Executive Burnout: What Running an 8-Figure Business Taught Me About Hitting the Wall

In 2017, I burned out.

At the time I was a GM running an eight figure business unit inside a much larger organization. We'd had a brutal couple of years. Multiple transformations happening at once. Multiple restructures at once. An executive team that was basically a revolving door of people. A whole transformation function being built at the same time as everything else.

It was, honestly, just very complex. And of the 10 GMs in the business, seven of them left.

That left three of us holding the workload of ten people.

I made a decision in that moment that I'd come to regret. I decided to do more than I was actually capable of doing. I put myself in a compromised position, my accountability outstripping my ability, and told myself I had to just do everything. Be in all the meetings. Solve all the problems. Answer all the questions.

That's what led to my burnout. Not one bad week. A slow accumulation of yeses, in a system that was falling apart around me, with no methodology for pushing back.

What I did next

After some time out, I started building a thinking process around why this had actually happened. Not what I should have done differently as an individual, but what it was about the system, the friction, that had made burnout the almost inevitable outcome.

I was traveling at the time, kind of a “backpacking, find yourself trip”, and I kept running into digital nomads. A lot of them had burned out themselves, or had left roles specifically to avoid it. I started having conversations about some of my thinking. Was it because there was a lack of clarity in the business? No clear strategy? Too many priorities at once?

People kept saying, “yeah, that's exactly what happened to me. I could never get a straight answer from my boss about where I should focus. I kept asking my team to do things and they never delivered what I asked. I could never get down to actual work because people kept interrupting me”.

Those conversations turned into, would you mind coming to talk to our leadership team about that? Would you come have a chat with our HR function? Within about eighteen months, it had just grown legs.

Why this matters more than the story itself

I'm not sharing this because it's an interesting story. I'm sharing it because I think most leaders heading toward burnout right now are doing exactly what I did. Blaming themselves for not managing the workload better, rather than asking what's actually broken in the system around them.

We don't tend to ask, what's my role in this, and how am I causing this? We blame the system. We blame the employer. We blame the boss. We rarely ask whether we're the one who feels like they have to be in every meeting, giving every answer, solving every problem, saying yes without ever building a way to push back.

If any of that sounds familiar, you're not in unfamiliar territory. I've been there. It's why we built what we built, out of a very direct, very personal need to understand what actually causes this, and how to fix it before it costs someone their health.

Curious where the friction sits in your own business, before it turns into your version of 2017? The free assessment at jblhighperformance.com/assessment takes about five minutes and gives you a clear, one page answer.