The REAL reason you and your best people burnout

It’s no secret that people, in the UK especially, work an unhealthy amount. I began to realise how integral this is to Britishness when I read War And Peace. At some point in the book Tolstoy explains through one of his characters how the British are renowned for their organisation and hard work. I can’t remember the exact quote and the book is a little too long for me to scour back through it to find the exact quote but the point is that for at least the last 150 years (the book was written in 1867) our proclivity for hard work has been known around the world.

It’s easy to argue that having a hardworking attitude is good but it doesn’t come without its challenges. Gallups global workplace trends survey for the past three years has shown the UK to be one of the lowest counties in Europe - and the world - for employee engagement levels. This suggests that although we’re willing to work hard, we’re not overly happy about it. As times continue to change so do our attitudes and the adoration of extreme hard work is dissipating.? Today there is a much higher premium placed on work life balance and working smart. Whether that is positive negative is up for you to decide but in my opinion working smart is much more important today than working hard. If that can be achieved alongside great work life balance then why the hell would we not strive towards it?? After all who doesn’t want better results alongside a more enjoyable life?

The problem is that if we take a close look inside into most businesses the common picture we will find is a stressed and burnt out owner, a stressed and burnt out leadership/management team and disheartened or totally disengaged engaged employees. This isn’t me being pessimistic but honest about what most businesses turn into. The media and high profile success stories might distort your view of reality and make you believe that most businesses are exciting, high energy places of inspired motivation.. but they’re not.

This isn’t because bad people run businesses. It’s not because most leaders and managers are bad people who don’t care and want to exploit employees for their own personal gain - yes this happens but it’s rare - but because us humans are emotional creatures. These emotions of ours can be, to put it nicely, unhelpful at times and get in the way progress. This becomes especially apparent in business and I want to take this opportunity to share with you why because.. it’s important.?

If we’re to solve the challenge of burnout and disengagement at work - which is in my opinion one of the most important problems there is to solve in our nation - we need to understand why it happens. I don’t think we do. I think we see the symptoms of management and leadership burnout, we see the problems of non highly motivated employees and we try to address the symptoms with not fit for purpose solutions. To really address the problem we have to address the root cause.

I’m quite open about my first experience of business ownership. I got totally burnt out and depressed despite the fact the business was doing well. Although I would never wish this experience on anyone else and I never wish to go through it again, it was one of the most important lessons of my life. Before owning a business if I was stressed or unhappy at work there was somebody I could point the mental finger at. When I got burnt out in my own business I had nobody to blame but myself. I had to take a step back and look inward to understand why this happened. What I learnt has helped me transform my own life and the lives of many others. I gained four key insights that helped me understand myself and why I made myself miserable through work. I’m confident that you and your best people will experience at least two of these three factors. If you want to prevent yourself or your best people from getting stressed and burnt out at work don’t put loads of emphasis into reducing workload. That’s a waste of time. Put loads of emphasis into equipping yourself and your best people with the awareness and tools needed to stop these factors coming to your detriment.? You don’t need to change your business, you need to develop your people. When you help yourself and your best people thrive, your employees will have a better experience and your business will perform better, consistently.?

1.High Performers Like To Work Hard, To Work ‘Too Much’

You and the people you promote like working hard. It’s hardwired within you to want to work hard and to want to do a great job. You find genuine happiness by doing a good job. That’s good news. But, of course, it brings with it challenges such as neglecting health and personal life for work. When that goes on for a long time there are obvious consequences. Telling yourself or your high performers to work less is like telling a fish to swim less. It’s not going to happen. Instead what you have to do is give yourself and your best people strategies that enable hard work without the sacrificing of health and personal life. This can be as simple as helping people set non negotiables that are essential for health and happiness. The Better Happy Cadence Calendar is a highly effective tool to enable this. Common non negotiable are daily health habits such as step or nutrition targets and weekly or monthly targets of quality time with partners and children.?

2.High Performers Often Suffer With Imposter Syndrome

There are very few high performers that genuinely believe they are going a good job. Pavarotti was sick with nerves every time before he sand and Van Gough died believing he was a failure. Although you might understand how great your high performers are - and they you - the reality is they probably think they’re doing a crappy job, that they aren’t good enough and that one day they’re going to get found out. What that leads to is them never feeling satisfied with what they have done. They will let the simplest of tasks take way too much time, they’ll take work home with them and whatever work they are doing will be overshadowed by a feeling of stress. When this goes on for too long burnout is sure to follow. Just because your people are good and produce great work, don’t presume they know that. Ensure that people are getting regular feedback and that it is not acceptable for people to regularly take work home with them. Take it a step further and actively encourage people to prioritise done over perfect. Create a culture where it’s OK for people to make mistakes and it’s widely understood that nothing is perfect. I coach perfectionists (such as myself) to actively submit work and projects when they are only 80% happy with them. Very rarely will this work be pushed back and it leads to those with perfectionist tendencies to recognise how the last 20% that usually takes more time than the first 80% isn’t a good use of time.

3. High Performers Prioritise Their Professional Lives Above Everything Else

Everybody has different values systems. Some people see their work as means to an ends and some people link their identity and self worth to how well they perform at work. There’s no right or wrong but I can guarantee that you and your best people fall into the latter camp. You’re intensely passionate about your work and the results you achieve. This is good for business but it creates challenges for for you and your people. There is of course more to life than work but that statement doesn’t change the fact that, for many people how we work is an integral part of our lives and happiness. I think telling hard workers to prioritise their health and families more than work is fruitless exercise. You can’t change a persons values system. Instead make peace with it. You like working hard and you tend to prioritise work over other areas of your life, OK, no problem, let’s look at how we can harness that and prevent it becoming a negative. Really the solution to this is the same as point 1. Just because you value work highly doesn’t mean you don’t value health, family and your personal life. You likely still value those areas highly, maybe just not as high as business/work. Of course the tendency is to neglect the areas of your life that come second to the thing you value at number one. Creating lists of non negotiables and using a tool like the Cadence Calendar is a simple but powerful way to keep things in order. Another simple but key learning here comes from a quote I heard from the fantastic motivational speaker ‘Jim Rohn’ RIP. “Work harder on yourself than you do your job.”

Simple and poignant. I share this notion with any team or person I work with. No matter how passionate you are about your work, family or any area of life in general, you can’t be of most service to people unless you look after and prioritise yourself. Be sensibly selfish, give yourself the time and attention you need to be the best version of yourself so you can live happier and longer to be of most use to others.

If you want to reduce the risk of yourself or your best people burning out in your business try to get out of the mindset of how the business needs to change to fix the issue. The business isn’t the issue, the people burning out are. They’re not burning out because of business demands, they’re burning out because of what’s going on in their own heads. Help them change that and not only will burnout become a risk of the past in your business but, as your leaders become more relaxed and happier, your employee engagement levels will shoot up also.