What is Causing Your Workplace Burnout?
Sometimes work gets busy and things get pushed to the back burner, and that's okay - it's also why I'm bringing a special replay episode to you today that covers an endlessly buzzy topic: burnout. I couldn't record a fresh episode this week because I got busy with some client work and wanted to avoid burnout.
So let's talk about what burnout actually is, what causes it, and the different ways you can heal from and avoid it.
If you originally listened to this episode when it aired in 2021, I invite you to listen again for a refresher.
In the episode, I am giving you the 3 ways burnout may be showing up and impacting your life/leadership and then reverse-engineering burnout to find what's causing burnout so that you can begin to think of ways to make tactical decisions and changes.
Take notes so that you can answer these questions:
What is workplace burnout?
What are the 3 primary ways burnout shows up in your life?
What are the 6 causes of burnout?
What questions can you be asking yourself to change those 6 causes?
On this episode you’ll hear…
The definition of workplace burnout and the ways that it can physically manifest itself
The six leading causes of burnout in the workplace and questions you can ask yourself to combat each one
Why Chaili believes a values mismatch is one of the most important things we can look for when avoiding burnout
The reminder that self care is not the cure for burnout and why we must lean on community and meaningfulness
Ready for more?
Listen in:
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** This is a raw, unedited transcript
Chaili Trentham 00:00
So I was in a workshop this morning with an organization talking about how to optimize your career and life. And to do that we we reverse engineer burnout and the causes of burnout and talk about being proactive in our leadership so that we can fight burnout. Now, right when I finished, my husband walked in the door and was at a local coffee shop, and proceeded to tell me a story of how he was sitting behind a group of three creatives, people from a creative industry that were friends. And he's like, I sat there and listened to them for over 30 minutes complain about how burnt out they are, by their job, and by their work, and by the people they work with. And it was so interesting, because I had just given this talk, and it just reminds me that this talk is so prevalent right now. And I go into multiple organizations to give this talk on burnout, and often think I should bring that back to the podcast. So that's what we're going to talk about right now is burnout, what that looks like what that means, how it shows up? And what are the causes of burnout. And specifically, what are the ways that we can begin to identify the causes, and then be leaders who make proactive decisions to respond to those areas of our life that might be causing burnout, and make a change? Because my goal is that if you're a burnout in the work, that you might be able to make changes so that you're not burnout. I don't think anybody should stay in a job where they're burnt out. But I think a lot of us are trying to find ways to stay and do that well, and to not be burnout at the same time. So I've got that coming for you. You're ready. Welcome to the coffee on leadership Podcast. I'm Chaili Trentham, a higher education practitioner and Professor trends consultant, guiding leaders in cultivating creativity and wholeness through learning and development. And this podcast is a whole lot of that fit in the short segments, you can listen to over a cup of coffee. Meet me here as I design conversations around leadership that you can authentically integrate into the spaces where you need and have impact. Cheers. Let's talk about the definition of workplace burnout. I want to specifically focus on workplace burnout, because the reality is we can experience burnout across multiple areas of our life. And it manifests in a way that impacts all areas of our life. But by the research, when we're talking about workplace burnout, we're looking at the ways that the stress is coming specifically from the workplace. So here, here's the definition of burnout, burnout is an individual's response to chronic, emotional and interpersonal stressors within the workplace. So this is stress that is accumulating that is pervasive that keeps coming up over time that's related to the emotional and interpersonal side of how you're experiencing it. And it has to do with your response. Right. So it's not just the stress, it's the response. And that is what the burnout is, when this happens over time. You have a relationship with those stressors, right? And so then it begins to manifest in different ways. And it shows up in primarily three different ways. Number one, is it shows up as high emotional exhaustion. And this is usually where we see it, and often experience it most especially the research shows that women experience high emotional exhaustion more than men as the outcome of burnout. This is energy depletion and exhaustion on like a whole new level, like I often have, or in the past, not often because I try to avoid this but in the past, I have described this as I'm tired in my bones, like I get to the end of the day, and I just can't think about anything. I'm so emotionally depleted, I have nothing left to give, I have no energy. I'm tired. Ring a bell with anyone high emotional exhaustion. Okay, so then the other area that this could show up as burnout can show up as is increased depersonalization high depersonalization, and this is that like mental distancing that you do from your job, or you might have feelings of negativity or cynicism, or you might just act like you don't even care anymore in it that depersonalization is like a coping mechanism almost right? So you depersonalized so that you don't feel as invested so that you're not experiencing the pain of that stressor of the burnout. And the final area that you can experience the burnout and is low personal accomplishment. So on the front end, we had high emotional exhaustion, high depersonalization and then low feelings of professional efficacy. Feeling like I've got this you don't experience that anymore. It might you might be feeling like, gosh, I just got terrible reviews on that project that I submitted. should I even be in this job? Or you may not be communicating well with your co workers or having connection point or points of belonging and so you might feel like do I belong here? Do they like me? Am I any good at this? Did I waste a whole bunch of money? I'd agree to enter into a field that I'm terrible at. It can be all over the board. And often, it's feelings that aren't rooted in anything real or secure. So you're feeling low personal accomplishment and reduced efficacy. But it's coming from a place of burnout and not of reality. All right. So those are the three ways that burnout begins to show up. And that's significant to understand, because usually, we're using the word burnout before we're actually identifying how we're experiencing it. We're like, I'm just so burned out. But then when we begin to break down, the ways we're actually feeling burnout, we can begin to identify ways that we can fix it, we can reverse engineer it and respond to it. Because we might identify that we have high emotional exhaustion or energy depletion, because we have too high of a workload, right. And so then you can work backwards and begin to make changes and decisions that help your leadership in the long run. So now, I want to quickly go through the six causes of burnout that happen before you get to those three areas there, I want you to picture like three concentric circles that make up the burnout area. But then I want to take a step back, because we need to figure out what's causing the burnout so that you can make changes. And so the six are workload control, or perceived lack of control, reward, community, fairness, and a values mismatch. All right, and then just rewind quickly, if you want to hear those again, because we're going to move through these and then I'm going to have some questions at the end that I want you to think through. So if you're taking notes, listen to this, you'll have a little activity at the end to kind of walk you through your specific areas of burnout that you may be experiencing. So number one cause of a burnout. These six causes were identified by Maslak and leader and a lot of organizational research across the board of how people were showing up. And so these were the the six top areas for burnout, not the only causes of burnout, okay, but number one is workload. This is the extent to which the demands are manageable or overwhelming, right. And that's kind of an obvious one, most people experience burnout, they recognize that they're exhausted, and then they see that they're constantly overwhelmed by the amount of work that they have. Now, here's something I want to throw out. On the flip side, too, you can be burnout on the amount of workload you have when it's too manageable. This is when you're not challenged, we need challenge in our work. If we don't have it, then we often experience feelings of apathy or boredom at work. I've often referenced me Hi, chicks, and Mihai and his work in flow. And that's where he identifies the places where we are not challenged in our work or don't have the right skill sets at hand. And that's a similar type of burnout, because your workload is too manageable. So the extent to which your workload is manageable or overwhelming could be a key area that's causing burnout. Number two is control or perceived lack of control. This is the amount of control you may feel about your job. Do you have autonomy are you given freedom and how you can create and how you can do things. And we've seen a huge shift in the past year, right as a lot of people have switched to remote work in their ability to redefine the control of their work. And that is why people have overwhelmingly said that they love the ability to work from home or work from anywhere, or work in a hybrid work model. It's because they have a sense of control of how they're approaching the work. And they were able to take that back in a season in a in a season of life and global experiences where we felt out of control, right. So we were out of control when it came to COVID and out of control when it came to changes in the marketplace. But we were in control of the way that we approached our work because we're doing it remotely without people looking over our shoulder, we were given a lot of freedom and autonomy to solve problems in new ways. And so we were given back some of that control. But control is a way that you might be experiencing burnout. The third is reward. This is the effectiveness of rewards and recognition systems that will exist in your organization and in your work. How are you being given praise and recognition? How are you being told that you're doing a good job? What do reviews look like? Are their reward systems, this can be a key cause of burnout because you feel like you're just running on a hamster wheel and feel like you're in the cycle of being stuck and not able to get out of this cycle of I work I work I work I work I work I don't know if I'm doing the right thing. I don't know if I'm accomplishing anything. The outcome of this can be that that circle of low professional efficacy, okay, because you just don't know how you're doing. So what what is reward look like what do feedback systems look like for you? Now the next one is community which this is one of my favorites to dissect. This is an organization's responsiveness to staff, and community as a whole within the organization, we know that our organization and our work teams make up a key part of community. We also know like research over the years has shown that people will stay in a job that they hate. If they love the people that they work with our relationships with our coworkers matter. Our sense of belonging within our team within our organization matters. And so what does that look like for you? What is the responsiveness of the organization to that community? Meaning how does the organization foster belonging? How do they respond when, when a group within the organization is feeling a certain way or experiencing something who has brought that up to the organizational leadership? What does community look like? All right, the next one, I think relates to community a lot this is fairness is the respect and fairness among people in the organization. And often this is causes breakdown in community, right? If there's not fairness and mutual respect among people. So what does fairness look like across the board? How do you feel about fairness and respect. And the final one, the sixth key cause of burnout is a values mismatch. And this is one that is so near and dear to my heart, and I just believe is a big cause of the great resignation we're seeing right now. And people really checking their core values and deciding what's most important to me, and what decisions and am I going to make to make sure that my personal values are aligned with every decision and behavior and attitude and change that I'm making in my life. A lot of you know that my family, we moved our family or two boys down to Southern California to be closer to family, to get out of the city, to change it up a little bit after 2020. And it was a really good decision for our family. And it started with conversations of if we could work anywhere, where would we work? And why if we could live anywhere, where would we live? And why? Who are the people that we're interacting with daily? Where are we raising our kids. And we started having all of those conversations when so much change was going on around us. And then we also looked at our personal values aligned with the organizational values with the work that we're doing. When there's a values mismatch, that can be a primary rub for burnout. Because if you're working outside of your values, if you're making decisions that don't align with your values, you constantly are feeling tension, you're not showing up with integrity and authenticity to your leadership. So those are the six causes of burnout that you might be experiencing. Those are the root pieces that when you begin to look at those and say like, oh, gosh, maybe I do have a map that is mismatch, oh, gosh, maybe I'm not experiencing community in my role. Maybe I feel like I've been seen scenarios that are unfair, or I have been treated unfairly or without respect. Those are all pieces of this greater puzzle of burnout that again, when we begin to reverse engineer, then we can work back towards it by making changes and choosing opportunities to lead differently so that we can avoid burnout. So that we can maintain more wholeness and wellness in the way that we lead in our work and in our life. Because it's all integrated. It's all intertwined. So here's some questions for you, dear listeners, I want you to think through these questions for each of the categories. And as I was talking through the six categories, and again, this might be an episode you have to listen to twice. I want you to see which categories you identified with most and then ask yourself the questions that fall into these categories that I'm going to go through and ask right now. So write these down. Ask yourself these questions for work overload if that's the cause of your burnout, how is your work intensity demands on your time and resources given to you to complete your job? How are those impacting your feelings of overwhelm? Number two, if you are feeling perceived lack of control, think through this. Are you given autonomy, permission to problem solve, and opportunity for creativity in your work? Number three reward if you are feeling like you're lacking reward, think about this, is there meaningful recognition and reward for the level of work you are doing? And I was in a workshop once where they asked about how this is tethered to financial resources and I said praise and thanks are free to give. So consider that to how are you receiving praise and thanks because any leader can and should be giving a lot of it. Number four is community and here's the question here is their relationship and belonging fostered through mutual respect and support. And number five is fairness. Is there trust, openness and respect in the world? workplaces trust, openness and respect in the workplace. And the last one, the values mismatch conflicting values piece I want you to think through are your company values or organizational values in alignment with your personal values. How does that impact your attitudes, behaviors and decision making? So those are the questions to ask yourself. And you know what, I think that if you're really doing the hard work of navigating burnout, I think you should ask yourself those questions for all six categories, don't just pick the ones that are most prominent right now. Because the reality is, you could have all six of those show up at any given point, right? To work through burnout, I want you to consider what is really contributing to your burnout and make action oriented changes. The things that are within your control, I want you to make changes that create movement, in your leadership and in your life. And then lean into your values through connection and belonging, because at the end of the day, I really do think that we have to look at connection and belonging as the primary conduit for leading through our values. We have to do it with others. If you're familiar with the burnout book that came out with from the Nick Gaskey, sisters, Emily, Emily and Amelia, they wrote a book on burnout recently that gained a lot of traction. And one of my favorite quotes is them talking about the cure for burnout. And they say the cure for burnout is not self care. They go on to say it's about all of us caring with one another for one another and how we can't do it alone. We need everyone to be a part of it. And that's summarizing, a little bit paraphrasing. But that's where I, I truly believe that the cure for burnout is not self care. And that can be the easiest response to give a friend or a person who's feeling overwhelmed and in burnout. But the cure is caring for one another genuinely. And so as I laid out the six causes of burnout, consider how you can have conversations about those six causes of burnout with your friends, with your co workers with your teams, and then begin to identify how you can work through it together. So that's a little bit of reverse engineering of burnout. Again, it's something I teach a workshop on, that's an hour long, and I think we're at like the 15 minute mark right now. So that won't solve everything for you have 15 minutes, but this is hopefully a springboard for you to be thinking about burnout in an extremely tactical way, so that you don't just have to settle and decide I'm burnout. And I'm going to feel this every day of my life. As long as I'm in this organization know you have capacity and ability and skill sets to be able to break down where you need to make changes so that you can lean more heavily into your values into your purpose into your calling into the meaningfulness of your work that will help you then to feel more accomplishment to feel more energized in your work. And when you're beginning to identify the things that you need to remove to avoid burnout. You can strive for more wholeness and more wellness in your work. Thanks for listening to the coffee on leadership podcast. Take a few moments to reflect on how you will integrate today's episode into your life. And let me know if it was helpful to your leadership. Reach out Visit my website or leave a comment. And don't forget to share with colleagues. Subscribe for future learning. Until our next cup of coffee together. Cheers