What Is Driving Burnout Amongst Managers? Clearing Misconceptions.

9 Nov

This is the first of a three-part series on burnout amongst managers. In this first blog post, I talk about the common misconceptions of burnout and why this is continuing to undermine the solutions organisations are putting in place for their employees.

According to recent research conducted by Benenden Health, a not-for-profit healthcare provider, burnout among managers is at an all-time high in the UK. 61% of managers reported suffering with burnout and 20% have either resigned or thought about it due to the negative impact on their mental health. The COVID-19 pandemic is, of course, the obvious culprit. Whilst 34% of managers reported that working longer hours was the main cause of burnout, it is actually “anxiety about the future of work” that tops the list of reasons – cited by 46%. That is quite revealing. It points toward aspects of burnout that organisations can easily misunderstand.

In popular imagination at least, burnout is simply conflated with exhaustion as a result of work overload. Managers and team-members who are burnt out are often advised to take time off, or at least take frequent breaks and reduce back-to-back meetings. Such respite from work is a necessary part of the solution, but it does not address a much deeper issue related to anxiety: lack of control.

As human beings, we have a profound biological need for control.

We are creatures of choice and nothing unnerves us more than feeling like we are out of options and have no choice.

Power and control are so central to who we are that they create real physical effects in our bodies. They help release dopamine (which increases pleasure) and inhibits cortisol (which reduces stress).

Burnout and lack of control, not coincidentally, have a strong correlation.

No wonder then that we have such high levels of burnout during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has created unprecedented professional anxiety for all of us.

What is burnout?

Burnout is not a medical condition. Chronic burnout can severely impact a person’s mental and physical wellbeing (which may lead to medical conditions), and affect other aspects of his or her life. It is, however, a strictly occupational phenomenon. The International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) defines it as:

“. . . a syndrome . . . resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.

Burnout is characterised by three dimensions:

feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion;
increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and
reduced professional efficacy.

Burnout is a combination of these three factors. A recent HBR article written by Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter, suggests that when accurately measured only 10-15% employees meet the burnout profile. Most employees (over 50%) fall into either one or two dimensions of burnout suggesting that they are on the route to burnout. The remaining employees appear to fit the engagement profile. So you can start to see how nuanced peoples’ experiences are.

Model of burnout illustrating the interaction of three facets of burnout and why current organisational solutions to burnout are limited.

It becomes more nuanced, and useful to understand, when we examine how the workplace factors predict the different facets of burnout.

The Areas of Worklife Survey (AWS) measure six components of workplace culture deemed critical to ones’ relationship to the workplace: workload, control, reward, community, fairness and values.

Maslach and Leiter (2021) report that when data gathered using the AWS is examined, it illustrates different patterns for each burnout profile:

Managers who feel overextended - the key problem is workload (high demands and low resources)
Managers who feel disengaged or ineffective - the key issue relates to fairness, equity, social rewards and recognition.
Managers who feel burnt out - they experience problems in multiple areas of workplace culture.

So, what does this mean? It means there is more to the assumption that employees are overworked, therefore burnt out and offering self-care solutions.

The well-intended mistake that organisations make is to offer only respite solutions (i.e. using rest as a solution to exhaustion). This does not address (1) the work overload issues with this dimension and (2) does not address the other two dimensions of employee burnout. This is one pattern. What we see are multiple patterns so any organisational solution needs to encompass them all.

Resist the Lure of ‘Quick Fixes’

Burnout occurs as result of a pattern of experience at work. It develops over time. This means that quick fixes do not work. Organisations, leaders, and HRDs need to be prepared have conversations that cut past the superficial reasons. They must not misdiagnose the problem as a simple case of exhaustion and send the manager home for a day (or however long) off.

Organisational response to employee burnout must go deeper than that. Remember, burnout is contagious, precisely because there is an interpersonal dimension to it. When your manager is burnt out, he or she is more than likely to “pass it on” to their team through emotional contagion. That’s why, a deeper intervention is necessary that addresses all three dimensions of burnout.

To address burnout amongst managers fully, organisations need to address two important facets of control:

self-efficacy: feeling in control over ones’ tasks

power: feeling in control about your ability to influence others.

Subscribe below to learn more about this in my next two blog posts.

Final Thoughts

The workplace is a psychological-social environment. Burnout profiles can vary across occupational groups and organisational departments. Burnout is complicated, and whilst it is not a mental health diagnosis, it can interact easily with other mental health difficulties such as depression. Often organisations do not have the internal expertise in workplace culture, occupational stress, and mental health. Misdiagnosis and misapplication of solutions can further complicate and intensify the problem.

Sign up to receive the second of this two-part series on burnout amongst managers where I talk about self-efficacy as one of the secret ingredients to alleviating burnout. I’d love to hear your story if this resonates with you - reach out to me via the contact form. Thank you for reading!