Three tips for leaders: balancing enthusiasm with behaviours to minimise burnout
“I’ll do it!” she said with gusto in the team meeting.
“Thank goodness, I was hoping she’d volunteer. She always jumps at an opportunity. I might meet that deadline afterall.” You thought with quiet relief.
“It’s a busy week, but I’m sure I can squeeze it in tomorrow night after dinner. It’s another chance to prove myself.” Her busy mind thought, while calculating the rapidly diminishing hours in her next day.
There are few things as energising as an aspiring young team member radiating enthusiasm. It can feel like an emotional contagion sweeping through a team meeting. Maybe even cracking the hardened surface of your most tenured cynic!
Determined to prove themselves, they’ll give anything a go. Darting here, there, back & forth. Grabbing opportunities in the workplace with both hands, even if they don’t align with their current priorities.
“The more I do, the more I’ll be valued.” They rationalise.
Before long, work infiltrates their after hours diary. Professional commitments slowly swallow their social obligations & the balance between the two becomes too tricky to manage.
Burning the candle at both ends starts to take its toll. The candle tipping, favouring work. Soon the orange flame creeps up the waxy column until “ouch!”, it burns the fingers holding it.
The slippery slope to burnout has begun.
Coaching clients often plonk down in front of me, barely thirty & utterly exhausted with life.
“This was my dream job. I was meant to love it. Instead I’m exhausted & miserable. I don’t understand why it’s not working?” they tearily ask.
When we delve into the nooks & crannies of their diary, they soon realise how much work has infiltrated their life & identity.
Together we work to bring self awareness to the forefront & introduce a few simple hacks to protect their energy levels. All designed to nurture their sense of self connection.
“If there was one lesson I could teach all professionals, it would be that we represent ourselves first. Before our brand & our product or service. Decision making is much, much easier when you are confident in what you stand for & the impact you want to make.”
Peta Sitcheff
How do leaders set aspiring & enthusiastic young team members up for a successful & sustainable career?
We can teach them boundaries - how to apply a personal development skill in a professional context without feeling like they are compromising opportunity.
Understanding boundaries begins with identifying what is most important to us. Both of which I’ve written about before in previous blogs & we dive into in the first module of Momentum Mindset™, Motivation Momentum.
Supporting our team in applying boundaries in a professional environment begins with clarifying our assumptions:
What is my team’s understanding of the boundary concept?
What is my team’s understanding of their own boundaries?
How confident are my team in asserting their boundaries in their work environment?
Here are three tips I’ve found helpful as a leader & supporting less experienced team members in applying boundaries:
Be proactive & check in
Experience gives us knowledge. Without it, we don’t know any different. Often less experienced team members simply don’t know what they don’t know, making it hard to recognise when they are nudging their limits.
As a leader, taking the responsibility to proactively check in & offer support, is a more effective approach to monitoring team well-being, rather than putting the onus on them to reach out for help (1).
Here are a few common phrases often mistaken for support:
Reach out if you’re struggling.
My door is always open.
Let me know if you need help.
Action: Diarise regular check-ins to understand the layers of their workload & alignment with priorities. Identify the work they do/ don’t love doing, this will likely align with their passions & is an opportunity to build on individual purpose.
Base your conversation on observations & ask open ended, calibrated questions to obtain accurate information.
What work is energising for you?
What is draining for you?
What is consuming most of your time?
What could you do without right now?
Describe how you are feeling about your current workload?
What’s within your control we could change today to support you?
Identifying opportunities for support & offering solutions should be reliably followed up on, to maintain a trusting environment & maintain confidence in leadership.
Help them find the words
Saying “no” can be incredibly daunting to an inexperienced team member trying to find their way in a new organisation. Even more so, when there’s a need to say “no” to a customer.
Their minds might be thinking, “I don’t want to let anyone down,” “I need to prove myself,”“The more I do the more successful I’ll be,” & “I couldn’t possibly say “no” to a customer, I’ll lose the business.”
Saying “no” is asserting a boundary. It’s us recognising our limits & communicating those limits to others, so they are aware of them too. Remember, no one can read minds.
I like to think of asserting boundaries as articulating our personal “terms & conditions.”
When coaching boundaries, I like using Kemi’s quote (below). It find it resonates because most of us remember how we’ve felt when we’ve been pushed too far - we never forget the way something makes us feel.
“My boundaries help me be the kindest version of myself.”
Kemi Nekvapil, Power - A woman’s guide to living & leading without apology
Action: Work through the conversation with your team member. Help them find the words & tone, then have them speak the words out loud with you, practicing numerous times. The key is speaking the words out loud. It brings order to the mind & confidence to the future conversation.
Teach them how to use “tools of trade”
Mobile phones & laptops seem like wonderful perks when starting a new role. Particularly if you’ve not had them before. However perks can rapidly morph into a weighted ball & chain if expectations aren’t set & a disciplined approach isn’t encouraged.
Less experienced team members will need to be mindful of new boundaries - physical, mental, time & social media.
Action: Keep an eye out for extreme working times. ie. emails sent at 12am. Support your team member in setting up & communicating boundaries through; email signatures, out-of-office, email scheduling, redundant notifications, focus mode for focus work, personal versus professional phones (especially for roles when you aren’t in control of your time)
Lastly, the most powerful & influential tool available to us as leaders is to lead by example. Never should we underestimate how much of what we say & do, is being observed by those around us - particularly the enthusiast.
A gentle reminder that from time to time, along with checking in on our team, we should also be checking in on ourselves.
Peta x
Sales Coach | Consultant | Mental Health Speaker for Beyond Blue
Founder of Momentum Mindset - online mindset course for sales professionals with coaching support
Author of My Beautiful Mess - Living through burnout & rediscovering me
References & recommended reading:
(1) Leading Well-being - A leader’s conversation guide to mental health mastery at work
by Fleur Hazelwood
Slow Productivity - The lost art of accomplishment without burnout
by Cal Newport