Three hands-on ways I watch for strain: after-hours Slack messages, a 1:1 question I reuse, and meeting habits that can add stress.

The after-hours Slack pattern I don't ignore

I first noticed this when the same three people started posting at the same time every night. It was little stuff. A quick Jira link, a screenshot, and an "I'll circle back" that landed at 10:15 p.m. for three nights in a row. When I see that kind of pattern, I pull up the channel history and look for a specific combo: late timestamps, short, transactional messages, and fewer questions. When people stop asking for help and quietly take on more work, I take that as a warning sign.

My move is to treat the message as a signal and make the extra work visible to the team. If the same person answers with more work, I open the calendar and book 20 minutes that day.

Two practical things make this work in real life. First, I turn on Slack's scheduled send, and I use it myself. When my team sees me queue a reply for 8:30 a.m., it shows them that they don't need to respond immediately. Second, I stop rewarding the midnight post with immediate attention. If I respond instantly, I can unintentionally make late-night messages feel like the fastest way to get help. When the late message is truly critical, the escalation path should be explicit (phone, PagerDuty, whatever you've got). I don't want my leadership style to make late-night work feel expected.

The 1:1 question I use to uncover hidden workload

I keep my 1:1s pretty boring on purpose. The question that gives me the most honest signal about team well-being isn't "How are you?" because everyone can survive that with a thumbs-up. I ask: "What are you carrying that I don't see?" Then I give them time to think before I fill the silence.

The answers I get are usually practical rather than emotional, like "I'm the only one who knows the deploy script," "I'm getting pulled into every pricing exception," or "I'm doing onboarding and closing tickets." That's useful because I can actually act on it. I like to follow with a second, equally unglamorous prompt: "If we had to drop one thing this week, what would you drop first?" The first answer tells me what's heavy. The second tells me whether the person believes dropping anything is allowed.

Some of the people I rely on most can be reluctant to flag an overloaded schedule. They may have learned from past workplaces that asking for help makes them look less capable. So I bring receipts. I reference specific artifacts: the GitHub review queue, the calendar that has back-to-back internal meetings, the Notion page that keeps growing, and the customer thread they always end up owning. If I'm wrong, they can correct me. If I'm right, we can address the workload without waiting for them to reach a breaking point.

Then I do one concrete thing in the same meeting. I open the shared doc and type a sentence like: "By Friday, we will move X to the next sprint and assign Y to Pat." It sounds small, but making the decision right there removes one more thing for the person to carry.

Make meetings less stressful

I've sat in well-run meetings that still left the team tense afterward. You could see it afterward: tense body language, shorter conversations, and people rushing back to their desks. That is a leadership choice about stress.

The simplest change I've made is to stop using surprise as a tool. If a meeting is going to include a hard call (reorg implications, a headcount freeze, or a project being paused), I put that in the calendar description in plain English. When the purpose of the meeting is unclear, people may spend the opening minutes trying to figure out what is going on.

Second, I watch for one specific behavior: leaders answering before the question is finished. It's subtle, and it's contagious. People can get the impression that speed matters more than clarity. If I'm running it, I force myself to take notes while they're talking, even if I know my answer. If I'm not running it but have a chance to step in, I model the pause: "Hold on, I want to hear the rest of that." The discussion usually goes more smoothly when people have a chance to finish their thoughts.

Finally, I put decisions where everyone can see them. I use a shared doc with three lines: Decision, Owner, By when. Clear decisions also mean people don't have to spend their evening wondering what was actually decided. If you care about well-being, make the work legible. The result is a clearer record of what was decided and who is responsible for the next step.