The High Burnout Organization - Part 2

Yesterday, I shared the first 4 patterns from our research about organizations that burn out their people. Today I’ll share the rest. No organizations have all of these. But the more you have the higher the risk of burning out your people.?Starting with....

5. Lack of support from above

A recurring theme was that people could handle a lot of pressure at work as long as they felt they were supported by their boss. But when that relationship soured or they got a new unsupportive boss the dam would burst. (Nick’s note - the boss was often in the same position as the Direct Report. And so was the bosses’ boss. There are no villains here.)??

• I couldn’t get time to speak with my boss about the challenges I was facing. The issues that were on my agenda were no longer on hers. She’d say, “You have to figure this out, this is your job.”
• I had a conversation with my boss about how I was feeling and my current state. He seemed to take it all in. Then after he just completely loaded me up again like we had not even talked. It felt like the opposite of support.?

6. The talk doesn’t match the walk

It is unusual these days for companies not to talk about how important their people and their wellbeing is. In the high burnout organizations the common theme was how little the action and decision making in the organizations matched the words.

• The CEO paid lip service to ‘we really care’ and here is a wellbeing program. But then we’ll still run you into the ground and you’ll work 60 hours and over the weekend.?
• The walk never matched the talk
• We were quite good with physical safety but not psychological safety

7. People don’t talk about Burnout around here

It is extremely common for the system to be burning people out but individuals feeling they are only one. People in organizations are hiding what they are experiencing from others. In many of our minds and org’s, burnout still has a stigma attached to it.

• “After I burned out, I wrote a linkedin post about it. I had so many people I knew contact me to say they had also experienced burnout. I would say, “But I thought you left because you got a great career opportunity. You never said it was because of burn out.” I realized people weren’t talking about it because it had a stigma to it. I now realize burnout is way more common than we all think. People just aren’t talking about it yet.”

We shouldn’t continue to create organizational conditions that burn out good people. The organizations above didn’t start out like that. Their goal was high performance, but over time they neglected the health of the organism and became toxic.?

A lot of people have said, it must have been depressing hearing all these stories. It wasn’t. I felt inspired by the people and their courage. They lifted me. Partly because of their courage. But partly because of what these people did to turn their situation around. In upcoming posts I’ll share positive examples about what individuals and organizations did to move from toxic performance to healthy performance. Hopefully it will inspire you too.?

The research is still in process so if you have ideas, thoughts or stories to share we'd love to hear from you. Just add a note in the comments or email [email protected] ??

We looking fwd to connecting.