Association staffs are often overburdened. Leaders can help by showing the benefits of taking more on, but they have to follow through.

When people working in associations say they “wear many hats”—as they often do—they usually say it sweetly, as a kind of in-joke. But they’re speaking in code: What they’re actually saying is, “I’m overextended.”

For some people, this predicament is a virtue of sorts. The association industry’s promiscuous haberdashery, particularly at small-staff organizations, means people can learn about multiple areas of the organization on the fly; as training for C-suite leadership goes, it’s not bad. But it also stokes burnout and often leads to subpar work

As professor and coast Melody Wilding explains in a recent Harvard Business Review article, the phenomenon extends across an organization: “Leaders are being handed more while also managing teams that are already stretched thin themselves.”

Wilding lays out a few of the roles that leaders can play in response to that circumstance. Candor is one of the key tools: Leaders need to be honest about how everybody’s in-box is filling up, and recruit them to “brainstorm possibilities since they see day-to-day realities [they] might miss.” That includes an honest conversation about triaging the current workload. 

Moreover, laying out your criteria about how you’re triaging is important too. In the same way leaders don’t always know all the tasks their people are managing, staffers aren’t always tuned in to what kind of priorities a leader is thinking about due to board and stakeholder pressure. 

That’s all reasonable enough advice. But there are a few other things Wilding asks leaders to consider that are a little trickier. Wilding recommends that leaders encourage their people to take the long view in moments when the workload is especially heavy: That if they assume the extra work, there’ll be the opportunity for growth in the future. And Wilding also suggests doing a soft sell on the wider workload: “They’re not passing off grunt work, but rather, giving others exposure to different parts of the business,” she writes.

For somebody who’s already overburdened, that can sound a whole lot like, “I have a new hat for you. Aren’t you happy about the new hat I got you?”

Delegating is a necessary part of a leader’s job, and sometimes that means assigning your people tasks that staff may find tedious. But follow-through is just as important. Staff have long memories, and if the promised expanded department doesn’t materialize a year later, they’ll remember. The same is true for promises that they’ll learn various parts of the organization—if they sense they’ve just been recruited for scut-work, they’ll have good reason to feel less loyal. (And by the way, this all goes for your volunteer groups too; a committee that feels like it’s taken on a bunch of unpaid busywork on top of their actual jobs will fray easily.)

“Handling overload well puts your executive acumen on display,” Wilding writes. “It shows you know how to create the conditions to get more done without doing it yourself, while empowering your team to grow.” That’s all true. But handling that overload is only successful if everybody has a sense of growth when those many-hats moments have eased up a little. Success means providing support when being overextended is inevitable—and rewarding people when the job is done.

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