Why Overperforming Creates Burnout And Bad Behavior

This post was originally posted on Forbes.

On a recent flight from seeing family, my seatmate was a former executive at a well-known social media company.

He shared a story (with names redacted) of an internal product team who were charged with a performance goal of boosting the company’s advertising revenue by advertising to a bigger percentage of their user audience. One hitch: The ad spend in question was for adult-only products.

To accomplish this, the product team analyzed user data and found a large group of millions more users they could target. My seatmate had raised a significant concern at the time that potentially millions of underage minors could be included in that new pool of users, tarnishing the company’s reputation at the very least, not to mention it was illegal, with likely severe consequences.

But the product team argued back, “We won’t make our year-end bonuses if we don’t do this.” Despite the fact that the advertising was created for adults, they ignored the concern. They pulled the trigger on a highly risky and potentially damaging campaign.

Pressure Leads to Poor Decisions

In another scenario, I know a doctor who, severely burned out in regular practice, started moonlighting in the emergency department to pay the bills while figuring out the next steps for their career.

A few weeks later, the hospital’s financial officer paid a visit not to welcome the new doctor but to pressure them to run unnecessary tests on patients (lab tests, CT imaging, etc.). The CFO was desperate to increase revenue in order to meet the hospital’s annual performance goals. Further burned out by this lack of autonomy in their practice of medicine in lieu of serving the almighty dollar, the doctor quit.

And that’s where we’ve gone too far—leading to lying, cheating, or burnout—according to scientific research.

A common misconception of burnout is that it has to do with fatigue, e.g., repeating the same thing day after day or being saddled with a huge workload. Burnout isn’t about any of those things; it’s about the futility of one’s efforts and a lack of control over the outcomes, a sense of failure.

This is where performance goals can do a lot of harm because they narrow the definition of success to a single outcome (e.g., running unnecessary tests to reach the hospital’s revenue targets rather than doing what is right for the patient). Every other outcome is perceived as a failure.

Statistically, this means that failure is far more likely than success because life is messy, and most things do not go as predicted. Rigid performance goals drive failure, and then failure drives burnout.

Our Internal Failure Alarm

A newly discovered brain area, the habenula, acts as a failure alarm and, if the alarm goes off, a motivation kill switch. In overly performative environments, if you’re trying to do the right thing but are pressured or incentivized to do the wrong thing, your brain experiences failure (e.g., at patient care), and you lose motivation to keep trying.

Ultimately, two things can happen:

• You just burn out. Your habenula has killed your motivation, and you just can’t get yourself to do it anymore.
• You lie, cheat, or steal. You create the illusion you’re performing exactly at the predicted (often arbitrary) level.

A highly visible example of the second outcome is Wells Fargo’s laundry list of legal scandals by their sales teams under pressure from top-down performance goals to cross-selling products, overcharging clients, padding diversity quotas, and other deplorable behaviors.

Whenever we, as leaders, managers, entrepreneurs, teachers, or coaches, drive other humans to perform unreasonable fixed goals, we may leave that person no choice but to lie, cheat, or burn out.

Show me the incentive, and I’ll show you the outcome. —Charlie Munger

Neutralize Failure by Flipping the Performance Script

As a CEO, I believe there is a helpful role for workplace performance goals to help our company measure against our aims. However, in light of this recent brain science, I now believe that it is harmful to overuse performance-based approaches, and our company is instead blending traditional performative approaches with an iterative model that neutralizes the failure that is inherent to doing any innovative work.

Burnout goes beyond resilience. The modern-day use of mindfulness to calm employees operating under performance pressure is insufficient. Instead, giving people control and providence over their work will allow them to increase or retrieve their motivation and sense of control.

Numerous research studies on burnout have shown this to be the case. And, central to burnout and bad behaviors at work, mitigating and neutralizing failure is going to require leaders to right-size the use of performance-based goals.

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