The Leadership Problem Solver: Supporting your Overwhelmed Employee
- linnearader
- May 26
- 5 min read
Introduction
This blog series offers practical strategies for leaders facing common workplace challenges. Drawing from my 19+ years of experience, I'll share actionable solutions that have consistently delivered results for my teams.
While these approaches have proven effective in my experience, I recognize that leadership styles vary widely. These posts represent my perspective rather than universal truths—take what resonates and adapt it to your unique situation. And of course, for issues requiring legal expertise, consult with qualified professionals.
Today's Leadership Challenge
Today’s challenge is one that those of us that are introverts can likely relate to and those of us that are extroverts might be guilty of – an introvert employee gets overloaded. Here’s the situation that was brought to me:
I have an employee who is incredibly soft-spoken, a true introvert. Anything I ask him to do, he will do, even if it overloads him and won’t say a word. It wouldn’t ever occur to him to tell me no or that he doesn’t have the time. He’s often taken advantage of because he won’t speak up.
What do I do to help my employee? Most of the time I don’t know if he’s overloaded or not, so now I’m questioning if I should delegate anything to him or not. As a leader how do I know what my staff can take on?
Four Key Strategies for Supporting Introverted Team Members
As a fellow extrovert leader, I struggled with this situation early on as well. The best approach will be to set clear expectations, improve communications, build confidence, and establish appropriate boundaries. Great news? These solutions will help not only with this situation with your introvert team member(s) but also with the effectiveness of you and your team as a whole.
Setting Clear Expectations: Creating Mutual Understanding. Have a conversation. Review job tasks, what’s going well, what isn’t, and utilize the information to set expectations. For greatest effectiveness, do this together. Make it interactive and listen more than you speak. But, in the end, remember that you are the supervisor and responsible for the outcomes, this isn’t a voting situation, if there’s a decision that must be made, you must make it.
Improving Communication: Beyond Just Words. Open and honest communication creates an environment in which employees will be more comfortable explaining their workloads and capabilities. The expectations exercise can be the first step towards improving communication. To continue, practice active listening, ask questions and pay attention to what your employees say as well as what they DON’T say (body language, eye contact, etc.).
Building Confidence: Creating Safe Spaces for Growth. Setting clear expectations and improving communication are foundations to building confidence. There are multiple steps necessary to truly build confidence within your team, only a few of which I’ll outline here (more to come in a later blog post!) First, create a safe environment for your employees to communicate openly in an environment free of criticism, with mistakes viewed as learning opportunities, and an openness about your own mistakes to model humility and vulnerability. Begin delegating work in a meaningful way by assigning challenges that are achievable with the authority to go along with the responsibilities, and the freedom to complete the work in ways that are owned by them.
Establishing Appropriate Boundaries: The Foundation of Healthy Work. The ability to establish appropriate boundaries will require the expectations, communication and confidence previously outlined. In this example, appropriate boundaries would be carefully defining what a full work load looks like, explaining how much can (and will) be done, consistency in the enforcement of those boundaries, and learning how to professionally say “no.” The professional no will be another full blog post as it’s a HUGE topic to dive into!
These solutions are not easy and won’t be quick to put into practice. However, they are meaningful and the process of collaborating with your team to develop them will bring success in many ways.
Moving Forward with Your Overwhelmed Employee
Now that we've covered the foundational strategies, let's address our initial concern:
"How do I know what my staff can take on, and should I even delegate to my introverted employee?"
Practical Tools for Setting Expectations
Start with a one-on-one focused solely on workload. Begin by acknowledging what you've observed: "I value your contributions and want to make sure I'm not overloading you. I've noticed you always say yes, but I want to ensure your workload is manageable. It’s ok to say no, and I want to hear it from you sometimes!"
Create a task inventory together listing everything on their plate with estimated time commitments. Building this map or schedule creates a visual representation helps both of you see the full picture and identify when capacity is reached. Our team members struggle at times knowing if they are doing enough, not enough, meeting expectations or not, seeing this visual representation will settle their mind and allow any anxiety about their capacity decrease.
Communication Techniques That Work
Establish a workload signal system that makes it comfortable for your introverted employee to indicate when they're at capacity. This might be a simple color-coded status they update weekly or a rating scale for availability when you assign new tasks.
Schedule regular check-ins specifically about capacity, not just project progress. Make these brief but consistent to normalize discussions about workload. Setting the meeting for the specific purpose will ensure that this topic is your primary focus and isn’t meshed together or overlooked.
Modeling Healthy Boundaries
Model boundary-setting yourself by being transparent about your own workload limits. When you demonstrate that saying "not right now" is professional and respected, you create permission for others to do the same. With this transparency also comes reminding your team that you are in fact human and relatable.
The Confidence Connection
EVERY SINGLE ONE of these will help build the confidence of your team member!
Remember that helping your introverted employee establish these boundaries isn't simply good for their wellbeing—it results in more realistic project timelines, higher quality work, and ultimately better outcomes for your entire team.
Your Turn: Share Your Experience
On Wednesday, the next blog post will expand on this topic, called The Art of the Professional No.
Now that you’ve seen how I would approach this issue, what would you do? Share your ideas and insight. Continue the conversation and keep on sharing! Tell me what worked (or didn't) when you tried these strategies. Your insights could help fellow leaders who are struggling with similar issues.
Submit Your Leadership Challenge
What leadership challenge are YOU facing right now? Share a leadership dilemma you'd like me to address in an upcoming post. I select reader questions for future topics!
Email me directly at linnea@leadwithlinnea.com or [click here] to submit your question. The best submissions will be featured (with permission) in future posts."
And, as always, carry social kindness with you everywhere you go. The world needs you and your positive mindset!
Connect With Me
If you want to consult on training or coaching for your team, please reach out.
269-621-5282
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