Hey,

Every workplace loves the woman who is easy to work with. She is reliable, flexible, helpful, good in a crisis and rarely the person making things harder. It sounds like a compliment. Until easy to work with starts meaning easy to ask, easy to depend on, easy to load up.

Sometimes the reward for being the person who always makes things work is simply being given more things to make work.

In #Edition91, we’re looking at the costs of being endlessly useful at work – when competence becomes convenience, invisible work eats into visible opportunity, and being indispensable does not always make you more powerful.

Inside this Edition:
👉 The Cost of Being Easy to Work With
🥗 What she’s watching, reading, doing
📰 5 headlines worth her time
✨ Her Spotlight
🤍 Note to Her

Being easy to collaborate with should never mean easy to load up.

You rarely make things difficult.
And people love working with you.
Until “easy to work with” swiftly becomes “she’ll take care of it.” 

That shift happens in tiny increments: one favour, one extra task, one problem that lands with you because you’re good at making problems disappear. And that is where competence can become convenience.

Researchers call this non-promotable work – tasks that help an organisation function but do little for the career of the person doing them. Linda Babcock and colleagues found that women were more likely than men to volunteer for, be asked to take on, and accept these low-promotability tasks.

The strange trap is that: The better you become at invisible work, the easier it becomes to keep giving you invisible work.

Your reliability becomes the backup plan.
Your emotional intelligence becomes conflict management.
Your flexibility becomes something other people schedule around.
Your competence becomes: “She’ll figure it out.”
And when you become very good at absorbing friction, the workplace has fewer reasons to remove the friction.

Sometimes the reward for being the woman who always makes it work is simply being given more things to make work. That can make you indispensable. 

But indispensable and powerful are not the same thing.
Because every invisible yes has an opportunity cost.

An hour spent rescuing someone else’s problem is an hour not spent on the project with your name on it. The meeting you organised is time someone else may spend presenting the idea. The gap you quietly filled may never appear in your performance review. You can become essential to everyone else’s work while leaving less room for the work that advances your own.

So the answer is not to become difficult.
It is to stop treating usefulness as an obligation.
Before the automatic “sure,” ask one thing: If I say yes to this, what am I saying no to?

Helping should be a choice, not an identity. Being easy to work with is a strength. But it should describe how you collaborate and not how much of you people are allowed to use.

💬 Ideas for the week when life starts sounding like a deadline.

🎬 WATCH: Support the Girls (2018)
This is a warm comedy about a woman who spends her day solving problems, protecting people and keeping everything moving. Regina Hall is brilliant as the kind of person everyone relies on – and often without noticing how much she is carrying.
📖 READ: The No Club by Linda Babcock, Brenda Peyser, Lise Vesterlund & Laurie Weingart
Four women started tracking all the thankless tasks they were taking on at work. What began as a private pact to say “no” became years of research into why women disproportionately end up doing work that matters but rarely gets them promoted.
🎧 LISTEN: “Surface Pressure” by  Jessica Darrow, Encanto
A song about being the capable one. The strong one. The person everyone assumes can carry a little more. It is technically from a Disney film, but the older you get, the less it sounds like a Disney song.

🌍 5 stories shaping the week for women everywhere.

⚖️ Washington’s abortion coverage law survives challenge: A U.S. appeals court rejected a church’s challenge to Washington’s law requiring insurers that cover maternity care to also cover abortion, keeping the reproductive-health mandate intact.
🧬 Women’s testosterone prescriptions have jumped 146%: Testosterone use among women has nearly tripled since 2023, even as patients face pharmacy denials and the U.S. still has no FDA-approved testosterone product specifically for women.
💰 Women’s health startup Evvy raises $40 million: Evvy secured a $40M Series B to expand vaginal-health testing and turn data from more than 100,000 patients into a larger research engine for female health.
🚨 Seven women’s deaths trigger major South Africa probe: Police are investigating whether the deaths of seven women found near Johannesburg are connected, as President Cyril Ramaphosa vowed an intensive investigation amid renewed alarm over violence against women.
🏆 Jean Smart makes Emmy history with Hacks: Jean Smart won her fifth lead-comedy-actress Emmy for Hacks, becoming the only woman to win the category for every season of a multi-season series.

Found her. Loved her. Needed you to see her.

Before “I’m Donna” became one of Suits’ most recognisable lines, character Donna Paulsen had already built her value in the spaces nobody else seemed to notice.

She remembered everything, read people before they spoke, anticipated problems, managed Harvey Specter, handled conflicts and often knew what the room needed before the room did. Officially, she was a legal secretary. In practice, she was part strategist, part fixer, part emotional infrastructure. And that is what makes her arc interesting.

Donna was indispensable long before she had the title to match it. Eventually, she became COO, but only after years of proving that the work everyone relied on was actually leadership.

✨ Sometimes being needed is obvious long before being powerful is recognised.

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✨P.S.  Send this to her who needs to know this because the best kind of wisdom goes from women to women 💚