It’s not noble; it isn’t even enviable. It might feign nobility or servant-heartedness, but it’s not. It’s a pattern I have that prevents me from actually benefitting from the skills and kind hearts of others.
I’ll start with one of the more obvious dumb tasks: air conditioner repair.
Our office has roughly 15 air conditioners. When your facility has been frankensteined together over 30-40 years, you make do. They’re almost all residential units. Deferred maintenance has meant that in the past 26 months we have replaced (I think) six of them. We have done repairs and diagnostics on another three or four. One currently doesn’t work. Another one has a wire mesh screwed over the top of the condenser unit.
One of our AC vendors keeps vampire hours. He’ll work on a unit until late into the night if the customer is up for it. He was built for odd hours and has the stories to show it.
So he has to replace one of our bigger units and he chose vampire time to take care of it. No problem, I thought. I’ll volunteer as tribute.
It’s the right thing to do.
Assuming the Role of the Joyful Martyr
If you’re like me, you might be a joyful martyr—that person who gladly suffers just a little more because you assume nobody else will join you or help you.
On the surface you’re the team-player. You’re the “take the lowest place” kind of person. You live to serve, right? Nothing wrong with that.
Not so fast.
The joyful martyr assumes nobody else is interested. He or she takes the place, in part, because of an inflated view of self-importance. (I speak about myself here.)
I mean, can you not even ask?
So there I am, sitting up at the building. It’s 10pm, 11pm, 12am. It’s so dumb. I’m exhausted. Why am I not just leaving the guys here? If we can’t hire a trustworthy contractor we have more than AC problems.
But there I sit. Forever. I go sit in my office, do work, and then climb the stairs and check in on the guys working.
“Done yet?”
“Not yet. Need to do a few more things.”
Sitting. Waiting. Walking. Working.
Now I’m annoyed. “Joyful” left a long time ago.
Keeping Help at Bay
The joyful martyr in me enjoys being the last to leave and the one who appears the most willing to help.
But all of this got slowed (I won’t yet say “halted”) a year or so ago. I was in an eval with some other leaders on the team and my propensity for stepping in and taking on tasks I assumed no one else wanted came up.
“We’re on the same team. You have to stop taking these on yourself.”
Okay, so maybe the joyful side isn’t as obvious as I thought it was.
What mindset did I actually have? One that assumed only I was the one who needed to do the most annoying tasks. Such a perspective limits in at least two, inter-connected ways: (1) it removes the chance that someone else might actually want to do the task and enjoy it, and (2) it prevents me from leaning on those around me.
But assume that nobody wants the task (which with vampire ACs is usually the case) and it is no one’s direct job to keep vampire AC hours (besides the AC vendor himself). What then?
This is where that second reason becomes so important.
It doesn’t have to be your job to step in—it can happen simply because you’re on the team. You share the tasks and distribute the load.
Just Ask
It might sound simple but the allure of being the joyful martyr—and that little bit of self-inflicted suffering we get from it—keeps us from leaning on others.
Every team has vampire tasks (even if it isn’t necessarily keeping late hours). Sometimes those tasks have a clear owner; other times they don’t.
Rather than assume you need to do it because you’re the bigger servant, share the load. Let others step in. Let them help. Without it, you’re assuming the team you’re on can’t handle the load and you have to take it on yourself.
That’s not a team I’d want to be on (even if I am complicit in creating it).
And what do you gain when you ask? You gain a team with a new capacity to serve one another.
Where are you under-estimating those around you?
(Also, for the record, I just leave our AC guy at the building now.)
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