The Person You Never Worry About Is Your Burnout Risk

The person in your business you never worry about turns up early, cares about everything and says yes to every request. Ask how they are and the answer is “good, busy”. Then one day they run out of gas.

Fifteen years ago I would have told you burnout belongs to the people who cannot hack it, the ones who were never fully committed. Plenty of businesses still treat it as a resilience problem in people who cannot cope. It lands on the most engaged people you have: the hardest working, the ones who give all of themselves to the place.

The mechanism is a gap. Burnout arrives when what you are accountable for exceeds your ability to deliver it. On one side sits everything you are on the hook for. On the other sits the hours, resources, people and capacity you have. Someone who does not care looks at that gap, decides it is not their problem and leaves at five. Your engaged person cannot do that. They fill the gap with evenings, weekends, sleep and family time, and because they are good operators it works for a while. The quality you value most in them, how much they care, is what wears them out. From the GM’s chair the cost arrives late, as a resignation from one of your best people or a manager whose decisions slow, with no warning, because they kept saying they were fine.

I know this from the inside. In 2017 I was a GM in a complex organisation. I had three bosses in 18 months, and the other GMs kept leaving, which left a few of us carrying the load. I decided my job was to be in every meeting, solve every problem and answer every question, and I took on personal accountability never to drop the ball. That meant 20-hour days, travelling 10 days out of every 14, feeling sick before I got to work and opening my laptop to 75 emails of drama each morning. Ask me how I was and I would have said “good, busy”. One morning I sat on the edge of my bed, knew it would end badly if I changed nothing, and resigned that day.

Almost nobody tells their boss they feel dreadful or wake up anxious. “Good, busy” is the acceptable answer, so the people most at risk are the best at hiding it. The last thing they want is to let you or the team down.

Programme data points the same way. Across cohorts, 93.75% of participants reported an improvement in their burnout, outlook or performance, and one SkyCity leader said: “I’m no longer operating at breaking point.”

Two things help you see it before it gets there. The first is a phrase: “I’ll just”. I’ll just work late tonight. I’ll just skip the gym. I’ll just grab a takeaway and finish this. I’ll just do it over the weekend. Each one is nothing on its own, but they stack up fast, and a hundred of them is how burnout arrives. When you hear “good, busy” followed by an “I’ll just”, pay attention.

The second is a better question than “how are you?”, because you already know that answer. Ask where they are at today, and ask for a percentage. A number is much harder to fake than “fine”. Somebody who says 80 will carry on as normal. Somebody who says 60 is telling you something. Then ask what would get them to 70.

The answer is rarely resilience training. It sounds like “I’m the only one who can sign this off”, or a complaint that they keep getting pulled into work that is not theirs, or a gap between what they want to do and what they can manage. That is friction that lives in the business, not a fault in the person, and you can fix much of it, because people carry more than they need to when priorities are unclear.

This week, go back to the person you have in mind. Find five minutes and ask where they are out of 10, then ask what would move it up. You do not have to solve everything. Take one thing off their plate, give them the authority to decide it without you, or give them flexibility in how they do the work, so the gap between what they are accountable for and what they can deliver gets smaller.

If useful, the full conversation is Episode 63 of The High Performance Leader, on the podcast site, Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Jimmy Burroughes is the founder of JBL High Performance.