Burnout results from poor leadership

Intro

On a high pressure project many moons ago, I was approaching burnout but still failing to deliver against unrealistic deadlines. A management consultant was sent to work with me, or as he admitted later, to spy on me. Thankfully, his conclusion back up the chain was that ‘this horse will not run any faster if flogged any harder’. I survived. But I continued to flog myself just as hard, and no-one stopped me.

You might see burnout as a matter for the individual to manage. You might see it as a consequence of the company culture, which you alone cannot change. You might even view it positively as a badge of honour for hard work. And you might see it as a ‘survival of the fittest’ test to filter out the weak.

Or you might see burnout for what it really is: a sign of poor leadership.

What's the issue?

1. This is not a small problem, neither in frequency, nor consequence.

2. A third of UK adults are affected, so there’s a good chance you yourself have firsthand experience of burnout. And if you’re in professional services, you know you’re attracting and providing all the burnout raw ingredients such as talent, ambition, self-doubt, over-achievement, infinite workload and drive.

3. Burnout slams personal productivity into reverse. The trouble is, that’s not always so easy to self-assess. Burnout is like a parasite that injects you with a painkiller so you can’t feel what it’s doing to you, until it’s too late.

4. Some leaders think only of the end, not the means. As long as the results are flooding in, everything – including their leadership – must be a success, right? They dismiss the trail of any longterm human issues that may be left in pursuit of short term corporate objectives.

Consider this

1. Burnout isn’t classified as a medical condition, but it is most certainly a human one with financial consequences. Apart from the few die-hard-wired workaholics who resolutely refuse to be coached away from habitually operating in the rev counter red zone, it is your job to save everyone who’s heading towards burnout in your team.

2. It only takes slightly below average leadership to make or allow people to work too little or too much. It’s getting the best out of them sustainably and symbiotically that’s the trick. That takes nuance, care, empathy, challenge and any other number of leadership skills, in the right amount, at the right time.

3. Burnout tanks productivity. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but soon. Leaders can act like toddlers in that famous experiment where a child is offered one sweet now, or two sweets later. For too many leaders, there is no concept of later. Results are required now, or sooner.

4. The way to avoid burnout isn’t wrapping your staff in cotton wool and sending them home at lunchtime with chicken soup. In fact, what you’re aiming for in terms of a healthy workload throughput actually isn’t all that far away from burnout at all. Your job as leader is you push your people to their edge, but not over it. Give them work that will stretch them, but not break them. Give them work that will let them make a difference towards your common purpose, and let them find out what they’re capable of. It’s a fine line to tread, one which requires a shedload of applied leadership, both to find and to monitor. The first step of which is a desire to find it.

5. You want your organisation to be the best place to work – yes? Where people are given the chance to do their best work. Letting people go beyond that – overloading and under-supporting them - is lazy or incompetent. Either way, you need to act. If you walk past burnout, it’s on you. Organisations have a fiduciary responsibility to look after the bottom line, and a pastoral responsibility to look after the people.

6. If you’ve got more than a handful of people heading for burnout, it’s safe to assume that your leadership and the company culture are major contributors.

7. There are many ways to solve burnout, here are a few:

   Better prioritisation and saying ‘no’.
   • More staff. Unpopular no doubt, but a few to protect the many can pay for itself.
   • Regular 1:1s to check in and monitor mental health and workload status.
   • Call out leaders who accept or even promote unsafe working practices.
   • Check with your staff before you make promises they can’t keep. No, that doesn’t mean you’re running a hippie co-op, and yes you can still make decisions without a vote, but if lots of them are strongly telling you the initiative or deadline is unrealistic, it might be true. (And if they’re pulling the wool over your eyes, you’ve got a whole different and much deeper leadership issue).

Try this

Right now, if you have people in your team who are heading for burnout, use the list above to do something about it. Or don’t, and understand that you’re letting people take themselves into danger, where their mental and physical health may deteriorate, the quality of their work and decision-making may be compromised, and their relationships at work and at home may suffer.