How to Stop Losing Good Managers to Burnout and Overload

A recent Deloitte survey showed that 53% of employees are looking for a new role that is going to be more healthy in terms of their wellbeing. Worse, 70% of C-level leaders reported they might resign for a role that is less stressful.

Burnout is becoming a real issue. Some media outlets are reporting it as the new pandemic post COVID. I don’t necessarily buy into the likeness but it certainly is a top concern among the clients I work alongside. The key is how that is affecting business, their ability to keep their staff, and how that impacts performance.

During a WoW Talent Management session with an executive team this week, we were looking at the linkages between Talent, Burnout, and the Great Resignation. Here are three ideas we discussed. I am genuinely interested in your thoughts or perspectives on them.

1. Burnout is a phenomenon affecting everyone but interestingly, those most affected are your highest performing, most committed, most engaged team members. Those who leave, are not those who can’t cut it. They are those who lost faith and belief that things were going to get better, so they started looking somewhere else.
2. The great resignation is being caused by employees who don’t perceive that their organisations are offering the things they want – pay, conditions, leadership, etc. Often those companies actually are offering things in several areas, but they haven’t communicated or shared it in a way that it alters the perceptions (reality) of their employees; so they leave for an organisation that has.
3. Talent management should now be more focussed on identifying, supporting, and retaining your internal talent. Pay particular attention to how you can help them feel cared about and supported. Then work hard on helping them perceive all the good things your organization is doing to support them. This helps retention but also tackles burnout.

How are these things linked?

The figure below shows the main reasons employees are leaving their organizations.

From our experience, it is pretty challenging to find a leader who doesn’t care. But there are plenty of leaders who are on the edge of burnout and who are overloaded and who don’t have/make the time to stop and ask what care looks like for each member of their team. This leads to the perception that their actions and behaviors are not caring.

From our research, we see that poor communication between employees and their leadership is the principal cause for employees becoming disengaged and leaving.

It’s possible your team aren’t aware or aren’t seeing the things they need from you, so they leave and cite those factors as their reason for leaving. Many of these things are actually present but simply haven’t been effectively communicated or shared.

If you are a leader who is seeing turnover and burnout in your team creep up, focus your energy on helping your team members to:

• Feel cared about
• Clarify the work expectations they are under, and investigate if that is reasonable in their eyes and yours
• Talk about the things they have learned doing their job and where they would like to grow their career
• Help them connect the dots on how what they do connects to the bigger picture
• Find out what they need to help their well-being stay intact
• Address total compensation and highlight all the employee benefits they can access
• Make their work as flexible as possible
• Grow their network through the business and connect with the team more
• Confirm the resources they need and if you can provide those
• Check the amount of travel that is required, when and for what purpose – remember travel is now significantly more stressful than it used to be

This list will give you 11 great conversations for your 1:1s and it really will help to connect you with your team more effectively and understand their potential reasons for leaving before they check out. If you’d like some help on how to actually plan and have those conversations, that’s where Ways of Working helps. We support you to have these conversations and more to really build a high-performance, people-centric culture.

Speak soon,

Jimmy

Want to see how this works with your managers? Here is how I work with GMs.

If this sounds like your week

Your managers are not the problem. They are where the problem is stuck.

When your last leadership spend was signed off, did anyone go back to those managers' bosses and ask what changed? That question is the JBL Outcome Standard, and it is how I work.

• Find the friction. A short diagnostic that shows which decisions are stalling, and at what level.
• Am I the bottleneck? Ten questions on where your week is actually going.
• How I work with GMs. Six weeks, one hour a week, up to twelve of your managers, scored by their own bosses.
• Beat Burnout, Boost Performance. The book.
• The High Performance Leader podcast.

Managers I work with reclaim around four hours a week, and their bosses score the change 8.75 out of 10. Would it be a crazy idea to find out how we did this? Book a scoping call.

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