For World Mental Health Day, organisations should look beyond workload and ask what invisible effort their cultures require people to expend simply to be regarded as credible.
Workplace wellbeing is often discussed in terms of workload, working hours, burnout and access to psychological support. These are important considerations, but they do not capture the full experience of work.
There is another form of effort that is much harder to see: the mental and emotional work people perform to establish that they are capable, credible and deserving of authority.
In my research with Black women executives in corporate South Africa, I identified this as shielding labour. It describes the additional work people undertake when they believe their competence will be scrutinised more closely, their mistakes remembered for longer, or their authority questioned more readily than that of their peers.
Shielding labour is rarely formally assigned. It is learned through experience.
It can mean preparing excessively for a meeting because being insufficiently prepared feels more consequential. It can mean checking a position with several colleagues before expressing it publicly. It can mean carefully calibrating one’s language so that confidence is not interpreted as arrogance, or directness as aggression. It can mean waiting for the right moment to speak because the consequences of getting the room wrong feel greater than they should.
These behaviours can easily be mistaken for diligence, emotional intelligence or executive maturity. Sometimes they are all three. The important question is what is driving them. When people are doing additional work because the organisation has created conditions in which their competence does not feel secure, wellbeing becomes an organisational issue.
The psychological cost of constant self-monitoring
My study did not measure mental health outcomes, so I would not claim that it demonstrates a causal relationship between shielding labour and poor mental health. However, it points towards a question that organisations should take seriously.
What does sustained self-monitoring do to people?
There is a difference between preparing well for an important meeting and preparing because you believe one imperfect answer could confirm somebody else’s doubts about your competence. There is a difference between being thoughtful about how you communicate and continually monitoring your tone because you know that the same behaviour may be interpreted differently when it comes from you. The distinction matters because the second form of effort does not have an obvious endpoint.
A demanding project has a deadline. A presentation ends. A difficult quarter eventually passes. But the work of managing how one is perceived can become continuous because the individual is required to remain alert not only to the substance of their work, but to how every decision, disagreement, mistake and interaction might be interpreted.
That is cognitive and emotional effort, and it is particularly important when organisations discuss mental health because much of the conversation remains focused on helping individuals cope with pressure. We should also ask whether the organisation itself is creating unnecessary psychological demands.
The organisation pays too
The consequences are not limited to the individual. When people spend significant cognitive energy protecting their credibility, organisations lose some of the very value they appointed those people to provide.
A leader who spends too much time considering how a challenge will be received may offer a more cautious version of their thinking. Someone who believes their ideas need to be extensively validated before they can be voiced may contribute less freely. Someone who continually prepares for the possibility of being exposed as inadequate may have less cognitive capacity available for strategic thinking, experimentation and risk-taking.
There is also a longer-term cost – people eventually make decisions about whether the environment is worth the effort required to succeed in it. When talented professionals leave, organisations often describe the departure in terms of career opportunity, remuneration or personal choice. Those factors matter, but organisations should also examine whether people are leaving because succeeding has required too much invisible labour for too long.
Retention data will tell you who left. It may not tell you why they felt they had to work twice as hard to stay credible.
The culture is often in the signals
One of the most important findings from this research is that shielding labour is not necessarily created by explicit discrimination.
Organisations can have inclusive policies, sophisticated diversity strategies and leaders who genuinely believe they treat people fairly, while still producing environments in which some employees feel compelled to prove themselves repeatedly.
Culture is communicated through small signals.
Whose confidence is interpreted as leadership and whose is interpreted as arrogance? Whose mistakes are treated as learning and whose become evidence of a pattern? Whose challenge is welcomed as constructive and whose is described as difficult? Whose expertise is accepted immediately and whose requires additional validation?
These questions are uncomfortable precisely because there may be no single incident to point to. For professionals, recognising this distinction can also be useful. Not every act of preparation or self-monitoring is evidence of a dysfunctional workplace. Some are simply part of being a senior professional. The question is whether the additional effort is serving the work or protecting the individual from assumptions about their competence.
If the latter becomes a permanent feature of someone’s working life, it deserves attention.
What organisations should do differently
The response should not be another programme teaching people how to become more resilient. There is value in helping professionals develop coping strategies, but resilience cannot become a way for organisations to outsource responsibility for the conditions they create. Organisations should instead examine the conditions that make shielding labour necessary.
- First, ask better questions. In engagement surveys, leadership assessments and one-to-one conversations, ask people what they do before important meetings and why. Do they prepare for the work, or do they prepare to establish their right to speak
- Second, interrogate the language of leadership. Terms such as “executive presence”, “gravitas”, “tone” and “culture fit” can be useful, but they can also conceal subjective expectations. Organisations should be able to explain what these qualities mean in observable terms and whether the same standards are being applied consistently.
- Third, examine whose mistakes become identities. One of the clearest indicators of organisational culture is what happens after someone gets something wrong. If some employees are allowed to recover from mistakes while others feel they must avoid them at all costs, the organisation is creating unequal psychological conditions for performance.
- Fourth, pay attention to silence. When capable people become increasingly quiet in meetings, do not automatically interpret that as disengagement or lack of confidence. Ask what they have learned about the consequences of speaking.
Finally, treat wellbeing as a design question. Employee assistance programmes and mental health benefits matter. So do workload management, psychological safety and access to support. But organisations should also ask what unnecessary cognitive and emotional work they are creating through their cultures, leadership practices and assumptions.
World Mental Health Day is an opportunity to broaden the conversation. The question should not only be whether our people have enough support to cope with work. It should also be whether we have designed work in ways that require some people to expend considerably more psychological energy simply to be believed.
That is not a resilience problem.
