Why Working at Night to Protect Your Team Is Holding Them Back

Imagine the following situation: Your stakeholders or bosses deliver critical project information to you late. So you, to avoid overloading your team, decide to stay up working until the early hours. They sleep peacefully, the work gets done, and you feel like you're a good "protective shield."

Sounds like empathetic leadership, right? But in reality, it isn't. It's a mirage that will eventually become a trap.

On more than one occasion, I've worked with professionals and leaders who feel exhausted and overwhelmed. When we analyze the situation, we see it's not an issue of lack of personnel or technical workload. Often it's more a problem of blocked boundary management and a strong self-image as protectors.

This leads them to confuse empathy with taking on others' responsibilities, generating a cycle of operational codependency.

The 3 Blocks of the Protector Leader

During my work with these leaders, we've identified certain beliefs that tend to repeat and that keep them working at night while simultaneously turning them into a bottleneck:

• Excessive benevolence bias: The belief that delegating means "making the team suffer" or passing them a burden.
• Individualistic efficiency: Thinking "I can do it faster," which justifies not delegating due to the "time cost" involved in teaching.
• Resignation in the face of conflict: Feeling powerless to demand that external stakeholders or superiors meet their deadlines, out of fear of consequences or lack of time to challenge them.

The breakthrough in this type of situation usually occurs when we shift perspective. If the leader always rescues the team, they're depriving them of business exposure and the growth necessary to advance; ultimately, they're harming their long-term development.

Delegating isn't passing off dirty work. On the contrary, it's saying: "You're leveling up. I need your support on this, which will give you business exposure and prepare you for the next step."

When we see delegation as a development opportunity rather than a punishment, everything changes.

If you recognize yourself in this dynamic, here's a practical action plan:

1. Reframe your delegation conversations: Talk with 1 or 2 people on your team. Present a new responsibility to them not as "extra work," but as strategic exposure and succession planning.
2. Manage expectations upward: Implement follow-up meetings with stakeholders exactly the day after a missed deadline. The success metric isn't that they deliver everything on time, it's reducing your nighttime hours compensating for others' lack of organization.
3. The next time you hesitate to delegate to the team, ask yourself this: "Who am I really protecting when I work at night: my team, or my own need for everything to turn out perfect and conflict-free?"