Why Burnout Burns People Out
By Dave Logan and Ashleigh Rodriguez
Talking about burnout is making burnout worse, and programs that address it without implementing shared leadership only gives people the vocabulary to convince themselves and others that their company is in trouble and that they are burned out, leading to turnover, reduced productivity, mistakes, mediocrity across organizations, industries, and the entire economy.
How We Got Here
We got into the burnout business in 2019—just a few months before the pandemic hit. Our mission was to focus on, and reduce, physician burnout, especially in the state of California. When we talked with people outside of medicine, the fact that doctors could be burned out was surprising, even startling. Aren’t they well paid? Their lives seem pretty amazing, judging from all the TV shows about their lives, loves, and careers. In 2019, almost half of physicians showed one or more symptoms of burnout. In 2022, that number grew to almost two out of three, in large part because of the pandemic. By that time, “burnout” was in the air—and everyone – not just physicians - seemed to be talking about it and suffering from it. It is cited as a cause in the “Great Resignation,” “Quiet Quitting,” and in China, “Lying Down.”
Burnout reduction programs are spreading quickly with 9 out of 10 employers offering some sort of a wellness program. As these programs have become more common, they often incorporate apps and off-the-shelf training tools. The more the programs have been commoditized, the less relevant they are to what a specific set of people are experiencing.
Despite the spread of these programs, we are exiting the burnout cosmos and are writing this article to suggest that others leave it also.
We aren’t leaving because we have been unsuccessful. Just the opposite: we’ve done a lot to crack the code on burnout, with our programs reducing burnout in our cohorts by an average of 72% and increases in professional fulfillment (often seen as the opposite or burnout) of 172% in one large healthcare organization.
Despite the short-term gains we’ve been able to deliver, there are two insurmountable problems in the burnout movement.
Problem 1: Burnout is That Song That’s Stuck In Your Head
First, the language of burnout traps people in it, like bugs in a spider’s web. Experts talk about burnout, write articles about what causes it, give explanations about what it means, and rant about it on podcasts and in articles. We are bombarded with the language of burnout. More and more people identify with it, and as they do, they manifest the symptoms of it.
Like many social phenomena, burnout is highly contagious, with the R naught (the measure of spread) higher any strain of Covid. When a team member declares they are “burned out,” their team members ask what’s going on. And as they hear the explanation, they might feel toasty themselves. As that team craters into ash, others go down as well. It spreads from industry to industry, from nation to nation, to our kids, new college graduates, unemployed people, people feeling stress and uncertainty at work, and retirees. Unlike an actual virus, burnout may affect people right away, or it can build up and then explode—often taking out an entire team all at once.
Burnout is a serious concern, defined by the World Health Organization as a workplace phenomenon (not a medical condition). Quoting 11th Revision of the International Classification of Diseases, burnout consists of:
“Feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion;
Increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one's job; and
Reduced professional efficacy.”
Burnout is an occupational measure, not a disease diagnosis. It makes us feel, we’ve said so many times it haunts our dreams, other people are objects rather than actual, feeling, emoting human beings. We might feel numb, down, joyless, sad, isolated, with work becoming something we endure rather than enjoy. And as we discuss burnout in big conferences or small groups, we can see it’s actually getting worse, right in front of our eyes. Ask a person “are you burned out?” enough times, and the answer eventually becomes “yes.”
We’ve seen this movie before. When terms like “codependent” and “passive aggressive” began spreading through popular culture, most people seemed to know someone—perhaps their friends, coworkers, spouses, and bosses—got labeled with those terms. These terms are now at use by laypeople, often without knowing what they precisely mean. How many of us know someone whose ex-spouse was discovered, as their marriage was circling the drain, to be sociopathic and/or narcissistic?
As Kenneth Burke, a literary critic from the last century wrote, “As you name a situation [or a thing], so you respond to it.” If you name a person as passive aggressive, or sociopathic, you’ll treat them that way. And here’s the kicker: the more you treat them as their label, the more they become that way, at least to you.
The burnout label is even more harmful, because we can label others, entire teams, companies, industries, or ourselves, with that term. (How many people labeled themselves passive aggressive, by comparison.)
But what does it really mean to be burned out? The phrase comes to us from Thomas Edison’s invention. A light bulb is either working or, after giving its life in service, emits a bright flash and a slight popping sound, and will never work again. A burned-out incandescent bulb is trash, along with a used Keurig pod.
“Burnout” in people, is usually temporary condition that they can recover from, with a little (or a lot of) help. Most of us (including the authors) have been burned out and worked through it, with the help of coworkers, family, friends, and professionals. But the mental image of that dead light bulb is haunting, even tyrannizing. If we were burned out before, we probably will be again—and we need to warn out family and friends that, they too, can fizzle out. The more we look for burnout, in ourselves and those around us, the more we see it, the more that label sticks, and the deeper people sink into its symptoms.
Problem 2: Companies Don’t Really Care As Long As There’s Someone Else To Replace You
The second reason we’re leaving burnout is that companies aren’t really invested in ending it. (And society isn’t either. We haven’t reached catastrophic consequences quite yet…) When companies see that burnout is an issue—often from internal surveys—their “leaders” want to show that they are serious about the problem, and pull in outside experts, like us. When we ask what the leaders are willing to do to fix the problem, the answer is usually: “we’re bringing you in.” In other words, nothing about how the company is managed will change. But there will be salve available in the form of an anti-burnout program led by yours truly.
The real causes of burnout is the “cog-ification” of workers. The opposite of burnout is “empowerment” and “leadership.” When someone is self-empowered in a role that’s been empowered by their company with a mission to create change as leaders, they have agency, and likely won’t be burned out, or won’t be for long.
“Cog-ification” happens because of 1950s top-down management, which this publication has railed against for decades and yet will not die. People make decisions far from the action, often by looking at spreadsheets. Employees get lumped into, with the goal of making them interchangeable. Edicts are issued over email, often late at night, commanding others to change or announcing change that will envelop them very soon. And yet, as article after article says, top-down management doesn’t work. Yet its death grip on organizations has not let up, in all but a few cases. These efforts disempower people and make it clear that the company has leaders—but you’re not one. You’re a cog. Do your job and here’s some yoga to make you feel better.
Consider the industries that have the biggest burnout problems: education, law enforcement, and healthcare. In all three, the front-line workers: teachers, police officers and clinicians, are increasingly being told what to do by people who aren’t living those careers. They feel devalued, through low pay, talk of defunding, and cranking up the expectations for next year, so the future looks even bleaker than today.
In day-to-day management, the implicit message is “we don’t trust you,” so we’re going to be monitoring your test scores, measuring every keystroke on your computer, looking over video from your body camera, and examining quality statistics to decide whether you’re competent, which influences bias in reporting. If you’re doing ok today, we’ll have to look at tomorrow’s numbers just to be sure. And that cycle never ends.
So what?
The solution is easy to articulate, and surprisingly easy to implement—if executives are willing. To make burnout go away --- it will be alleviated somewhat, we do not think it will ever go away in our society, there are three actions that work, and each one depends on the other two.
Action 1: Build Great “Micro Cultures”
First, encourage formation of vital “micro cultures” at work. We are social creatures, and we need communities to provide meaning, a sense of belonging, and purpose to our careers. A “micro culture” caps out at about 150 people (what we’ve called “tribes” in our work), and is a place where everyone can be known, accepted, and feel a sense of belonging.
Micro cultures are in contrast with the overall culture, which is often so large, complex, and not uniform, that even measuring them is hard. Changing a company’s culture all at once is doesn’t work, because a cause of bad cultures is people not being seen, heard, appreciated, and accepted. All politics are local, and all business activity is local. A micro culture, when it works, is where “everyone knows your name.”
“Vital” means “life giving,” and now we’re talking about less than 5% of work cultures. The others 95%+ are undermining, ineffective, toxic, or places where bullying happens. Leaders (both formal and informal) set the tone, and “vital” cultures start with leaders taking time for community, displaying vulnerability and deep caring for each person. They lead conversations about why people got into the line of work, recalling the noble purpose that used to drive people (and can again).
Action 2: Level-Up Your Critical Thinking (And Patience)
Within micro cultures, complaints will come up, and that takes us to the second action. People are hungry to be empowered as leaders, and that requires preparation. In the best companies, all employees have access to MBA-level education that is more than “key takeaways” on simplistic videos or self-help books. It’s taking part in discussions and debates that develop critical thinking skills, the ability to see all sides of an issue, and to be humble and curious. Complaints need to be analyzed and discussed, with lots of solutions examined before one is implemented. This takes patience, and in our fast society, we have to remind ourselves to pause, take a take a breath, and explore the situation before acting. And then it takes courage to act and effect change, real change, and then to maintain the transformation. Inertia is a powerful force.
Action 3: Empower Your People
The third action is the death knell to burnout: implement what we call Participatory Leadership. Within the many academic studies on this subject, we’ve identified five components that rise to the surface. They are: voice, vote, values, veto and invite. (They all start with a V, if we torture “invite” to become “inVite.”)
Giving “voice” to people and groups means their opinions are valued and matter. Too often, we’ve seen employees speak (in surveys, listening tours, or town halls) only to learn later that their voice was rendered moot by an executive decision. In one organization, some space was freed up and the company asked employees whether they wanted a childcare facility or a gym. When they overwhelmingly voted for child care, the news leaked out: the gym equipment had already been ordered.
“Vote” means people’s voices have formal decision weight. We’ve seen teams vote about strategy, hiring goals, equipment refresh plans, and when they do, burnout goes away…unless their vote is cancelled in ways they didn’t know could happen (like getting a gym and not a childcare center).
“Values” are decision-making criteria, highlighting what is important and what demands action. In most companies, the values that hang on the wall or sit on a web page are not the values of people who work at the company now. The best companies look at values as an ongoing conversation, with new people talking about what’s important to them, and those values guiding decisions. Values need to be vibrant, talked about when important decisions are being made, referenced before any action is taken, and highlighted in post-mortems and retros. People, at the deepest level, are their core values, so when they see their essence acting in decision-making, the result is enlivening. This simple question will reduce burnout more than hours of mindfulness: “what do your values say we should about this situation facing our organization?” And just in case this wasn’t clear already: values aren’t told to you by some HR poster hanging on the wall.
“Veto” is recognizing that there are times when executives need to make a decision and perhaps not involve anyone in it. That’s the case with M&A activity, lawsuits, investigations, quiet periods before reporting earnings, or other issues that legally demand silence. If the MBA-style education has done its job, people will understand that vetoes happen. Being transparent about why and when vetoes happen is imperative. Think of transparency like the guardrails that keep you safe.
“InVite” means giving people the option to join conversations about the future of their company and their careers. Nothing is more burnout-inducing than to learn that meetings have been going on and you weren’t invited, and yet most people report not being in the room when their fates were being worked out.
Do We Stay or Do We Go Now?
There are positives from the burnout movement. It’s gone a long way to destigmatizing mental health, seeing asking for help as a sign of strength not weakness. It’s legitimatized by erecting some boundaries so that work doesn’t become life. For a company to really recover from the burnout epidemic requires seeing it as a manifestation of a bad culture, and a bad culture almost always arises from a company that isn’t fostering meaning in its work and the connections among its employees, investing in community, education, and sharing the burden and joy of leadership.
The opposite of burnout is people seeing that they are empowered leaders with agency, trusted with the future of the organization. Only when this happens can we say the age of burnout is finally behind us.
So, the next time a company asks us for a band-aid and won’t put in the effort to make meaningful changes happen, we have our auto-reply ready to go: “nope.”
Even better, if leaders recognized that burnout is a symptom of work that’s out of whack, they can work to create aligned and vibrant organizations, going all in. Everything will get better, profitability, innovation, retention of key people, and yes, general recovery from burnout. The best success indicator in the world is a company that says: “Hell, yes! We want to be better.”