Are You Creating Burnout for Other People?

May 19

We call it by many names, Miriam-Webster gives us: apathy, overfatigue, impotence, debilitation, but they all describe symptoms of an overarching problem: burnout. The Mayo Clinic defines professional burnout as “a state of physical or emotional exhaustion that also involves a sense of reduced accomplishment and loss of personal identity.”

Ten years ago, The Harvard Business Review noted, “Decades of short-term management, in the United States especially, have inflated the importance of CEOs and reduced others in the corporation to fungible commodities — human resources to be “downsized” at the drop of a share price.”

In her newsletter, Anne Helen Peterson, one of the poet laureates of burnout, turned her focus on those who might be causing others to reach their wit’s end. “How you act,” she writes, “as a manager, as a co-worker, as a partner, as a parent — has ripple effects that extend far past the immediate relationship.”

Peterson’s focus was primarily on millennials, but fellow burnout chronicler Jonathan Malesic agrees that burnout is not only a generational epidemic but a societal one. “It stems from the demands we place on others,” Malesic says. “The recognition we fail to give, the discord between our words and actions. The question can’t just be how I can prevent my burnout; it has to be how I can prevent yours.”

In 2000, Dr. Christina Maslach and co-author Michael Leiter expanded on an idea she helped pioneer in the early 1980s. In The Truth About Burnout: How Organizations Cause Personal Stress and What to Do About It they were able to identify six main causes of burn-out: work overload, lack of control, too little reward, lack of community, inequitable treatment, and mismatched values.

While it may be easy to see the symptoms in ourselves, it may not be so easy to see them in colleagues or direct-reports, which means the likelihood of your inadvertently leading your team into a morale slump, can be high.

“If you’re actually serious about treating burnout,” Peterson says, “[You] just need to legitimately and actionably care about other people.”

Burnout Source: Work Overload
They’re here to work, you’ve got work, it’s an easy transaction, right? As a manager, however, you’ve got some broad objectives when it comes to your employees: understanding the work you’re delegating and understanding your people.

Staying late or coming in early for projects is expected in most jobs. Busy seasons give us something to congeal and complain about. Forget a ropes course, there’s nothing like a looming deadline to bring us together. But if deadlines are a recurring theme and there’s never enough time to complete your to-do list, and the threat of deadline or job loss is always hovering — something isn’t right. There are ways to encourage balance, but if it’s you who’s putting the pressure on, maybe it’s time to reevaluate.

Leaders have to lead and it’s to the detriment of the work, the morale, and your employees to push to exhaustion. It seems simple but the more we treat people like people and not cogs in a machine, the less complicated at least one side of the work will be.

Burnout Source: Lack of Control
Employees need autonomy, they need space and they need to be able to make mistakes and learn. Do you need constant updates on minor changes or do you just want them? Every project can’t be the project on which we stake our careers.

Employees also need consistency. A similar schedule every week allows people to organize their lives in ways that can make them more productive. Consistent leadership gives us reasonable expectations for how the job is going so our focus is on the work.

Burnout Source: Too little reward
Some employers expect dedication and loyalty but don’t compensate in ways equitable to all employees. “Perks” like a drink cart on Fridays, a coffee corner, a holiday party, etc. — will always exclude some group of people. And later, after layoffs eliminate a significant portion of their friends and colleagues, the optics of spending money on perks instead of valuing workers can make the “perk” worthless.

“We created an economic model where if we worked hard and didn’t [waste] time, we could become rich,” writes Isabel Rimanoczy, a writer and academic researcher of the sustainability mindset. But if we don’t value the effort of that hard work and the actual person making it happen, a hostile work environment is well on its way to brew.

Pretty much every marketing/creative culture book published in the last 50 years will hit on the fact that encouragement can go a long way. Don’t spend the bulk of your time analyzing what went wrong — spend it on what went right and what it would take for that work to be even better next time. It’s the easiest “reward” you can give.

Burnout Source: Lack of Community
What is the vibe like? Is it all about the team or individual pursuits? Henry Mintzberg writes, “We are social animals who cannot function effectively without a social system that is larger than ourselves.”

One shouldn’t have to be maniacal with joy to come into the office every day —honestly, I’d find that suspicious and off-putting — but dreading the office because it’s a dismal place is just as unhelpful. As a manager, you must engage your employees, care about what they’re doing and fix what you can. This is your job.

Ed Catmull, former head of Pixar, talks about the concept of community in his book Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration:

Getting talented people to work effectively with one another [takes] trust and respect, which we as managers can’t mandate; they must be earned over time. What we can do is construct an environment that nurtures trusting and respectful relationships and unleashes everyone’s creativity. If we get that right, the result is a vibrant community where talented people are loyal to one another and their collective work, everyone feels that they are part of something extraordinary, and their passion and accomplishments make the community a magnet for talented people coming out of schools or working at other places.

Burnout Source: Inequitable treatment
In simpler terms, unfairness. It’s not always related to money, but let’s consider salary because it’s the most obvious point of contention. It’s a self-preservation tactic to mandate employees to keep secret their salaries, bonuses and any other personal job perks. It’s also illegal.

It’s the onus of the employee to know their own value, but as most of us know, it can take a long road to get there. Being transparent about this process might be more effective than dancing around the issue. If you’ve ever had a job, you’ve likely seen the many ways fairness can play out. Some employees are favored over others; upper management is compensated far more than the rank and file; exclusion; time; opportunity, mistreatment, etc. It’s the job of a leader to be open to the possibility of unintended bias and taking measures to right the wrongs and match strengths with areas of development.

Fairness builds trust and without trust, relationships will fail.

Burnout Source: Mismatched values
Companies change all the time. You think you’re joining a great company, then, just as you dig your feet into its paradisian sand, you realize you’ve just stepped into a minefield. It’s hard to balance business and happiness (this article is just one case in point), and while many of us might be okay with some moral ambiguity, we all have our limits. If you’re a manager being asked to go beyond your responsibilities in ways that are uncomfortable, it’s okay to draw the line. Don’t let your job turn you into someone you’re not and don’t ask your employees to do what you’re not willing to.

Burnout is contagious. It not only affects who we are but also how we are. How we treat other people, especially those who look to us for direction, and how they respond to us can feed “a toxic working environment of low morale, scapegoating, and increased office politics.” A toxic work environment is not only bad for morale, but it’s also bad for business.

InHerSight.com reports, “Toxic workplaces come with an economic toll. It’s estimated that a single toxic employee can cost a company more than $12,000. The toxicity can affect the performance of other employees as well: 38 percent of employees say they decrease the quality of their work in a toxic work environment, 25 percent say they have taken their frustration out on customers, and 12 percent have simply left their jobs as a result of a toxic workplace.”

But it’s not the end of the world or the business. Good leadership is key. When you’re managing well you’re teaching, listening, challenging and inspiring. Know when you’re not being effective and make a change.