Welcome to back in your Leadership. I'm Chris and I'm Lorenzo, and welcome to this week's Thoughtful Thursday. Don't forget to follow us on YouTube at Hacking your Leadership and leave us a review on iTunes. On this Thoughtful Thursday, I want to talk about something that I think is pretty cool. I came
across an article on gallups website. I explore that website often. I think they have a lot of really cool data driven articles and analytics, and I'm kind of a data driven person when it comes to making decisions on leadership. I kind of want to know the broader kind of implications as opposed to just thinking about my own personal experience. And one of the articles I came across
was around burnout. But it's five years old and it talks about the five causes of burnout and I was reading through them and I had to go back and look at the beginning to see what the date was because I didn't know if it was if it was a current article or an old article. It says that the five main factors that lead to employee burnout are unfair treatment at work, unmanageable workload, lack of role lack of communication and support from manager
and unreasonable time pressure. I mean, I don't know was was this written yesterday or was this written five years ago? Yeah, I think these are pretty accurate to today as well. Like when I think about the pillars of specifically in leadership, and like what I think this is about. Like in burnout, you know it says it says it's about the workplace, not your
people. What I think the article should say is, like, it's about leadership, not your people, because like unfair treatment at work, Like who's treating them unfairly? Right, Who's who's giving them an unmanageable workload, who's not providing clarity, who's not communicating? And then support from the manager,
and then who's providing unreasonable time pressure? Like at the end of the day, we can say the word workplace, like we can say that, you know, a company creates a culture, but what the reality is like leaders and people do that, and leaders are the ones who have to look at these types of things and understand uh, and and look in the media and then go in and address the things from a workplace standpoint that could be causing
this to happen. And again, sometimes it's not just a quote unquote bad leader or somebody who is like unfairly treating people a certain way of work. Sometimes there are things within the work systems, or sometimes there are things that are expected of employees today or of ways of getting things done that because of certain aspects of the workplace makes it easier for some and harder for others.
So again, I think that a lot of this is about leadership and people, but I don't necessarily disagree that these are any different today than they were back when this article came out. Yeah, I'm kind of reading through these things also and thinking that, you know, a lot of it it really is about leaders, like all of them, not just unfor treatment at work. Unmanageable workload. I mean, yes, have I put more work on
myself than I should have sometimes? Sure, But in most situations an unmanageable workload, the implication is that the leadership is doing too much work on somebody. Lack of role clarity. I mean, we've been talking about that since day one on this on this podcast, the importance of what is it? What does your role mean? What are your responsibilities? What are you accountable
towards? And and and are you clear on what these expectations are. If you're not clear on what the expectations are, that leads to an unmanageable workload, because then you start doing work that maybe you shouldn't be doing you should be You're adding things to your plate that you shouldn't be adding because you think this is part of your workload or that it should be when in actuality, you're just unclear about what your actual role is or what the expectations are.
Uh. And then lack of communication and support from manager and unreasonable time pressure same thing. Unreasonable time pressure is the same thing as unmanageable workload. You take the same workload and give me twice as much time, and then you've just you've solved both at the same time. Lack of communication and support from manager. To me, that's the same thing as lack of role clarity and
an unfair treatment. It's this This all comes down to leadership and if you are If a person is burning out in a role, I would think this This list implies that the very first place you should look at is what is the relationship between them and their direct leader, What is the relationship between them and maybe one two levels up in leadership, and whether or not it's that's a good relationship. If it's not one, other things tend to fall.
You know. That's kind of like the first domino that has to fall as the relationship with the leader. If that's in place, a lot of these other things tend to go away because they are manageable if you have a good relationship with your leader. And so the question I want to ask you, Lorenzo, is of these five things in this article unfair treatment at work, unmanageable workload, lack of role clarity, lack of communication, support from manager,
and unreasonable time pressure? Which are these five things do you think is the most pressing in today's environment? You know they're there, they all have an impact, But in the work that you're doing and the people that you've seen where this has been an impact for them, what are you hearing as the thing? And it kind of stands out amongst these five is the thing leading to the most amount of burnout by people? So I want to ask you that, but first I want to get up to Ward from one of
our sponsors. All Right, Lorenzo, what do you think is the single biggest cause of burnout? Of these five things? The one that might lead to the most amount of people, you know, leaving or or disengaging or just reporting that they just can't do this anymore. It's funny because I think I want to clump them all together to a degree kind of like you did.
And if you read through the article, it asks some questions, and I think we actually fast forward four years that we've had some dialogue around answering these questions. And the questions are, why does our work environment lack the conditions for them to flourish? And how can I make it safe for them to work here every day? From the context of the leader, like what
do you do? And now I think about over the last four years, how much we've talked about the feeling of feeling of included and welcomed, and the diversity of a team and conditions for people to be authentic and to flourish. And then we've talked a lot about psychological safety, creating cultures and environments where people feel that they can express how they're feeling, what's going on, the points of stration, that they feel that they can do their best work,
that they have the support of their leader and their manager. And when you think about those two things, to me, so like truly feeling more inclusive and really being able to see and understand people for who they authentically are and appreciate the uniqueness of what they bring, along with creating a place where we can have some real dialogue about what the team needs, what individuals need, what are things that help them be motivated and inspired, what are the
things that may be triggers for them to shut down. You start to have these conversations and now you can really talk about the idea of having there be more more fair treatment at work, more understanding of what do people need to be successful, of dialogue around workload and what's achievable, but also what is motivating, what may be pushing them to do more but not over pushing them to feel burned out, you know, having dialogue and convers around clarity of
the work, of the role of expectation. So for me, I think that what that's what has happened over the last four to five years in those two spaces that I think that's where I would That's where I would kind of boil it down to, is that are we a more inclusive, more welcoming, more open workplace and are we creating spaces for our people to talk about times when they are frustrated, when they are unclear, or when they are
not feeling like they're getting what they need to be the most successful. Yeah, what I'm hearing here and this is I think this is almost like going from a one oh one level to a two oh one level in a class
on this. It seems like, you know, maybe the difference between four or five years ago and today with regard to employee burnout is these five things were viewed five years ago as the cause of burnout and in actuality, the learning that we've had over the last five years around what the expectations of leaders should be and the skills that leaders should be in DEE on higher than they have been in the past. Really, what it says is that these five
things are not causes a burnout. These five things are symptoms of a broader leadership problem that will ultimately lead to burnout. And so that the problem isn't unreasonable time pressure, The problem isn't lack of communication and support or unmanageable workload. The problem is poor leadership and poor leadership and poor leadership relationships with people. The symptoms of that situation would be these things. People feel like they're
being treated unfair, or they don't feel like they're included. They feel like their workload is unmanageable. I've had leaders where I've had massive amounts of workload, but because the relationship was so good and the support was so good, I didn't feel burnt out. And then I've had other instances where the workload was a lot lower, but I felt like I was burning out because I didn't like the leader, I didn't like the work that I was doing,
I didn't like the team that I was on for whatever reason. So unmanageable workload in actuality isn't just a kind of a black and white how much work do you have to get done? It's how bought in are you to the work? And all of these things kind of fall into the same line.
If you have the good relationship with the leader and you have good relationship with your team, these things it's not that they go away, it's that they're not viewed as negatively as they could be if you didn't have that support from the leader or the relationship. It's like it's almost like, do you have the tools to solve the problem, because inevitably they will happen inevitably there will be a lack of role clarity. Right. Does it burn you out?
I don't know. Do you have a good relationship with your leader because you can get rid of that lack of clarity right away. Do you have an unmanageable workload? I don't know. I do you have a good relationship with your leader because if you do, talk to them about it and figure out where you can take steps to make it more manageable in the moment, it becomes burnout when you don't have that relationship. All of these things kind of
fall into that same line. So I think that's really the takeaway here is is don't look at these things as causes a burnout. Look at them as symptoms of the of the broader problem of a lack of good relationships with leaders. Yeah, and I think the article you know, talks a little bit about that around like leaders leadership starting the prevention strategy is much further upstream.
So to your point, like, I think that that that you're absolutely spot on that it's like this is you know, the only thing that I would say, is like, it's it burnouts about your workplace. I would change that in finac I would say burnouts about the leadership, like you know, like that that's the reality, is that the leaders bring these things to life, or the leaders lessen these things of an impact. And then to your
point, like yeah, like I've been in exactly the same boat. I have felt sometimes that like, man, I'm being asked to do a lot more than maybe a peer of mine is doing. But I also feel like my leader is aware of that. They inspire that they motivate me in that
space. They explain to me why that's a thing. You know, my leader will say things like you know, I want you to work to your potential and not measure yourself against other peers, like because I think you have more potential, Like those are things that a leader can say that will erase some of these things off the list for me, Like then it's all good, Like I don't need to worry about these things or these things don't have that type of an impact on me because I know that there is a larger
picture here, there's a different level that I'm being asked to deliver upon, and I'm willing to accept that personally because my leader is really clear about that type of work. So yeah, I agree with you, and I think that so much of this is about that understanding of if leaders are not doing the work that they should be doing with their teams in these ways, then these symptoms will start to show up, and over time these things will definitely
turn into burnout. Yeah, and we learned from the interview that we put out with Steven Schadletski last month on Speak Up Culture that a person's relationship with their leader has more of an impact on their overall physical and mental health than even the relationship that have with family doctor that came from the World Health Organization.
That is absolutely true. And so if you're looking at trying to stop the burnout that might be happening in your place of work, really understand that this isn't just about, you know, people having more grit or being able to like power through something. For a lot of people, this is having a true impact on their mental and physical health and well being. And the broader implications of that are are life and death in some situations, and for
a lot of people. In the last few years, with the reprioritizing of things in people's lives, a lot of people are a lot less willing to
compromise those things than maybe they would have in the past. And so if you're a leader and you want to make sure that your people aren't constantly leaving or you know, or burning out, the way to do that is to is to look at your relationship with them and make sure that if these things event when inevitably these things wear their heads, that you and your people have the tools together to solve them as opposed to them leading to that burnout.
Absolutely, and with that it brings us to the end of this episode. This is hacking leadership. I'm Lorenzo and I'm Chris, and have a great day.