struggles and struggle to know who to turn to for help. So, why is overwhelm so common for leaders, and where can engineering leaders find meaningful answers?
This article is a guide for you when you face those moments or times of overwhelm, as I call them. I’ll share with you practical tips and strategies from my own engineering executive roles, as well as what’s worked for the leaders and organizations I work with in coaching and trainings. You’ll better understand where your overwhelm may come from, why it’s so common in leadership roles, what it looks and feels like, and what you can do to get better.
Know How to Spot Overwhelm
Overwhelm in leaders is often so subtle it’s almost silent. Here are signs to look out for:
- Exhaustion: You feel physical, cognitive and emotional fatigue. You might notice in yourself that you struggle with paying attention and getting things done, but at the same time you feel so stressed that you can’t really afford to take breaks or struggle falling asleep. You feel the pressure on your shoulders, maybe even physically, and don’t want to let the people around you down or disappoint them, but don’t know how not to.
- Cynicism and Sarcasm: You distance yourself psychologically from your work and your engagement drops. You rely on coping mechanisms like cynicism and sarcasm more, masking frustration or disillusionment. You might also notice that you’re gossiping more about certain parts of your work or bonding with people you trust mostly about things that are going wrong or annoying you. You struggle getting out of a sense of negativity and might find yourself frustrated with people who try to develop solutions to problems because you wonder what the point is in trying.
- Inefficacy: You feel incompetent, unproductive and like you’re not making progress, let alone achieving anything substantially. Your confidence and motivation get replaced by feelings of self-doubt, and your ability to be creative and solve problems decreases, as does the quality of your work because you make more errors than you usually do and miss deadlines, further increasing your doubts about yourself.
You might not notice all of these signs in yourself, but even some of them, persisting over time, can be important to understand and address.
Identify What’s Causing Your Overwhelm
Overwhelm often builds up over time and has multiple sources. Leadership roles are varied, and the better you understand what’s contributing to your feelings of overwhelm, the better you’ll be able to address it. We all know that naming things in tech is hard, and you might feel the same way about your overwhelm. But I’ve also found that naming things can be powerful and unlock new ways of thinking and feeling. That’s why the first step to addressing your overwhelm is naming it what it is and digging into where it’s coming from:
High-Ambiguity Work
The one thing all leadership roles have in common is that they handle a lot of ambiguity: You’re given complex problems to solve (e.g., “increase our revenue by X through expanding our product” or “decrease our infrastructure cost”). The higher up the role, the blurrier the problem shape will typically be.
It’s taxing to constantly be in the middle, translating between higher and lower levels of the organization, making your boss care about issues they’re not super interested in and helping teammates understand decisions from higher-up leaders.
Being able to handle these scenarios requires the ability to take this blurry problem and turn it into one that can be solved. This can be rewarding, but often also involves very long-running, complex work that requires wrangling multiple stakeholders with differing motivations, long-running negotiations, and, somehow, getting a tangible deliverable out at the end — which can be months or even years out. As a result, leaders also lack the positive experience and dopamine hits that come with getting things done.
Being (Stuck) in the Middle
Many leaders are in the middle of not just hierarchies, but also communication and context levels, translating higher-level messages from senior leaders for lower-level team members who require more clarity and want to understand what those messages mean for them.
It’s taxing to constantly be in the middle, translating between higher and lower levels of the organization, making your boss care about issues they’re not super interested in, and helping teammates understand decisions from higher-up leaders.
Operating in a Fast-Moving Industry that Likes to “Break Things”
The tech industry, while fast-paced and innovative, often pressures leaders to adopt the mantras of, “Move fast, break stuff, do more with less and better to ask for forgiveness than for permission.” This mindset can lead to dangerous consequences, the fallout of which often falls to leaders to handle. Many leaders also fear falling behind on new tools, features and evolving frameworks.
Repetitive Tasks, Coupled with AI Advancements
More than one-third (37%) of business leaders say that AI replaced workers in 2023, according to a recent report from ResumeBuilder. Industry pressure often translates into workplace pressure, with organizations constantly changing strategies and goals. The overwhelming workload and constant changes in priorities create a sense that everything is important at all times.
Disproportionate Amounts of Unrecognized Work
There’s a historical pattern in the tech industry where people, especially members of underrepresented groups, tend to be asked to take on additional work that’s:
- Outside of the role and responsibilities that they’re assigned and paid for.
- Involves a lot of emotional labor.
- Not factored in when it comes to promotions, or even negatively impacts their ability to advance, because doing this work has taken away from your time to hone the core skills needed for your role.
Many leaders struggle with knowing how much of this work they should be doing as part of their job, how much they can ask others to contribute and when it’s appropriate to say no to additional work.
High Change Rates
Navigating overwhelm as a leader involves wrestling with a high change rate, a multitude of changes to handle and the real phenomenon of change fatigue affecting both leaders and their teammates. The relentless pace of change can contribute to your own sense of change fatigue, requiring you to simultaneously guide your team through these constant shifts.
Poorly-Defined Roles
Many leadership roles are about “handling ambiguity and change” to a degree where this ambiguity also includes the role itself: roles lack clear definitions and what success will look like for the person in it. Oftentimes, leadership roles are established to fill gaps where processes or structures are absent, provide clarity during uncertain times and operate independently. In the fast-paced tech environment, leaders are often left to “figure it out” on their own, without the necessary check-ins being asked like, “how are you doing?” or “what do you need?”
Low Visibility and Feedback
A lot of leaders’ roles already happen behind the scenes and aren’t seen or recognized — most leaders are judged based on results, after all. Supporting employees through difficult times, giving feedback, managing performance, driving clarity, connecting dots across the organization, relaying context and maintaining situational awareness are critical, but often don’t lead to directly measurable impact. Leadership work is often never truly finished, with responsibilities like ensuring alignment and sustaining high performance forming an ongoing continuum. On top of that, leaders typically don’t get a ton of feedback from their busy bosses and employees.
Who You Are
According to ComputerWeekly, 45% more women than men leave technology roles, and half of the women in tech roles depart before the age of 35. These trends are largely attributed to sexism, racism, microaggressions and a homogeneous work environment. In extreme cases, this can manifest as overt bullying. USA Today reports that “LGBT employees were the most likely to be bullied (20%) and experience public humiliation (24%), with 64% stating that it contributed to their decision to leave.” Furthermore, “Nearly one-quarter of underrepresented men and women of color experienced stereotyping, twice the rate of white and Asian men and women.”
Women and people of color in leadership positions are still underrepresented in our industry, in part also because many leave tech as they don’t want to continue dealing with discrimination. Those who stay and are among the few who land a leadership position often face these challenges from two sides. They view it as their responsibility to make their team or department a place where everyone can feel they belong and can do their best work. At the same time, they’re experiencing discrimination themselves from the homogenous leadership team they work on.
Low Sense of Agency
A significant factor in overwhelm is whether you feel like you have agency and feel empowered to make changes yourself, with your team or influence change outside of your immediate area of impact. Leaders feel the tension between their desire to drive meaningful change and the constraints imposed by their demanding roles. Fostering an environment where individuals, especially leaders, feel a sense of agency becomes crucial in mitigating the impact of overwhelm and cultivating a more empowering and fulfilling professional experience.
Feeling Stuck and Unable to Change Anything Significant about the Situation
Overwhelm often happens when people feel like they’ve already tried a lot of things but nothing helped. I often hear from experienced leaders who have been in the industry for a long time. They know the time management techniques (pomodoro! GTD!), the prioritization frameworks (Eisenhower matrix!, Deadlines!), have tried saying no to requests more or delegating — and still feel stuck. This can even intensify the feeling of overwhelm, feeling like you’re running out of options, with nowhere to go.
Your Boss
Maybe you work for an inexperienced boss — the tech industry still predominantly overvalues technical skills. Many startup founders or higher-level leaders got into their roles because they’re great engineers, but are still learning to be managers (or aren’t even really interested in that work).
Many leaders, especially in startups, are really busy. You might not want to be a burden on them and feel like you need to absorb a lot yourself. This can also require a lot of work to manage-up.
On the flipside, you might be putting in a lot of work to set clear expectations for your direct reports, give them actionable feedback on a regular basis. That’s important work, but if you’re not getting much of this for yourself, it can become draining. The resulting imbalance can be hard to deal with.
Overwhelm can come from many different sources, and what you’re experiencing is likely a combination of a few. What can you do to deal with these issues?
How to Handle Feelings of Overwhelm and Get Better
Review the suggestions below and pick one or two that resonate with you and try them out.
Take Care of Yourself
- Understand Core Needs: Identify and understand your core needs using resources like the BICEPS method. Reflect on factors contributing to unmet needs and take proactive steps to address or improve the situation.
- Manage Your Energy: Don’t just manage your time, but manage your energy. During your work day, write down any event that made you feel energized or drained. Afterward, review your notes. What patterns are you seeing? What are common causes of excitement, and what’s regularly annoying you? And what changes can you make to your work schedule or how you use tools like chat and email to help you balance your energy levels better?
- Connect With Your Emotions: Start a habit of weekly reflections, try mood-tracking apps, maintain a gratitude journal or try meditation — anything that helps you get more in touch with yourself and your own needs.
- Control the Content You Consume: Manage stress by controlling the content you consume. Consider stepping back from ad-inundated social media platforms and explore more in-depth resources, such as podcasts.
- Take Regular Breaks: Stretch your arms and neck. Drink water. Take deep breaths.
Get Support
- Seek mentorship or guidance from someone within your company who you trust. This can be helpful for added perspective.
- External support and the perspective from someone who has experience in the industry and is not entangled in your company’s power dynamics can be helpful, too. Find a mentor or coach, or reach out to others in engineering leadership communities. Many communities have private channels for people with different identities, like women, non-binary and trans folks, or BiPOC. The ones I’m most familiar with are the eng-managers Slack, the LeadDev Slack, the CTO Craft Slack and the rands Slack community (the biggest one in there). Getting therapy can also be really useful!
Acknowledge What You Can and Can’t Do
- Your job as a leader is to know which fires you need to put out and which ones you need to let burn. What might sound a bit bleak is actually important to keep in mind: You can’t fix everything, and you need to let go of the idea that you’re only successful if everything is going well at all times.
- Shift your focus from volume to prioritization. Proactively determine which tasks to prioritize or let go of, rather than leaving choices to external factors. Regularly align priorities with supervisors to enhance clarity and foster a shared understanding.
Navigating overwhelm as an engineering leader involves managing an influx of tasks, the weight of team success and the fear of the unknown. This problem is often overlooked by mainstream media, contributing to internalized stress and the misconception that leaders must have all the answers. I hope this article has equipped you with valuable insights and strategies to conquer overwhelm in the dynamic engineering landscape.
