This week, I’ve launched a new course on Thinkific: What Managers can do to Prevent Employee Burnout. This course builds on the first one, a course about The Step Everyone Skips in Burnout Recovery. It applies the lessons learned from that first course, as well as a lot of the lessons I learned personally as a manager.
If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know that the burnout content I’m creating is personal. It combines lessons learned from my own experiences of long-term burnout, my failures and successes at lasting recovery, my struggle with autistic burnout, and my professional experience. It also combines the work I’ve done with my graduate studies, and applies that mythological, depth psychological lens to the problem of burnout. This work brings together my experiences over the last decade at work and at school in order to help others.
While I’ve blogged about my experience of burnout previously, I haven’t written about my experience as a manager yet.
Managing in Fits and Starts
In some ways, it feels like I’ve always been a leader. It felt like the retreats I went on in middle school, the 4-H workshops, the first forays into working for a pay check were all pointing me in the direction of leadership. I was the de facto person in charge in every group project. I held a few manager roles in college: on-campus, over the summers, and I was an RA a few times. But because my work was largely of the individual-contributor sort, I didn’t have an employee reporting to me directly until about 2015 or so.
Like the vast majority of middle managers, I felt like I’d been dropped in the deep end of the pool without a styrofoam noodle. There were sparse trainings, and I had good mentorship, but the day to day challenges of management were all on me.
One of the biggest challenges was preventing my team from getting as overwhelmed and burned out as I myself was quickly becoming. I did what many of us over-achieving, people-pleasing, burnout-prone Type A folks do: I took on the work myself.
In the training, the first session is about this, specifically. Because middle managers are more likely to suffer from burnout, and this is a huge reason why. In the course, I do get into the burnout risk factors, and who needs to get extra attention on the team (hi, it’s me) as a result. The gist is that you need to position your own oxygen mask before helping others.
Cobbling Together Tools
Over the past decade, I’ve been cobbling together my toolkit for empathetic, people-first management, as well as successfully coaching my direct reports to meet their own specific career goals and priorities. This burnout prevention course sort of accidentally ended up being an offering of a number of those tools.
One of the beta-testers for this course has a number of new managers on her team, and she’s eager to ask them to take it as well. She wants to offer it as an introduction to management techniques she’d like them to use with their own teams.
The soft skills included in the course:
- Holding Space
- Reflective Listening
- Getting the most out of One-on-Ones
- Using training to get stakeholder buy-in
- Looking for the win-win in process improvements
- Upholding Boundaries at Work
- Managing Up
- The Moral Courage to Speak Truth to Power
The main focus of the course, however, is preventing employee burnout. My experience here is both as an in-house SEO at WebMD, and running the SEO team at ROI DNA — both of these are demanding, fast-paced environments, with dozens of projects running concurrently. The work in both places involved creating, documenting, and training others on processes, as well as meeting performance numbers and objectives for the websites we managed. I was doing all of this management, coaching, and process improvement while also managing my own burnout.
There is one lesson aimed at helping managers know what to do when employees are already burned out. There is no hard and fast rule that says that your department or company is absolutely going to lose the burned out person to another job. It’s entirely possible to keep them on the staff! But there are new, revised ways of working that everyone needs to agree to. Sometimes managing someone who is burned out is a level of damage control – just making sure their work meets standards while they plan to move on.
Most of all, I tell it like it is in this course. While it’s wonderful to advise managers to hire more people, we all know that’s an ever-decreasing likelihood as the economy turns more and more toward shareholder value. This course faces that reality head-on, and provides tools to help you deal with resource constraints in spite of hiring freezes.
Drop the Ball
One of the things that I say a few times through the course, and that was my hardest lesson learned personally, was sometimes you have to drop the ball. No matter how much I asked for help, my boss (and the business) wouldn’t make a move toward helping me until I started to fail. It wasn’t until I could no longer deliver that I got the help I needed.
When the autoimmune arthritis knocked me down, it took five people to take care of my workload. I asked, half-joking, where those five people had been a month earlier. “You were getting everything done,” was the reply. So, my advice to fellow over-achievers is to not burn yourselves into chronic illness like I did. To drop the ball earlier, so that help can be found sooner.
I deeply enjoy teaching, mentoring, and managing other people. It was the part of my job that kept me motivated for the last few years of full-time work. My hope is that this course can help others like me to prevent burnout as much as they are able.