Here are the three primary causes of burnout so you can recognize what created yours and how to start resolving it, ideally putting in place preventative measures to stop it from occurring again in future.
- Lack of appreciation: When people experience burnout there’s almost invariably a sense of not being appreciated by their leader or manager. The assumption is that appreciation must come from above, but studies show that appreciation from any direction can help prevent burnout. One solution to beat burnout and access high performance — both for yourself and your team — is to build recognition and gratitude into your way of doing business.
Let others know that it feeds you. Create peer recognition processes (which work just as well as manager recognition) into your meetings. Recognize others, both publicly and privately. Actively cultivate gratitude practices, including towards yourself.
There are three things you can do to supercharge appreciation:
- Use the person’s name before sharing your appreciation. It will land with more impact and they will remember it more.
- Aim for paragraphs, not platitudes, e.g., “Michelle / Michael, I’ve been watching you for some time and I’ve noticed the way you have been doing…. and what an impact it has made in these ways…. .”
- Don’t always make it about results. Instead, praise effort, commitment, character, ability to bounce back, courage, grace, and Research shows this will make others more inclined to continue these ways of operating, and you are impacting their identity. This is so much more powerful than just praising results. By directing your appreciation at their character and identity, you can instead change how someone sees themselves, and the results of that can last forever.
- Rein in over-caring: The second cause of burnout is over-caring, or what I call over-functioning. This is when we give above and beyond what is required for our role, when we lose perspective and become too attached to what we are doing.
Even though a lot of people still prize this idea of being the obsessed workaholic that has no life, it’s not actually useful to operate this way. Workaholism is just a respectable addiction, and normally a response to other things, e.g. unresolved issues at home, residual shame, high anxiety, or avoidance of other issues.
If you find yourself over-caring, take a moment to step back and ask yourself what’s behind it, and what “appropriate caring” would look like for your role. Yes, you have responsibilities. Yes, you need to deliver. How can you do that in a more balanced way?
For example, a lot of leaders I work with start to carve our regular restorative breaks for themselves throughout the year where they can step back and gain perspective. Everything you do as a leader is amplified and assumed to be the norm, so ensuring your teams also get sufficient rest, exercise, etc. will help them work more effectively and be more collaborative and creative.
- Not working to strengths:The first role of leadership is to know yourself and create your approach around who you truly are, which includes knowing your values and your strengths. If I were to ask you what your strengths are, how clearly would you be able to articulate them to me? If you don’t have clarity around your strengths and how to use them, you’re likely swimming upstream.
If you’re experiencing burnout it’s also likely that the work you’re doing regularly is not working to your strengths, so knowing what these are allows you to recreate your role around what gives you energy. And the same can be said for your team and how well they know themselves and each other and shape their roles accordingly. Knowing you and your teams’ natural strengths will prevent burnout and instead enable flourishing, and isn’t that what we all want?