In your career, how to discern whether your leader is developing you or squeezing you is a deep and realistic problem. The key to judgment is not the amount of work or the difficulty of the task, but whether the effort you put in is directly proportional to the resources, remuneration and room for growth.
First of all, we need to understand the essential difference between "squeezing" and "cultivating". The two may seem contradictory, but there may be a subtle connection in a particular situation. Squeezing often means excessive workloads and demanding tasks, but to a certain extent, such an environment can force employees to quickly adapt to pressure, improve their self-ability, and develop the spirit of perseverance. However, such growth should be based on fair and reasonable incentives. If the leader assigns unconventional tasks and uses them as one of the evaluation criteria, which will affect your salary adjustment or promotion opportunities, then this can be regarded as a kind of tempering and cultivation of you. On the other hand, if there is no clear incentive feedback mechanism, and it simply increases the workload, it is likely to squeeze you rather than cultivate you.
Second, it's also crucial to focus on what and what your boss is assigning you to do. The real training is not only limited to the improvement of professional skills, but more importantly, the development of all-round capabilities. If your leader is genuinely developing you, he will gradually hand over the management work to you, giving you the opportunity to gain access to advanced management skills such as team building, project coordination, and decision-making, so that you can gain experience in practice and prepare you for higher roles in the future. On the contrary, if your leader only asks you to act as his "firefighter", handling trivial matters and solving temporary problems, without touching on any core tasks that will help you in your career development, then he may not treat you as a person to cultivate, but is more inclined to use your value to meet his short-term needs.
To judge whether the leader is cultivating you or squeezing you, you need to consider the following factors: first, the difficulty of the work task and the matching degree of the corresponding reward mechanism; The second is whether the leader provides you with a practical career development path, including but not limited to promotion channels and salary packages; The third is whether the leader is willing to let go and let you get in touch with and master more complex management skills. Only when these conditions are met can we say that the leader is really cultivating you, and not just squeezing the value of your labor for his own benefit.