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Kadine Cooper, CPCC, also known as Coach K, is a certified coach, facilitator and speaker, specializing in empowering professionals and organizations to reach their full potential. With a focus on personal and professional development, Ms. Cooper leverages her expertise to drive positive change and growth.
I can usually tell within the first 10 minutes of a coaching session. Before the client finishes describing their job, before they name the problem, I already know the pattern.
They talk fast. They lead with accomplishments, projects completed, fires put out, gaps filled that nobody asked them to fill. And somewhere in the middle of it, almost as an afterthought, they say the thing that brought them to my session: “I don’t understand why I keep getting passed over.”
This is the over-functioning employee. And right now, I am seeing more of them than ever.
Over-functioning is not the same as working hard. It is a specific pattern: absorbing other people’s work without being asked, saying yes before the request is finished, treating every organizational gap as a personal responsibility. It looks like dedication. From the inside, it feels like survival. And it is costing people, particularly mid-career professionals in their 30s, the very advancement they are working themselves into the ground to reach.
According to a 2024 report from SHRM, the world’s largest professional association dedicated to HR, 34 per cent of U.S. workers reported a lack of recognition for their contributions. Meanwhile, research published by Forbes found 77 per cent of employees are asked to take on work beyond their job description at least once a week.
The extra work is expected. The visibility is not guaranteed.
One of my clients spent most of her career doing exactly what she had been taught success looked like. Long hours. Late nights. She even took on the job of three people in one of her corporate roles and absorbed the load without complaint, certain that eventually the effort would speak for itself. It did not. The recognition she was working toward kept moving. The support she needed never materialized. Eventually, her body made the decision her career would not: she took a mental health leave.
What she described to me when we began working together was not just exhaustion. It was a deeper disorientation, the feeling that the work had stopped meaning anything. That she had given everything to a role that never once acknowledged her.
This is where over-functioning stops being a career strategy problem and becomes a personal one. For so many of the clients I work with, their output and their identity have quietly become the same thing. When the doing stops working, they don’t just feel stuck, they feel lost.
The Deloitte 2025 Global Gen Z and millennial survey found 46 per cent of millennials say their job is central to their identity.
That is not inherently a problem. But when the job does not give back what you are putting in, that equation becomes dangerous.
This pattern is especially pronounced among women and racialized professionals, people who were taught, often implicitly, that they had to work twice as hard to be seen half as much.
It generates a trap: the harder you work, the more indispensable you become in your current role, and the less visible you are as a candidate for the next promotion.
The painful realization my clients eventually reach is that the people getting promoted are not the ones doing the most work. They are doing the most strategically visible work. One fills the gap. The other shapes the conversation about what the gap means.
For her, the shift started with stopping, not dramatically, but deliberately. She identified which parts of her work were genuinely hers and which she had quietly inherited from a culture that rewarded availability over excellence.
She rebuilt her professional identity around her values and strengths, developed language for her contributions that was specific and outcome-connected and built a strategy from that foundation rather than from desperation. In my experience, that intentional work is clarifying in a way that more hours never are.
If you are reading this and recognizing yourself in it, I want to offer one reframe before you go back to your inbox: busyness is not the same as value.
The goal is not to do less, it is to be intentional about what your effort signals, to whom and why. The most powerful question you can ask yourself right now is not “how can I do more?” It is “what would I stop doing if I actually trusted my own worth?”
That question has a way of changing everything.