Banish Your Burnout! How to Create a Culture of Sustainability
A woman suffers from burnout and exhaustion, falls asleep at her desk.
Alex was fried. She had been working 65+-hour work weeks for close to a year without much of a break. She knew that she needed one, but the thought of taking a break only amplified her sense of overwhelm. She’d have to double down on her efforts in the weeks beforehand to make sure things could function without her—and return to an even bigger mountain of work. No, a break just didn’t seem feasible at this time.
What’s more, her team was also experiencing serious burnout. People were starting to talk about leaving because they couldn’t maintain the pace. One of her direct reports confided this to her in private, saying she was worried that some of her most skilled coworkers were thinking about it. Alex knew she had to change something, for both herself and her team. But she wasn’t sure what it was.
Leadership isn’t a sprint; it’s a marathon. When you are confronted with overwhelming burnout within your team, it’s a harsh wake up call. But you don’t need to get to this point. Let’s take a look at why today’s leaders and their teams are experiencing burnout at an alarming rate—and how you can take action to overcome it.
Why is burnout on the rise?
The issue of burnout surfaces in my work with leaders continually. It’s nothing new, but rapid change, shifting priorities in trends and funding, have escalated this crisis substantially. We know from research that during the pandemic alone, employees became three times more likely to report suffering from poor mental health. For many, juggling work and home responsibilities causes a great deal of stress.
Gallup has identified something called the wellbeing-engagement paradox. During normal times, wellbeing and engagement tend to be highly intertwined, but during highly stressful events (like the pandemic), engagement actually soared as wellness plummeted. To many, engagement during stressful times is a “life raft of sorts,” Gallup explains. Leaders and their teams channel all their worries and fears into rallying together to persevere during hardship.
The effort we put in during a crisis may be admirable, but it’s not sustainable. Adrenaline helps get us through, often with impressive results—but then there is the crash after the adrenaline surge. Even years after the pandemic, burnout is still a pervasive workplace problem. And now, we’re all suffering the consequences of forging tirelessly ahead under the presence of constant stress. Many are still feeling disconnected from our work and our teams rather than unified.
The resulting burnout has often led to poorer reactions to stress. Our emotional intelligence may seem to decline as we lash out at coworkers and family over trivial matters. We may think and act more cynically and negatively about both our job responsibilities and our own abilities. And now, we are witnessing our productivity drop, and our teams lose focus.
Here’s how to banish your burnout
Resting and recharging is a countercultural notion, yet that’s exactly what we need to do. Getting more done over the long haul means slowing down in the present. As leaders, we need to build healthy cultures that support rest and renewal.
There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to burnout because it arises from many different causes. The answer for you will depend on the roots of your burnout. Let’s identify the behavioral patterns that are leading to your own particular burnout—and possibly to collective exhaustion on your team. Once you’re clear on what’s causing your burnout, you can dig into solutions.
Individual: What are you doing that contributes to your burnout?
What behavioral patterns contribute to your burnout? What beliefs might be getting in your way? What do you have the power to change? Starting with your behaviors, let’s examine each of these key questions.
Behaviors that lead to burnout:
Checking email incessantly.
Not having a practice in place for weekly planning and reflection.
Taking on responsibilities without realistically assessing whether you can handle them.
Not prioritizing self-care.
If you habitually fall into time traps or neglect self-care needs and big-picture thinking, you’re destined for burnout. Getting a grasp on time management and prioritizing what matters most will get you back on track!
Beliefs that contribute to burnout:
“If I tell my boss I have too much on my plate, they will think I'm a failure.”
“I am the ONLY one who can do this” or “It’s quicker if I do this myself than show someone else how to do it.”
“I just need to get past this week, and it will get better.”
“I can’t ask someone else to do this or say no because they are so overwhelmed themselves.”
In reality, it won’t get better next week unless you take action by changing the way you work, lead, and live. You’re dealing with a systemic pattern, not a one-time phenomenon. And you’ll continue to have far too much on your plate unless you invest a little time upfront in showing other people how to do things.
What’s in your sphere of influence or control to change?
Chances are, you have a lot more power and influence over your work life than you may realize. In fact, your example guides the choices and patterns that others live as well. Here are a few ways that clients of mine have stood up against burnout:
Conducting an audit of their daily tasks to find out how many of them support their personal mission—then offloading the ones that do not. (Sometimes, we suffer from “mission creep,” which leads our job roles to expand in focus until we can’t possibly handle everything on our plates.)
Scheduling time for relaxation or an enjoyable hobby.
Establishing a ritual for leaving work behind at a set time every day. (For example, some clients change out of their work clothes even when working from home, meditate for ten minutes, or make a cup of tea.)
Then, take a look at how your team as a whole can take steps to overcome your collective burnout.
Team level: What team beliefs and behaviors contribute to burnout?
At the team level, consider these questions:
What shared beliefs contribute to burnout?
What ways of being do we have as a group that promote burnout?
What systems or structures get in the way of working at a sustainable pace?
What do we have the ability to change?
The number-one issue I’ve seen with many of the teams that I work with is an unrealistic understanding of capacity and resources. Many teams overestimate how much they can get done and underestimate the people power and time it requires. Here’s how I advise clients to prevent this from happening to them.
Develop a list of questions for your team to review every time you take on something new:
What’s the timeline?
How much capacity do you currently have? (And more specifically, who is best positioned to tackle this project, and do they have capacity?)
What would you need to let go of or reprioritize to take this new project on? Is it worth doing that?
Answering these questions will help you map out whether you can afford to take on this project—and defeat burnout within your team.
Organizational Level: What norms, systems, and structures contribute to burnout?
At the organizational level, ask yourself what norms and cultural practices contribute to burnout. What kind of systems or structures do you have in place to support sustainability? What kind of supervisory support, leadership training, or coaching is needed to help cultivate greater sustainability in the workplace for everyone?
For instance, practices like these can help build a sustainable culture:
Instituting four-day work weeks.
Developing explicit policies for when a person is expected to respond to email.
Building in comp time for folks who work overtime in flexible ways.
Instilling a commitment to sustainability within the annual performance review and goal-setting process.
Bring wellness to the forefront by having frequent conversations about it, striving to measure it just as you do engagement, as Gallup suggests. Don’t assume the two are interconnected since the person who seems extremely engaged today—perhaps the person checking email at midnight—can easily become the person who’s completely burned out tomorrow.
Taking ownership of your well-being
Alex laid out a plan for taking action to banish burnout within herself, her team, and the broader organization. At the individual level, she had a reality check about how many tasks she could truly handle in a day, and she weeded out her to-do list. She invested a small amount of upfront time to train other people in how to carry out some of these tasks. She scheduled time every Friday for reflection, too. She and her team had a discussion about their collective burnout and worked to pinpoint the shared beliefs and cultural norms within their group and organization that contributed to burnout. They defined specific criteria that had to be met before they would take on a new project as well. Simply talking about the issue as a group gave them an enormous sense of collective relief. They were on their way to establishing a healthy, sustainable culture that would truly nurture each individual’s growth and wellbeing.
If you’re grappling with burnout and want to figure out how to address it in a holistic and realistic way, let’s get in touch.
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