How managers and leaders can help prevent burnout
Burnout, and the broader umbrella of chronic stress-related afflictions are a modern-day epidemic in the workplace, claiming the lives of 120,000 people per year in the US and causing over $300 billion in costs.
The prevention of this loss of lives and life quality is very possible to avert, yet requires significant awareness and action at the individual, group, and organizational levels.
In support of this goal of reducing the societal damage of stress and burnout, this essay explores burnout prevention recommendations for managers and organizations. These insights stem from my own 10 years of work with organizations including Microsoft, Coinbase, and Walmart, as well as my work as a leadership coach, and also through many conversations with researchers, founders, leaders, and managers such as Thomas Gheysen Da Silva.
I recently had a very insightful conversation with Thomas Gheysen about preventing burnout, and have added Thomas’s insights into how managers and organizational leaders can navigate the topic of burnout with their teams, as quotes throughout this essay.
To begin, as a manager or leader it is important that you firstly educate yourself on burnout.
It’s critical to understand that the majority people will experience a full or partial burnout during their careers. According to a mid-2021 Indeed survey, 52% of respondents had experienced burnout, which was up from an already elevated 43% in the prior year of 2020’s pre-COVID survey.
It’s also important to know that a burnout also not mean that a person has become permanently “damaged goods,” or cannot ever be trusted again as a “burnout risk.” Burnout victims even include famous examples such as Arianna Huffington, Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, and Prince Harry.
Businesses benefit from their employees’ efforts and outputs, and as such share in the responsibility of taking care of their employees’ wellbeing. For managers and leaders, learning how burnout happens, how to spot it, and how to support people through a burnout is key to honoring this responsibility.
While this is a non-fully inclusive list, here are some of the key, externally-recognizable warning signs of burnout that managers and leaders should know about:
Cynicism
Increased criticism, defensiveness, pessimism, or worst-case scenario thinking
Personality shifts
Irritation, anxiety, or apathy
Reduced productivity
Persistent fatigue or emotional exhaustion
Reduced creativity and innovativeness
Forgetfulness or difficulty concentrating
Find a list of resources for understanding burnout at Learn About Burnout.
Let’s continue with an overview of a few key dynamics that are important to understand in service of the task of preventing burnout in your team or organization.
People need more support and empathy when overwhelmed
The nature of burnout is that people enter into a brain-based, physiological response to chronic stress that diminishes their ability to think clearly and critically. Hence, people facing burnout may wave off support or concern from others, yet very much need it during a period of increasing burnout risk.
Externally, people with mounting burnout risk may project and pull off a look of confidence, but internally the dynamics of burnout cause people to feel the need to work harder, neglect their own needs, and displace work conflicts (stages 2, 3, and 4, respectively of the 12 stages of burnout). This manifests in some of the statements in the section to follow, as well as fearing failure, feeling like an imposter, or feeling judged by others.
It is common for people during this time to withdraw and feel that they must overcome their issues on their own.
If you see a persistent pattern in some of the prior warning signs, or your intuition as a manager tips you off that someone may be starting to burn out, then make a point to talk to them. Express that you are wondering whether they are feeling burnt out.
Thomas adds:
It’s important to almost be “candid” if you notice the little things (e.g. word usage change, turn of phrasing are more neutral or negative than before, for a period of time, struggle to focus on the moment).
Ask a simple “Are you OK?”
It’s very likely the person will say yes, yes. Depending on your relationship with the person you can push a bit more, but it’s important to remember that they may not want to talk about it, and that’s OK. It’s never a bad occasion to say certain things that will build a safe space for them (and to know that they are not alone, that it’s not something that will damage how you perceive them or their capacity).
“You know my door is always open. WE all go through lows, it’s normal and it doesn’t speak against how great WE are or can be. Sometimes the easy things are hard and when they are, it’s time to take a moment”.
“Why don’t you take some days off? Take the time to unwind a bit” This one is great as it will almost automatically lead to the person telling you they can’t because of this and that, likely tasks or an overall amount of work, this is the perfect opportunity to jump in and remove the blockers so the person doesn’t feel bad taking time off.
Label burnout
When approaching a burnout conversation, using the word “burnout” or “burning out” 1) gives the person the permission they may not feel able to give themselves to acknowledge how bad things really may be and 2) offers them an outlet to talk about it.
Labeling burnout also allows people the chance to clarify whether or not it is the case. They may counter the word and say that they’re not there, or they also may respond at first with denial in the conversation to try to evade being judged, but may follow up later or on a different day with a more frank admission.
Either way, they will probably appreciate your concern for their well-being, and it can open up a tangential conversation that leads in another direction but is also valuable. Don’t be afraid to label burnout. It is especially important for managers and leaders to use the phrases “burnout” or “mental health” in a work context, to enable their teams to know that it’s safe to talk about these issues.
High-achiever risk
Burnout can happen to anyone, yet those who are high-achievers are particularly susceptible. As these folks blossom into high-performers, the journey involves learning to push through and overcome challenges or adversity. As a result, they can often become desensitized to the notion that they may at times be vulnerable to becoming overwhelmed.
High-achievers are also particularly susceptible to burnout because they often establish mental narratives that they cannot – or must not ever slow down, or ask for help from others.
Some of the following are examples that Thomas and I identified as phrases held by individuals who, in the right circumstances, become at high risk of burnout:
“It won’t happen to me”
“I’m fine”
“Thanks, but I don’t need to take a break”
“It won’t last”
“It’s just a bad day/week/month”
“I’ve seen/gone through worse, believe me”
“I’ll power through”
On this topic, Thomas touches on the sensitivity of high-achievers to manager/leader praise, which over time can carry an inadvertent risk of creating an unsustainable self-expectation loop for high-achievers:
Ambitious people and high performers often can create a cycle of pressure on themselves.
For example, if a direct report is performing well and doing great things, a manager may compliment and express how great things are now and how great they’ll be. Stakes tend to get higher and higher.
On the one end it’s perfectly logical to do more complex things and find out your “level of incompetency” (Peter principle). The danger here is the creation of a positivity loop.
Other tips for preventing burnout at a manager-level
One straightforward burnout prevention tactic is to ensure people are able to and feel comfortable taking time off.
Make time in communication rituals such as all-hands or 1:1s to proactively remind people that it is important to take time off for their own health, as well as that of the broader organization. Lead by example and take time off yourself, too (with no or minimal public checking-in of email/Slack/Teams during time off).
If your organization doesn’t offer them yet,, add personal days, grieving time, sabbaticals, and paid parental leave.
Make it a consistent checkpoint or an HR priority to ensure that vacation coverage processes are up-to-date and that people are reminded of how many PTO days they have available.
As a leader, ask teams and other leaders to be consistently committed to spreading support for the mental wellbeing of each colleague.
Thomas adds:
It is important to clarify/remind the person about their opportunities for time off. In some cases, they feel bad/worse about what they are going through because it will add more work to their colleagues’ plates, it’s not fair to them, and questioning why they should be lifting their burden, etc. Reassure the person that this won’t be the case and that it is your job as a manager to find solutions, and in the grand scheme of things, we won’t die if a deadline isn’t met (rationalize the stakes).
This is also a more general topic about how companies in this era manage resources and what they expect of them, productivity-wise but there are simple solutions that can be applied (temporarily — if the business requirements permit it — add external workforce to your pool, etc.)
To support people who take time off, explore with them options such as temporarily rerouting some of their responsibilities, putting new projects on hold, or adding support for projects they are on.
Adjusting an employee’s workload should involve a conversation with the employee before implementing, otherwise it might backfire or make the situation worse.
Burnout is partially about employees not feeling rewarded enough for their work. In conversation, explore how to help an employee reduce their workload when they are becoming overwhelmed, without reducing their perceived sense of reward. If employees feel their work reward is diminished, it can trigger a compulsion to find more work to do or work harder to compensate for the loss of reward.
Some other tips include:
Learning and acting on knowledge of what work is rewarding to employees and aligned with employee skill-sets
Increasing the quality or frequency of manager-individual feedback touch points
Reducing operational ambiguity and improving task clarity and expectations
Take the time to coach your team on the following, utilizing empathy and patience in the process:
Time management and managing their to do list and calendar to let go of things that aren’t essential
Exploring how they can adopt a “good enough, not perfect” mindset with time-consuming tasks they own
How to ask for help and how to more effectively delegate
Their working style and approach, exploring assumptions, limiting beliefs, and saboteurs that are likely underlying their struggles
Tips for preventing burnout at an organizational leader-level
For organizational leaders, here are some additional practices that can have a powerful impact on preventing burnout at-scale:
Provide a system that facilitates regular upward feedback
Set up a mental health/toxic anonymous feedback or flagging system
Offer continuous training/coaching/personal development to individuals and managers
Communicate a compelling mission/vision/why, especially during a change management process
Create scalable checks/balances for meeting, workload, and deadline creep
Increase training/airtime of both DEI (under-represented groups may struggle with burnout pressure more as a consequence of societal norms) and mental health initiatives
Invest in custom employee career development tracks to create more pathways for employees with different skill sets and career desires (e.g. IC vs manager or client-facing vs internal-facing)
Offer sufficient vacation time, mental health benefits (e.g. Oliva), and flexible work structure options (e.g. remote work, 4-day workweek)
Continually re-calibrate workload and team capacity. Adjust expectations, enablement, and/or capacity as appropriate
Establish policies limiting work hours or employee contact outside of working hours
Thank you for reading. Learn more about how working with a burnout coach can help your team prevent burnout through 1-1 and group coaching sessions, or how you can lead your team and organization through burnout prevention. Please share this essay and the Learn About Burnout site to raise awareness for burnout.