This is What Happens after Burnout, The Silent Killer of Progress: Professional Leadership Coaching in Edmonton
My name is Adam Melnyk. I’m the owner of Seeding the Lead and a leadership coach. And today I’m going to talk to you about burnout and how to recognize it.
This is something that absolutely ticks me off. I hear so many people talk about, “I’m burnt out, you’re burnt out, we’re all burnt out.” It’s like: do you even know what that means? Do you know what the term “burnout” represents? And, typically, when I talk to people, the answer is no; they don’t know what it means. And that’s annoying because burnout has a definition—it means something.
In fact, I burnt out; it was awful—wouldn’t recommend it, one out of ten. The thing about burnout is: burnout is caused by long‑term stress within the workplace that isn’t managed. For example, when I worked in ACT or served community treatment, I worked with individuals that were high suicide risk. They had bipolar, they had schizophrenia. I had—I worked with individuals that were murderers; I worked with individuals that were pedophiles. And the stuff I heard, the stuff I saw, the stuff I dealt with on a regular basis was incredibly stressful. It was a high‑stress job.
High Stress Jobs Cause High Stress
And the frustrating part about this was: when I was doing this job, I wasn’t managing this stress effectively for a long period of time, which culminated in me burning out. And the thing about burnout is: it doesn’t just happen overnight. It’s not like you had a bad week and you’re burnt out. No—burnout occurs over months, if not years, of unmanaged stress until you get to a point that you are completely burnt out. You rarely understand that you’re burnt out, and your colleagues don’t even understand what they’re seeing; they just think that you’re some cantankerous prick at the end of the day, and that is frustrating because you are burnt out and you need help.
When I work with my clients, typically I see a lot of burnout in leadership, and I also see burnout within their teams that they just can’t manage. And that’s not okay because burnout has some serious consequences. For example, when I burnt out, there were symptoms that I had—that I was exhibiting to others—that were ultimately destroying my relationships, causing me huge depression, and ultimately some suicidal ideations, which, one out of ten, would not recommend.
No Light at the End of the Tunnel
And some of the things that I was experiencing is, just, one: I was incredibly cynical; I was cynical of life. People would say, “Hey, we got a new prime minister in there,” and I would say, “I wonder how long it’d take for him to screw it up.” I couldn’t really see the hope in life; everything was going to end, in my opinion—everything was going to end badly. There wasn’t any light at the end of the rainbow, which people found kind of oppressive at times.
But it wasn’t just cynicism; I had a lack of empathy. Not only did I have a lack of empathy for the people around me, but I had a lack of empathy for myself. And this came out in this form of: yeah, sure, my job is hard, it’s challenging, but when you look at my patients, they have it even worse—da da da da da da—like, yeah, but my life was pretty miserable at the time; like, I deserve some empathy, don’t just minimize my own problems. But I also remember a client came up to me and told me that their dad passed away, and my first thought was like, boohoo, who cares, and it sounds cold, it sounds so callous, but when you’re burnt out you literally don’t have the mental bandwidth to just deal with that, ’cause you’re so busy just trying to conserve and protect your energies.
Because, at the end of the day, when you’re burnt out, your battery’s empty—it’s on zero. And I can tell it’s on zero because, again, when I burnt out, I had difficulty getting out of bed every single day; I just felt exhausted. It was almost as if I was just going through the motions of life, and there was this weird disconnect I had between what I was doing and what I should be going through. It’s so hard to describe; it’s almost like I was watching a character, or playing a video game—like a third‑person video game—and watching myself go through the motions.
When Do You Realize You Need Help
That’s when I knew things weren’t well; at the time, I knew that there’s, like, this inkling that things weren’t going so good. I didn’t recognize it in myself because I took about two years to burn out, and it was only until my manager stepped in and said, “Hey, Adam, I’m not liking what I’m seeing. Have you thought about getting help?” that I actually took the steps I needed to get the help I needed to be un‑burnt‑out, or to claw myself from being burnt out.
Because you don’t recognize burnout when it’s happening to you, and, hell, in many leadership positions—for example, I’ve managed a team—I remember seeing some of my colleagues, and now I recognize that they were burning out. At the time, I just thought they were being pricks, they were being negative, that this job wasn’t a right fit, when, in reality, it was: they were burning out, and I needed to help them.
And that’s what I hope to teach a lot of my leaders: one, how do you recognize burnout within yourself, but, two, how do you also recognize burnout in your team. That’s critically important, and that’s where those signs and symptoms kind of come in. And the question is: well, how does burnout develop in the workplace?
The Six Places to Find Burnout
Well, there are really six places that we see burnout—or I should say, really, six, six areas—that, if we’re not attending to, we have an increased likelihood of burnout, is what a lot of the psychologists and whatnot would say. But I would argue that, if you’re not attending to these six areas, yeah, you’re going to get burnt out.
So there is a caveat to this, and it’s the understanding that fifty percent of the work around preventing burnout is with management, and the other fifty percent is with the employee—straight, simple. And so, when we go through these six areas, you’re going to hear that there’s going to be things leadership has to do and things that the employee has to do.
The first one is workload—full stop. Management, leadership, must understand that your team can only do so much. We have to make sure that the workload is manageable—key word in there is “manageable.” The employee, however, needs to be comfortable saying no, and also understanding that, hey, I shouldn’t keep saying yes—which leads into management also has to be okay with accepting a no. If I had a team member that said, “Hey, Adam, I would love to do ABC, but I physically can’t because I’m stretched too thin,” my job would be like, “Awesome, thank you for telling me. Let’s focus our energies on AB and then leave C for later.” Workload is a key part when it comes to burnout.
Are You Trying to Control Your Team?
The next area is control. A lot of leaders are just uncomfortable with this idea of independence with their subordinates or their team members; like, I do not understand it. Let your team be independent—work smarter, not harder. My chef told me very poignantly, when I worked in the cooking industry, he’s like, “I do not want to have to monitor you; I have my own job—I work here sixteen hours a day—I do not need to be babysitting you. Figure your stuff out.” And he encouraged independence at every turn, every corner. And when we look at the jobs that, for example, many corporations have, leadership is micromanaging the crap out of their people. No—stop this. As a leader, you have your own job; let your people do theirs, as simple as that.
And so, when we look at control, if you are overbearing and controlling of your people, it’s going to burn them out; we have to encourage independence. So the caveat is: as a leader or as a manager, we have to let go of control and encourage independence. On the employee side of things, they need to be okay with independence, and sometimes they want that control—they will encourage leadership: control me, control me, control me—and the answer, as a leader, is simply to say, “No, I’m not going to provide that control. I want you to figure that out.” And so the employee, the team member, they have to be open to the understanding: it’s like, okay, I can’t have this rigid schedule; I can’t be completely controlled, and I got to be okay being independent, being a freethinker, which is really what we want.
Are You Rewarding Your Employees?
The next area is reward—how are you rewarding your people? And this is going to be a whole video topic in a few weeks, but, when it comes to rewarding, I see a lot of managers just not rewarding their people appropriately. This is one: in compensation. They’re asking far too much of their people, and yet they’re not paying them appropriately. I saw an individual—they were being paid minimum wage for essentially doing the general manager’s job at a fitness center—which was not okay. No wonder their team member was being burnt out because, one, they’re not being rewarded appropriately, and, two, the workload is ridiculous.
So we need to understand, in leadership, we need to be paying our people appropriately—pay them appropriately; the compensation has to be appropriate. But, not only that, we have to reward them appropriately, and it’s not just a, “Hey, Greg, thanks for doing such a great job.” It might be giving them a gift; it might be taking them out for, I don’t know, supper or dinner—something that is beyond just the, “Hey, you did a great job, pat on the back.” We need to reward our people appropriately.
On the flip side of this, many team members don’t even understand how they want to be rewarded, and it can be extremely frustrating. I remember talking to one manager, and they said, “Oh yeah, my team members, all they want is to be told that they’re doing so good.” And I was like, “No, that’s—that’s not how they want to be rewarded. If anything, that’s just them saying, hey, I just want to know when I’m doing a good job or not.” But that’s not how they want to be rewarded, and you have to, as their manager, figure out: how do they want to be rewarded for doing an appropriately good job? Do they want Oilers tickets or hockey game tickets? Do they want a free meal? Do they want a day off? I don’t know. But we have to figure this out so we can reward your team, because, again, you’re paying for a high performer to do all this work, but we want to reward them appropriately; we have to figure it out. And that’s the problem that we can have from the team member side of things; it’s like, awesome, how do you want to be rewarded? Like, I don’t know. Which is why we have to spend some time trying to figure that out with them, because how people want to be rewarded is very unique.
Don’t Isolate At Work
The next area is community. Community is huge. We are social creatures—I’m a social creature. When we’re by ourselves, when we’re completely isolated without any conversations with anybody, we go squirrely; we get weird. Just look at Tom Hanks in Castaway; he was talking to the coconut—things got a little weird. It’s fine.
However, in the workplace, we don’t want to be isolated; we want to have a sense of community—this is important, community. So, in leadership, we always need to make sure that, one, we have social engagements; we have team‑building events; we have social spaces for team members to congregate, to talk, to share, to build those bonds. We need to have these spaces; we need to have these events, so then people don’t feel so isolated.
On the flip side of this is that team members are often very frustrating to work with because they say, well, I don’t want to deal with my team, I just want to be isolated, I am a—a loner—da da da da da. It’s like, no, I need you to get out of your box; I need you to come work with the team. You are at risk of burnout if you don’t have anyone that you can talk to, if you don’t have a sense of community at the workplace. We have to work on this. It can be so frustrating when we’re working with team members that, again, they are loners, or, quote‑unquote, they are loners, but, at the end of the day, it’s like we still have to promote—even for these individuals—a sense of community; we still have to promote this sense of a team with them, but that’s a whole other video—how to do that.
Ensure You Treat Your Staff Fairly
The next point is: ultimately, we have to have a sense of fairness as an employer, as a team, or as an employer, as a manager. We have to feel, or, I should say, as an employer, as a manager, we have to make sure that we are treating everybody fairly. There is nothing that will piss off your team more than if we, or they, feel that we are playing favoritism. I’ve seen this time and time again where management will often hire family members, or they’ll hire friends into a work position, and then they give favoritism to that individual, and that pisses the rest of the team off because they feel like the system is unfair. If they feel like the system is unfair, if they feel like it’s unjust and certain people are above others, it burns them out. They think to themselves: why am I trying so hard? It doesn’t matter how—how hard I’m going to try—these people are always going to get above me, or ultimately get promoted for management above me, because, ultimately, they’re just liked by management.
It’s incredibly frustrating. I see this with a lot of DEI initiatives that are supposed to be promoting inclusion but ultimately create this weird hierarchy within organizations where some people are better than other people, and the perception on the ground floor is: this is not a fair system, this is not equal, and no matter how hard I try, I will never be able to climb the corporate ladder because some people are just viewed more favorably than others.
What this all means for us is that, in leadership, we must treat everybody fairly; we must treat everybody as equals. We have standards, and we use those standards no matter what—we have to create an even playing field for everybody. On the team‑member side of things, or the employee side of things, the thing that we need to understand is: they may perceive that there is a system of favoritism. In that event, we have to understand—it’s like, okay, where is this coming from? Why do they see this system of favoritism? What is going on there? Just asking those questions of, like, okay, why do you feel like there’s favoritism, and then understanding what can we do to help disrupt that perception. Very important.
Have Values that Embody Your Organization
And then the last point is values. The values of an organization are critically important. One thing that leads to burnout is when the employee’s values and the organization values don’t line up, and this is where people get stuck; this is where people get very frustrated because I see this all the time when they say, “Well, my value is DEI—diversity, equity, and inclusion—and the organization’s values is DEI—diversity, equity, inclusion—and yet I don’t feel included; what is going on there?” And that’s where we have what are called accidental values. These are values that the organization embodies accidentally.
And a fabulous example of this is: I remember working with a manager who worked at a retail store, and they had all these beautiful values, but when you looked at the team, there was an accidental value of: we like young, beautiful women—that is a value, and the problem was that this value seeped into their organization, and then team members did not feel that this value lined up with their values. And so, when we look at an organization, or even a team, we need to make sure that we have, one, identified what our accidental values are that our team is just exhibiting, and, two, that we’re working hard to remove those values and start lining up our organizational values with the individual values to create retention, because, again, if the values aren’t lining up, it’s not going to work out. And that’s where a lot of organizations get tripped up in the values: they have accidental values that the organization is—is exhibiting, and they’re just simply not lining up with the values of the individual.
Avoiding Burnout is Easier Than Healing from Burnout
So, really, when we look at the solutions to fixing this burnout: one, understand that if you’re burning out, this is a long journey—I’m sorry to tell you this. It took you months, if not years, to get into here; it’s going to take you months, if not years, to get back out. But there are things that we can do, and, if you’re looking at potentially working with your team members to help them with burnout, again, just understand it’s a long process. But the first thing to understand is: we need to work on workload—make sure it’s manageable for people, but also encourage people just to tell us, “Hey, I can’t do this job; this is too much for me.”
Two, we need to work on that independence piece—promote them to think on their own, to just do things on their own; allow them to fail. We need to allow them to fail and be okay with it. We need to reward them appropriately, which is, you know, figuring out, hey, are we actually compensating our people appropriately? If we are compensating them appropriately, then are we rewarding them and their work appropriately? For example, when I do a really good job, I’ve had managers that give me a Dr Pepper and say, “Hey, you did a great job; here’s a Dr Pepper.” I say, “Awesome,” as opposed to that, “Hey, you did a good job,” pat on the back—don’t care for that. We need to ensure that we have those social spaces, that we have those community spaces, and also that people are coming out to those spaces. Again, don’t isolate yourself; get out to those spaces, meet those people.
We need to also make sure that there’s a culture of fairness—be aware of what your standards are as a professional; be aware of what you want to treat people, or how you want to treat people, and keep it consistent. I hate leadership that is inconsistent with their standards, inconsistent with their professionalism—that’s where I have to work with a lot of clients on creating that standardization, so, again, people feel like the system is fair.
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And then, lastly, we need to look at values: what are our core values? What are the organization’s values? What are the accidental values? The biggest hurdle for many organizations is simply getting rid of those accidental values—those values that are bringing and destroying your organization. I’m going to have to go into a whole conversation about accidental values in a future video, but just be aware that they are there, and, when you start listening, you can see every single organization embodies an accidental value. The question is not if they do; it is what value do they embody.
If you found this video helpful, give it a like, subscribe, and share with somebody that you think could simply use this information. Otherwise, I’ll see you in the next video. Cheers.