Essay: The work that prevents collapse
Unseen labour and the hidden foundation of leadership
What sustains a system is rarely what is most visible.
In organisational life, attention is drawn to moments of crisis, breakthrough, performance and change. These are the points at which leadership is most publicly recognised and most easily narrated. Yet the conditions that make those moments survivable — and sometimes unnecessary — are created elsewhere.
They are created in the ongoing, largely unrecognised labour of maintenance.
This is the work that monitors risk before it becomes event.
The work that holds relationships in usable condition.
The work that absorbs complexity so that others can function.
The work that keeps standards from quietly eroding over time.
It is the work that prevents collapse.
The structural invisibility of essential labour
Unseen work is not simply work that goes unnoticed. It is work that is structurally backgrounded.
It does not produce immediate, countable outputs. It produces continuity. It produces the absence of failure. It produces environments in which other forms of labour can appear effective.
Because it does not present as achievement, it is often read as personal capacity, temperament or “just part of the role.” It is feminised, naturalised and individualised. It becomes something a particular person is assumed to be able to carry, rather than a function that must be resourced, recognised and distributed.
When this happens, the system becomes dependent on labour it cannot see.
Leadership as maintenance
Leadership theory continues to privilege vision, change and performance. In practice, the most demanding aspect of leadership is the sustained holding of conditions over time.
To lead is to:
remain in responsibility in the presence of uncertainty
make decisions that carry consequence beyond the immediate moment
maintain standards without the reward structure of crisis
absorb the pressure created by structural contradiction
This is maintenance.
Not as repetition or stagnation, but as the continuous ethical and relational work that allows a system to remain viable.
Transformation does not occur in the absence of maintenance. It depends on it.
The human cost of continuity
Where unseen work is required for a system to function but is not recognised as work, burnout becomes predictable.
Not as a failure of resilience, but as the result of a structural arrangement in which:
responsibility is high
authority is partial
resources are insufficient
the labour that holds everything together is unnamed
The individuals who carry this work are often those most committed to the purpose of the system. They are the ones who notice early signs of failure, who compensate for gaps, who hold relational and ethical continuity.
Their depletion is frequently misread as personal limitation rather than as an indicator of how the system is organised.
Burnout, in this sense, is a diagnostic.
The civilisation function
The Roman figure of Cloacina presided over the infrastructural flows that allowed the city to live. Her domain was not the visible life of Rome but the hidden system that made that life possible.
Civilisations, like organisations, depend on what they do not celebrate.
To treat maintenance as peripheral is to place continuity at risk.
To recognise it as central is to change how leadership, value and care are understood.
Restoring value to what sustains
The first movement in addressing unseen work is conceptual. It requires language precise enough to identify the labour that is currently absorbed into personality and sacrifice.
From there, different questions become possible:
Where does this work currently sit?
Who is carrying it?
What authority accompanies it?
How is it resourced?
These are structural questions, not individual ones.
They shift the conversation from coping to design.
The work before the visible work
Every functioning system rests on forms of labour that do not appear in its public story.
To lead is not only to initiate change, but to take responsibility for continuity.
To care for a system is to care for the conditions that allow it to endure.
The work that prevents collapse is not secondary to leadership.
It is its hidden foundation.
© Pamela Weatherill. Please cite the original source when sharing or referencing this work.
Dr Pamela-June Weatherill is the founder of The Cloacina Collective, a thought-leadership and practice platform dedicated to making visible the unseen work that sustains people, systems and cultures.