There's no 'I' in Burnout

Photo by Markus Spiske.

In the past year, we've heard the word burnout about 9000% more than usual in our work. That's a conservative estimate.

We hear from managers who want strategies for dealing with the burnt out folks on their teams. Doing the equivalent of the trolley problem every time a new project pops up. How do you give someone new work even as they're drowning under the existing work? Should other teammates pick up the slack? Isn't that rewarding the squeaky wheel? This is all happening while the managers, themselves, are struggling with their own burnout.

HR leaders who are racing to catch the plates before they hit the ground. Sending regular reminders to take vacation. Followed by notes about mental health benefits the organization offers. And shoves to senior executives that if they don't take time off, no one else will either.

Recruiters crunching to staff roles due to unplanned turnover due to, you guessed it, burnout. And running so many concurrent searches that it's begun to feel like whack-a-mole. For every successful new hire, another departure. And with every understaffed team, the opportunity for more burnout, and more openings.

Trickle Down Workaholics

As an executive, it's easy to look at this pyramid scheme of burnout and shrug. You do want people to work hard. And when someone on your team says they're burning out, it's a little bit tempting, in your inside voice, to feel like you've identified a person who can't cut it.

Good, right? They can go somewhere else. Somewhere softer. Perhaps a place where the expectations aren't so high. And the work isn't quite so world-changing. Not everyone can hack it in startup. There's lots of 9-5 jobs out there that might be a better fit.

Again, this is all in your inside voice. In your out loud voice, you dig up the email from your HR counterpart and you remind the person about vacation. And mental health benefits. And you hope they figure it out soon cause you and the rest of the team are still on the hook for several big projects this quarter.

And the cycle repeats.

But other times it's not burnout your people are flagging. It's capacity. Seasoned leaders know execs often struggle to hear that a team is approaching functional limits in what they can accomplish. They've learned that these execs are more receptive if it's framed in terms of risk to the business.

So they say the other thing. It's a strategic risk to the business. We need to focus and prioritize. Strategy is about making choices. Then they cross their arms and push back from the table.

And, again, as an executive, it's still relatively easy to shrug this one off. Your team is always saying things can't be done. Heck, half your job is pointing to the last 12 times this team delivered against impossible odds. Even when they said it couldn't be done. Sometimes it feels like you're the football coach in an 80s movie.

There will always be the naysayers. The detractors. The folks who don't believe it's possible. But isn't leadership about finding a way through when others can't see one?

And the cycle repeats.

And the cycle repeats.

And the cycle repeats.

Capitalism loves an individual problem

Capitalism loves an individual problem because it means the broader system stays intact. And the scrutiny and fallibility rests on individual choices. The onus for change then also falls to the individual.

This is true for seat belts and smoking and poverty. For much of the 20th century, we pointed to poor choices and unfortunate consequences. Except...the impacts aren't limited to individuals. A society is a group of humans. If bad shit is happening to enough of them, that impact reverberates. We have to change our approach. And bring out collective tools. Like highway funding contingent on mandating seat belts. And laws making it illegal to sell cigarettes to kids.

Burnout is a collective problem that we're treating with individual tools. And that's why it's not getting better.

How do you deal with other organizational problems?

The good news is that we have a whole mess of tools we use for solving organizational problems. And you know it, because your org has likely dealt with plenty.

Want an easy one? Money. Every size and style of organization has an innate sense that it's important not to fuck up the money. If we hire too far ahead of revenue or reserves: that's a problem. If the economy tanks and a bunch of our accounts dry up: we understand that we'll need to adjust. When someone in finance sends a midnight email in ALL CAPS, we know that it's time to bring in some new tools.

And we've all seen what those organizational tools look like. We slow hiring or, if we were really surprised, freeze it. And deal with a room full of pissed off hiring managers, because that's still better than running into a wall. We shelve expansion plans and delay product launches. We postpone our IPO until the markets are cheerier. None of these are pleasant, and we can wish that we had the foresight to get out ahead of them. But we also understand that they are necessary.

What we don't do is tell people to go get a massage. We don't really tell individuals much of anything. Not because there isn't individual accountability for cashflow. There may be people who have to answer for their bad forecasts or missed targets. But however we got here, this is now an organizational problem. Firing Jim, whether that's a good idea or not, is not going to solve it. We get this.

And we all learned it again with COVID. In early 2020, every decision maker on the planet had a new organizational problem drop into their lap. You might have had great marketing events planned. Or an amazing conference. It's not that those things weren't important. It's that it quickly became clear that we can't operate like that any more. That wasn't your fault, it's a problem we all faced, org-wide. And overnight, every roadmap and launch plan was rewritten from scratch. We all know it. We all did it.

We can't operate like this any more

So okay. So let's talk about burnout.

What does it mean to think about burnout as an organizational problem? Well first of all, it means the people using that word in your org are a signal. They are telling you that the house is on fire. Spending your time on whether they ought to feel that way, or whether they're cut out for it, is missing the point. When your CFO tells you there's no more money in the corporate accounts, the solution isn't a flexi-friday.

What if you treated it like the organizational problem it is? What if you heard burnout as a signal that your roadmap is going to fail? What if it was a sign that you needed to increase staff, or push out timelines, or shelve the "stretch goal"? That you were going to miss on profitability because it was coming with unacceptable risk?

What would you do if the people saying that they're burnt out were actually saying, "this is a company that burns people out." That you're speeding towards a brick wall. And that a lot of the people you love working with are being hurt by the choices you're making. What would you do if you fully appreciated the risk of what they're telling you?

Because that's what they're telling you.

Postscript: if you can't take the heat...

The temperatures in the Pacific Northwest have gotten pretty scary. And as we were writing this week's letter to you all, we came across this short thread from a pizza worker in Oregon. The temperature in the kitchen was over 100F with the ovens off. And they did the thing. The thing that is so obvious, that the only surprise is that every company doesn't.

They shut down for the day. Yes, it was a hot day. Yes there were a lot of people who wanted to outsource the discomfort of cooking to a take-out place. Yes it would have been profitable to stay open. But it would have burnt people. It wasn't healthy. So they just didn't. fucking. do it.

- Melissa and Johnathan