Understanding Burnout
Therese Linton
Helping professionals build flourishing careers, optimise performance, get promoted, and live happier, more fulfilling lives! I transform mindsets and ways of working to take you from NOW to NEXT!
Many people get confused between burnout, depression and sadness. Burnout is the one that can be most easily reduced through good leadership as there is both an individual component and an organisational component to it.
Is burnout different to depression?
The answer is YES as the main difference is the source. Depression is focused inwardly on yourself. You feel you as a person are “not good” or “a failure.” Whereas burnout stems from something outside of yourself. For example, you may get burnt out because of a demanding job and prolonged stress, due to your lack of boundaries to preserve your work-life balance, or due to your lack of tools and tactics to replenish your reserves and increase your resilience.
Burnout can lead to a depressive episode, but depression does not cause burnout.
Burnout and depression can have similar mental health impacts and physical symptoms. Just like sadness and depression, burnout and depression resemble each other and have some common symptoms BUT these conditions are very different. Knowing the difference helps to figure out what you’re experiencing, so you can find relief sooner than later.
Burnout is the emotional, mental, and physical exhaustion that comes from long-term exposure to the following factors or life scenarios –
The most frequent type of burnout is career burnout, which impacts people in highly demanding professions more than most. Lawyers and legal professionals fall into this category, along with teachers, doctors, nurses, social workers, and elite athletes.
Is burnout a form of depression?
Though they share common symptoms, burnout is not a type of depression. The symptoms of burnout overlap with the list of symptoms of depression at the beginning of this newsletter, although the following are more prevalent – exhaustion; trouble with thinking or decision-making; reduced work performance; loss of empathy; and social withdrawal.
Someone can experience both burnout and depression simultaneously, and the causes can be unrelated or amplified by the other. The major factor leading to burnout is stress and different people respond to different stress events differently. What causes burnout for someone may not cause burnout for another.
Burnout at the individual level is typically addressed by attending to lifestyle factors and personal choices that create improved work-life balance.
Is burnout an individual issue or an organisational issue?
There are two very different perspectives on burnout – the individual and the organisational. Some individuals find it more difficult to set boundaries to preserve their work-life balance. Thus they undermine their resilience and deplete their emotional resources, which in turn can lead to burnout.
In addition to this, there can be organisational issues that can cause burnout or exacerbate individual burnout tendencies. Recent research by Michael P. Leiter and Christina Maslach To Curb Burnout, Design Jobs to Better Match Employees’ Needs ( hbr.org ) suggests that burnout amongst employees can be an indication of poor leadership and a challenging work environment within an organisation.
In other words, burnout can be the result of chronic job stressors and systemic issues within an organisation that makes it difficult for employees to thrive.
Increasing numbers of employees with burnout can signify endemic issues within an organisation that require action across the board, going beyond the individual. In these cases, burnout is not a physical or mental health issue, so promoting individual self-care won’t usually help team members recover.
Leaders can take action to support teams and reduce burnout by undertaking a collaborative process with team members to understand and address persistent mismatches and to redesign job roles to promote increased engagement and better outcomes.
Leiter and Maslach show that work-related burnout can be related to the following categories - workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values.
How can leaders reduce burnout?
A leader’s job is not always about having the answer. The best leaders know that it is a collaborative process with team members to understand strengths, and well as concerns and then provide the conditions for each person to thrive.
Here are some simple tips on what leaders can do to address each of these categories to support their team members and reduce the issues that contribute to burnout.
Workload – a mismatch in workload often stems from an overallocation of work; an underallocation of resources; or expectations about deadlines and objectives that are unattainable with normal working hours. Individuals and teams will often work ridiculous hours to try to meet expectations and either collapse at the end or give up before the end when they realise that the goals are impossible. Both situations can lead to burnout.
Workload leadership responses –
Control – a control mismatch occurs when a team member has inadequate autonomy to do the job effectively. This can be the result of a misalignment of the team members with the level of seniority or decision-making power required to progress specific work-related outcomes. It can also be the result of a manager who is unwilling to delegate sufficient authority for reasons such as a lack of trust, lack of awareness of capabilities, or a personal preference to exercise more control.
Control leadership responses
Reward – a reward mismatch arises when good work is not receiving appropriate recognition or resulting in better opportunities. They can also arise from misjudgement about team members' preferences, for example, extroverted team members prefer public recognition whilst introverted team members prefer private recognition.
Reward leadership responses
Community – mismatches in the area of community are most extreme in toxic workplaces where there is negative competition, bullying, or harassment. When this occurs then leadership are to blame, and they could be liable for consequences and subject to legal repercussions. It is the responsibility of leaders to build workplace cultures based on mutual respect, trust and support.
Community leadership responses
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Fairness – A mismatch in fairness involves discrimination and inequitable practices which can be difficult to identify and resolve.
Fairness leadership responses
Values – a mismatch in values can indicate ethical, moral, and legal conflicts in the workplace. Sometimes these are genuine and other times there is an individual bias that can result in one team member feeling out of step with the values of the organisation, or the goals and objectives of their team. This can sometimes indicate that a team member is unsatisfied in their overall career or professional choice, in which case a move to a different role or team is a possible solution.
Values leadership responses
There is no single approach or framework that can address all 6 mismatch areas. Although there is one universal place to start and that is with communication. It is up to the leader to understand the cause of the mismatch and select a set of approaches to support an improvement. This is best done through communication and consultation with the team or specific team members if it is a more individualised issue.
Job design to reduce burnout
Leiter and Maslach put forward the case for improved job design to support a reduction in mismatch issues that lead to burnout. They suggest 5 steps that leaders can undertake to redesign roles to reduce mismatches and the possibility of burnout. There is even more upside, as thoughtful role design can also increase employee productivity and engagement.
Step 1 Communicate and collaborate – when burnout, decreased performance or mismatches in the previous 6 factors are evident, then have a two-way conversation to understand any mismatches. There are some assessment and survey tools that can support this process for a broader team or where there is a predominance of introverts, although a structured one-on-one conversation will be more powerful and could reveal some surprises.
A team member's response to a survey or contribution to a conversation represents their expectations and informal proposals for consideration by leadership. A good place to start is by asking the question – What creates the most stress in your role and how might these stress factors be reduced or diminished?
Sometimes the message is simple, and the remedy is obvious, such as “the workload is just too high to successfully deliver all outcomes.” Other times the message and the situation are more subtle and complex. There may be greater concerns about the amount of autonomy people have and how much control they can exercise and how they achieve outcomes. Or perhaps the higher workload could be successfully achieved by reducing friction and promoting collaboration within the team.
After obtaining input it is critical to close the feedback and provide a summary of responses and issues, along with some immediate actions that will be undertaken. It is also okay to indicate areas where further investigation will be required before appropriate solutions can be identified and implemented. A great way to start such a response is “We have listened to your input, and this is what we have learned from it.”
Step 2 Explore options and solutions - The next step is to explore options and develop new ways of working to reduce burnout and improve performance. A timely and thoughtful town hall session or public presentation of the input and survey results continues the conversation. This can contain possible solutions and highlight the possibility of positive change.
It is important to immediately ask team members for ideas on how to do things better and to encourage them to take joint responsibility for creating an improved work environment. Smaller working groups can then be formed to design more detailed processes, change management plans, and recommendations to address the solutions.
Unless pre-approval is given, then the outputs of the working groups would need to be presented to management for consideration and approval prior to implementation.
Step 3 Begin with realistic goals and support with change management –
Drawing on best practices from the field of change management can also ensure that more benefits as impacted team members can be brought along for the ride and buy into new ways of working. Change management is more than simply communication, it also involves effective sponsorship, staff engagement, concern management, and many forms of training and reinforcement activities.
It is also great to start with simple quick wins to gain some traction and then maintain momentum by planning specific and achievable interim goals and outcomes along the way. In this way, the task won’t feel too huge.
Step 4 Use good design principles - when designing better ways of working it is critical to use best practice process design principles drawing on human-centric design and Lean Six Sigma approaches. This will result in clear operating procedures and efficient processes that can improve both productivity and the quality of outcomes – that is, solutions that are more effective and more efficient.
The mismatches that created the burnout in the first place are often the result of too much complexity and a lack of clarity. When redesigning processes and jobs, it is important to simplify and streamline them as much as possible. Human-centric design also balances intense periods of work with less intense periods as no one can run at top speed and produce great results indefinitely. It is possible to alternate social involvement with high-focus solo work, and alternate stretches of intense concentration with periods of less structure and creativity.
For roles where remote working is possible, enforcing a strict office-only or hybrid-work policy leads to severe mismatches, disengagement and burnout. This is especially true post-pandemic where many people thrived and were more productive when working from home. People resist inflexible policies that insist everyone come to the workplace some tasks can be done just as well from home. Endorsing a practical rhythm of “together time” balanced against “solitary time” (perhaps remote) can have a positive effect on community, workload, fairness, and control.
Step 5 Build in governance and progress checkpoints – the concepts being covered are transformative and best managed using some form of program delivery or project management approach. It is useful to have a broad plan that allows for quick wins and then interim, achievable goals along the way. Quick wins create enthusiasm and ensure some early successes that can sustain longer change agendas. Interim goals ensure teams don’t suffer from the burnout that accompanies massive objectives where there appears to be no end in sight.
In order to maintain senior sponsorship and endorsement it is important to set up easy-to-manage governance processes upfront to show progress, share successes, sustain progress, maintain momentum and prove benefits.
Ongoing monitoring of workplace improvement via a process of change management and continuous improvement makes progress more concrete and measurable.
More about burnout…
There are a lot of other great articles on burnout in the HBR archive. Here are a few more to help you understand burnout and the influence that leadership has on reducing the negative impacts on the workplace and individual team members -
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