Two People. Same Team. Same Morning. Not the Same Day.

Two people. Same team. Same manager. Same morning.

One came in after eight hours of sleep. His biggest stress this week is a delayed delivery on a home renovation. He is running at about 85% capacity before the day has even started.

The other came in after three hours of sleep. Her mother had a fall at 1am. She was at A&E until 4. She has a child with complex needs whose support package was just cut. She is managing a benefits appeal in her lunch breaks. She is running at maybe 20% today.

Their manager does a team check-in at 9am.

He says he's good.

She says she's fine.

Fine.

Their manager nods, moves on, and assigns them both the same workload for the day. Because that's what fair looks like. Same role. Same expectations. Same standards.

Except it isn't fair. It's identical. And identical is not the same as fair.

This is what I call External Load. It is the load people carry through the door before the working day begins. The stuff that has nothing to do with their job description and everything to do with their capacity to do it.

External Load is real. It is not an excuse. It is not a wellbeing concept. It is a measurable factor that directly affects performance, capacity, and retention in ways that never show up in any standard organisational measurement.

Most organisations have no mechanism to acknowledge it exists. Let alone account for it.

And here is where it gets expensive.

The woman running at 20% today does not stay at 20% forever. Most of the time she recovers, she manages, she holds it together. But she is doing so at a cost. She is drawing on reserves that are not being replenished. She is absorbing a load that the organisation has no idea she is carrying. And when she eventually cannot hold it anymore, when the errors start, when the sick days begin, when she hands in her notice with no warning, the organisation will call it a performance issue or a personal decision.

It was neither.

It was a capacity issue that nobody ever measured. Because nobody ever asked the right questions. Because the system only counts what people produce. Not what they are carrying while they produce it.

I want to be careful here because I know what some people will be thinking.

We cannot be responsible for what happens in people's personal lives. We cannot carry everyone's problems. There is a boundary between work and home that needs to exist.

I agree with all of that.

I am not asking organisations to solve their people's personal problems. I am asking them to lead accurately. To understand that two people saying fine at 9am are not starting from the same place. And that leading them identically is not neutral. It is a choice. And it has consequences.

The manager in this story is not a bad manager. They are a normal manager doing what normal managers do. They have not been taught to read External Load. Nobody ever showed them how. Their training told them to treat people equally. It did not tell them that equal treatment of unequal situations produces unequal outcomes.

That is a system failure. Not a leadership failure.

Pressure Literacy maps External Load as one of five dimensions in the Human Load Index. It gives organisations the language and the framework to acknowledge what their people are carrying without overstepping, without intruding, and without asking managers to become therapists.

Because there is a version of this that is manageable. That does not require anyone to overshare. That does not blur professional boundaries. That simply asks leaders to read the room more accurately than they currently do.

He said he was good. She said she was fine.

One of them was right.

Knowing which one matters.

Nikki