The Other Side of the Contract

On Overfunctioning, Urgency, and the Administrators Who Enable the System They Resent

This piece is the other side of a coin. In January, I wrote about the invisible labor that sustains academic departments; the unspoken contract by which research administrators absorb risk, compensate for structural gaps, and carry institutional weight that no one formally assigns them and no one formally acknowledges. That essay resonated more widely than almost anything I have written, which tells me it poked at something real. But resonance is not the same as the full picture, and the full picture requires something more uncomfortable: looking at ourselves.

What follows is not a retraction. I attended a conference  recently and sat in rooms full of skilled, knowledgeable, deeply committed research administrators; people who have given a lot to this profession and continue to show up despite conditions that would drive most people out. I left those conversations with enormous respect, and also with something I could not stop thinking about. For all the legitimate grievance in our profession, we have developed some habits that are not serving us, or the researchers we support, or the institutions we care about. I am raising my hand here too. We absorb what we should redirect. We fix what we should return. We rescue what we should let fail. And then we go to conferences and talk about how exhausted we are. That is not a criticism. It is a pattern worth examining.

This is not a critique of individuals. It is, again, a description of a dynamic. But this time, it is one we have more agency over than we tend to admit.

The Urgency Trap

Everything in research administration is urgent. Deadlines, compliance flags, budget discrepancies, sponsor inquiries, last-minute requests. The queue is never empty, and the pace rarely relents. What we have done, collectively and often unconsciously, is internalize this urgency as a feature of our professional identity rather than examining it as a symptom of a dysfunctional system.

The problem with operating in permanent reactive mode is not only what it does to our capacity. It is what it does to our thinking. Urgency is the enemy of deliberation. When every situation is on fire, there is no space to step back, ask why the fire started, or consider whether the response is actually proportionate. We move from problem to problem in a continuous loop of triage, and over time that loop becomes the job. Not because it has to be, but because we have never created the conditions for anything else.

This matters because the most valuable thing a skilled research administrator brings is not the ability to fix things quickly. It is judgment - the capacity to assess a situation, identify what is actually at stake, weigh competing priorities, and advise accordingly. Judgment requires reflection. It requires the kind of deliberate, collaborative thinking that reactive environments actively suppress. When we are always in firefighting mode, we are not developing judgment in ourselves or in the people we work with. We are developing speed. And speed without judgment is just efficient dysfunction.

There is also a compounding effect worth naming. The urgency trap does not stay contained to the immediate crisis. It trains everyone in the system, including us, to reach for the fastest available solution rather than the most considered one. Critical thinking atrophies when it is never exercised. Researchers who have always been rescued from tight timelines do not develop timeline discipline. Administrators who have always operated in reaction mode do not develop the habit of anticipating problems before they arrive. The whole system gets worse at the thing that would actually make it better: thinking ahead.

The urgency trap persists because interrupting it as an RA feels irresponsible in the moment. Pausing to ask a better question when a deadline is looming feels like a luxury. But the pause is not the problem. The culture that made the pause feel impossible is, but yet we do little to try and slow it down.

Overfunctioning Is Not Virtue

There is a concept in family systems theory called overfunctioning: the pattern by which one person in a system takes on more than their share of the cognitive, emotional, or operational load, typically in response to another person or group that is underfunctioning. The overfunctioner often tells themselves they are being responsible, reliable, indispensable. What they are actually doing is enabling the underfunctioner to remain exactly as they are.

This dynamic is alive and well in research administration.

We are, as a profession, extraordinarily competent. We know the regulations, the timelines, the sponsor quirks, the institutional policies, and often the unwritten rules that govern all of it. That competence is real and hard-won. But competence deployed without boundaries does not build stronger systems. It builds dependency. It builds a version of our departments where the research administrator is the single point of failure; the one person who knows where everything is, how everything works, and what to do when it doesn't. We call this being indispensable. A more accurate term is fragile.

When we overfunction, we are not just absorbing someone else's burden. We are also denying them the experience of carrying it. A PI who has never had to manage a compliance consequence does not develop compliance judgment. A staff member who has always been rescued from a missed deadline does not develop deadline discipline. We have spent years solving problems that, if left to play out even partially, might have taught something. Instead, we have optimized for conflict avoidance in the short run and accepted stunted development in the long run for everyone involved, including ourselves.

There is something else worth naming here: overfunctioning diminishes your own capacity. Every crisis you absorb is capacity you are not spending on the work that you actually own. Every problem you solve that belongs to someone else is a strategic initiative that doesn't get started, a process improvement that doesn't get built, a harder and more important conversation that gets deferred. We complain about being undervalued while trading away our strategic potential for operational heroics that no one asked for, and most people never notice.

The Complaint Without the Change

At conferences, in peer networks, in the corners of department offices, research administrators share remarkably consistent stories of burnout, overload, and frustration. There is solidarity in that, and it is not nothing. But I have noticed that the complaint loop has become its own kind of comfort - a space where we affirm each other's grievances without examining our own role in perpetuating them.

The structural critique is valid. The incentive misalignments are real. Central offices do issue mandates without understanding their downstream effects. Faculty are largely insulated from operational consequences. Leadership does avoid confronting tradeoffs. All of that is true.

And we keep showing up and making it work anyway.

Complaining about a system while continuing to absorb its costs is not advocacy. It is participation with commentary. If the goal is to actually change these harmful dynamics - and I believe it should be - then the complaint has to become something more actionable: a boundary, a redirect, a frank conversation about expectations, a willingness to let something partially fail when that failure is instructive and the stakes are appropriate.

This is uncomfortable, because research administration culture has a deep streak of conscientiousness running through it. We care about the work. We believe in the mission. We do not want grants to fail, or audits to be triggered, or PIs to be blindsided by consequences they could have avoided. That conscientiousness is part of what makes us good at what we do. But conscientiousness without boundaries is not professionalism. It is self-erosion.

What Coaching Actually Requires

Here is the version of research administration that I think is both more sustainable and more effective: one where we see our role less as fixers and more as builders of better judgment.

This requires a different skill set than most of us were trained for. It requires the ability to hold a line when someone pushes against it, not because we are obstructionist, but because the line exists for a reason and the reason is worth explaining. It requires the ability to give direct feedback to a PI when their habits are creating risk or fueling unnecessary urgency. Not the kind softened into ambiguity, not buried in a compliance memo, but said plainly and documented. It requires the willingness to let a researcher work through a difficult situation with our guidance rather than our intervention, even when our intervention would be faster.

Coaching is not the absence of help. It is the calibration of help to what the situation actually needs. Sometimes that is hands-on assistance. More often, in a mature professional relationship, it is a question that helps someone think more clearly, or a boundary that redirects the problem to the person who owns it, or a piece of direct feedback that names a pattern rather than just managing its effects.

This is harder than fixing things. It requires more self-awareness, more relational skill, and more tolerance for the short-term friction that comes from not absorbing problems on someone else's behalf. But it produces something that reflexive problem-solving never does: it produces change.

The researcher who has been coached through a difficult budget situation is more capable next time. The department that has experienced the controlled friction of a boundary is more likely to bring things earlier next time. The institution that has research administrators who set expectations and hold them is building something more resilient than the one running on invisible labor and professional goodwill.

The Mirror

The invisible labor essay was about what the institution takes from us without acknowledgment or reciprocity. This essay is about what we give away that was never asked for and what it costs us, and the people we support, when we keep doing it.

Both things are true simultaneously and holding them together is the actual work. Structural critique without self-examination produces righteous exhaustion. Self-examination without structural critique produces self-blame. Neither gets us to a more functional profession.

What does get us there is the harder combination: naming the system clearly and then deciding what we are and are not willing to keep doing inside it. Setting the expectation. Having the conversation. Coaching instead of rescuing. Letting the friction do its work when the stakes allow for it.

We came to this work because the mission matters. That has not changed. What has to change is the way we carry it - less absorption, more accountability, and enough self-awareness to know the difference between support and rescue.

Further Reading

Escaping the Drama Triangle: Strategies for Successful Research Administration from the Psychology of Codependence — Deborah J. Clark, Journal of Research Administration, Vol. 51, Iss. 2, Fall 2020

Helping: How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help — Edgar H. Schein, Berrett-Koehler, 2009

To Improve Critical Thinking, Don’t Fall into the Urgency Trap — Stephanie Santos, Harvard Business Review, 2023