Taking Care of Managers: What to Do When Workforce Burnout Creeps Up the Ladder

Burnout is a buzzword in 2021, but to be clear, it is also an official, international disease classification, according to the World Health Organization. At this point in the pandemic, nearly 80 percent of U.S. professionals have experienced burnout, according to a Deloitte workplace survey, and nearly 70 percent of workers don’t think their employers are doing enough to help them.

The good and bad news: This problem of burnout isn’t personal, it’s institutional. A team of researchers from the University of California Berkeley, Rutgers and Deakin University in Australia have identified six primary causes of burnout, all stemming from the organization rather than the individual. They are (1) an unsustainable workload, (2) perceived lack of control, (3) insufficient rewards for effort, (4) lack of a supportive community, (5) lack of fairness, and (6) mismatched values and skills.

And, according to the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI-GS), the resulting symptoms include exhaustion, cynicism and dissatisfaction.

Through the lens of organizational change, burnout is a barrier to growth, innovation, and organizational agility. At the employee level, burnout leads to resistance, resulting in one of two outcomes: (1) people will quit or (2) they’ll stick around while their teams and the larger organization deals with those negative repercussions (dissatisfaction, cynicism, exhaustion).   

While burnout can affect anyone, mid-level managers are among the most susceptible as they navigate their leadership, their projects, and their individual contributions, all while reporting up the ladder. They are also just as critical in their unique position to be able to address and remedy burnout. This is where change leaders become crucial in helping executives, managers, and teams connect the dots between employee well-being, project goals, and company performance.  

In order to address current and future burnout, and to build an adaptable workforce that can thrive in the midst of continual change, change leaders must bring managers into the strategy and decision-making process.  This starts with direct conversation with managers to identify issues they’re facing. Insights, trends and themes from those conversations can then be shared with leaders to discuss possible solutions, which can be presented back to managers for a period of feedback. 

By allowing managers to express their own needs and expectations during this back-and-forth process, change leaders can create human-centered strategies at each stakeholder level, which will already begin to address multiple causes of burnout.

Solutions can look different depending on the organization. They might entail reserving the last five minutes of every meeting for a movement or mental break, spacing out change implementations to limit conflicts, and communicating with managers over the channels and methods that make the most sense for them.

Change leaders can also coach managers and executives in empathetic leadership, including checking-in more frequently, engaging in self-reflection, encouraging workers to experiment with new behaviors, and acknowledging worker efforts. 

By making intentional adjustments to change management approaches while emphasizing the needs of end users across the board, change leaders have a leg up on burnout that extends from the mid-level across the entire organization.