Overfunctioning in Higher Ed:
What Supervisors Need to Own
If you work in higher education, overfunctioning isn’t a concept you need explained to you. You’re probably doing it right now. And if you supervise people, there’s a decent chance someone on your team is doing it too (also right now) and a real chance you haven’t said a word about it.
That’s what we’re here to talk about.
First, a little grace for all of us: overfunctioning in higher ed isn’t a character flaw. It’s practically load-bearing in the structure of the industry. Faculty life is the oldest profession on campus, and Most other roles, student affairs, advising, administration, operations, is in some ways a derivative of it. And faculty work, historically, has never had clean edges. (Your scholarship doesn’t clock out.) The developmental work of students (you know, the real kind that changes people) happens everywhere and at all hours, not just in classrooms. Layer residential life on top of that, and you have a workplace that has been genuinely, structurally 24 hours since basically forever. For everyone on campus.
If you’ve ever read Harry Potter, you already have a mental model for this. Nearly every teacher at Hogwarts was also running the school, managing crises, making institutional decisions. The staff members who weren’t also faculty were Hagrid and Madam Pomfrey…and even they crossed over sometimes. That’s not a quirky fictional detail. That’s just what residential education has always looked like.
And then there’s mission. People come to this work because they’re called to it. Anyone who has ever cared deeply for another person — a student, a child, a parent, anyone — knows you don’t get to turn that off at 5pm. Our families all know, even the furbabies. Chief Happiness Officer Felix will tell you our work never ends. He’s only been in this industry ten years to my thirty, but he’s a quick study.
The point is: creatures who are built to give care do not have an off switch. Neither do people who are called to this work. And that means telling someone to simply stop is not just ineffective — it can feel insensitive. Supervising in higher ed is its own particular adventure.
You cannot tell a scholar not to think about their work over the summer or tell a student-facing staffer to ignore cries for help even when the email is super-late. I’m not being dramatic; it is a near-impossible instruction. What you can do is be clear and honest about what is expected and what is compensated and hold that line with some consistency. More on that in a moment.
Okay, here's where it gets personal.
If your response to everything above is some version of well, that’s just higher ed — hold up and sit with that for a second. Because that response, as understandable as it is, is not neutral. When the system allows overfunctioning and you as a manager also allow it, you’re not just going along with the culture. You’re actively letting a position expand beyond what it should be. And when that person eventually leaves (because they will, circumstances happen, sometimes they win the lottery and move somewhere with better weather and truly, good for them) you’re responsible for covering that work.
Here’s the uncomfortable question: could you replace them with one person, at the same salary, doing what they actually do? Not what’s in their position description, but what they actually do?
If your gut just clenched a little, that’s data. That position has “crept.” Call it Expectations Creep — capital E, capital C — and know that it didn’t happen because your employee has bad boundaries. It happened because the system rewarded overfunctioning and nobody pushed back. Including, possibly, you. That’s okay. You can fix it. Let’s talk about how.
The place to start is visibility.
Pull your position descriptions. For anyone where the PD feels thin or out of date, have a real conversation: here’s what’s written down . Over the course of an actual year, what are you doing that this document doesn’t capture? You may not be able to revise the PD right away (and if you’ve ever tried to update a PD at a large institution, you know that process has its own timeline and its own energy), but you need to understand the real hours, the invisible work, the things that became habitual without ever being formally assigned.
That visibility is everything. It’s what lets you start rolling things back before someone burns out, checks out, or starts updating their LinkedIn profile.
Rolling it back.
Here are a few things that actually help:
- Audit for habit. Some of what your team is doing has simply never been questioned — it’s always been done, so it keeps getting done. Is it still necessary? Could it be done differently, handed off, or just ended? You are allowed to end things. (I know that feels radical.)
- Protect the intake. When new assignments come down from above, you are standing between institutional leadership and your team. That is one of the most important places you can advocate for your people. Receive the new assignment, assess what it actually requires, and make the case for something to come off the plate in exchange. I’m not going to pretend it’s a comfortable conversation. But it is one of the most direct ways you prevent your team from drowning. (Difficult convos with your leader-boss is one of the most frequent coaching topics, so it’s not just you, I promise!)
- Trust your gut on the “lottery” test, above. If thinking about a particular person leaving makes your stomach drop — because the market is thin, because the knowledge gap would be enormous, because you genuinely don’t know how it would work — that is your highest-priority position. Start there. Not because crisis is imminent, but because you want to solve this before it is. Start to plan how you can right-size the work in that role and your current employee (and future one) will thank you.
The goal is not to limit people who love this work. You can’t do that, and caring leader-bosses don’t try. The goal is to make sure that love isn’t slowly grinding them down, and that you’re not the supervisor who only figured that out after they were already gone.
0 Comments