RECOGNIZING BURNOUT
BY MICHAEL DEGROSKY
I was home for a couple of days when I realized I had hit the wall. I had planned to work from home for two weeks while some controversy played out at work but, within days, I announced my retirement. Mine was a tough job under the best of circumstances. Relentless workload, lots of people, cumulative stress and fatigue, too little time to step back and recover. Now, a new challenge felt like one too many.
Honestly, when I decided to retire, I wasn’t sure why. I loved the responsibilities of my job. I had assembled a great team, training and core fire season were nearly upon us, we were doing great work, and I had not intended to retire for another six months to a year. However, suddenly my stress seemed unending, I felt inefficient, cynical, and exhausted – what I now know was classic workplace burnout.
According to the American Psychological Association (APA) and the World Health Organization, “Workplace burnout is an occupation-related syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.”
Credible research suggests several negative health outcomes associated with burnout ranging from musculoskeletal pain to depressive disorders and cardiovascular disease. According to the APA’s senior director of applied psychology, people suffering burnout are less productive and more error prone. Absenteeism due to illness increases. Clearly, burnout is bad for us as individuals and leaders.
The essence of leadership lies in influence through relationships. Leadership happens between people and is a process in which leaders and followers engage together. In that process, leaders matter because they help direct, mobilize, and align people and their ideas. Leaders have power, responsibility, and authority, and all must be used responsibly. And then, of course, people rely on their leaders and expect a lot of them.
Therefore, it is easy to see how a person’s leadership suffers when the pressure of those responsibilities, other people’s expectations, and various burdens that come with leadership – such as isolation –become overwhelming; business and leadership writers have dubbed this leadership burnout. Evidence from several well-known business surveys makes clear that leadership burnout is a growing problem, and recent research indicates that the majority of leaders have experienced it at least once. I have read that leaders experiencing burnout can become indecisive, lose confidence in their choices, and engage less with the people they lead. In my case, in addition, I lacked confidence that I could regain my productivity or perform at my best.
In an excellent 2023 Harvard Business Review article, Kandi Wiens, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, wrote about the cynicism accompanying workplace burnout. “Cynicism is dangerous to both individual and organizational health,” Wiens said. “It can quickly overtake our thoughts, resulting in overwhelming negativity, irritability, and pessimism.” While, at the time, I had not yet recognized my leadership burnout as such, those observations about cynicism are spot-on with my experience.
Perhaps the worst part for me was that I was losing confidence in my own leadership and feared that perhaps I had become a negative influence on the people for whom I was responsible. According to Wiens, my fear was not unfounded, noting that “Cynicism can rapidly spread throughout teams and organizations through a phenomenon known as ‘emotional contagion.’”
It stands to reason that burned-out leaders simply cannot be effective leaders, and it is for that reason that I believe leaders must place a high priority on their own well-being. Advocating for self-attention can make one seem like an outlier in leadership circles these days. People have re-discovered servant leadership and it’s a hot topic. Others are selling
“extreme” and “radical” team leadership concepts left and right. But from what I’ve been able to learn, expectations of self-sacrificing service are contributing to an epidemic of leadership burnout. It is no coincidence, for example, that the resurgent interest in servant leadership comes at a time when some researchers are also suggesting that a servant leadership orientation may be inconsistent with the demands of leading in contemporary organizations.
I contend that we cannot be anyone’s loyal servant or awesome team lead if we are burning out. It took me a while to recognize my experience as burnout and considerable time and effort to work my way out of its effects. While all is well now, I do not recommend that journey. These days, I believe that serious leadership practitioners will learn about leadership burnout, remain vigilant to its causes and effects, and assure that they, and the leaders they lead, have ample opportunity to, at very least, manage workloads as well as step back and recover to relieve cumulative stress and fatigue.
