S2E34 – Unmasking Burnout – Tactics for Tech Leadership Podcast

Show Notes

Burnout transcends mere feelings of being overwhelmed; it’s a profound state that can drastically affect personal well-being and the productivity of organizations. Despite its significance to individuals and their workplaces, it remains a concept often enshrouded in mystery and misinformation.

Leveraging validated academic research and personal insights, Andy and Mon-Chaio present practical strategies for engineering leaders to foster healthier work environments. They explore over five decades of burnout research and discuss its application in contemporary engineering organizations. This episode is a treasure trove of advice for both experienced leaders and those aspiring to management, providing essential tips for cultivating a resilient and flourishing team.

References

Transcript

Mon-Chaio: Welcome back everyone, I’m here with Andy. Toward the end of August now, which means we’re 30-some-odd episodes in for this year, if my math is correct.

Andy: I guess this one is number 34, since I just posted 33.

Mon-Chaio: Okay. So here we are at number thirty four. Combined with our I think approximately twenty-some-odd episodes from the end of last year, puts us over the 50 episode mark. That’s a lot of them to do every week, about 40 minute episodes. And the question is, are we gonna do any more, Andy? Or, is this the end?

Are we just done with this? Are we feeling malaise, ennui, whatever you want to call it. Or, if not ennui, Andy, are you feeling burnt out?

Andy: Ooh, am I feeling burnt out? I don’t know. I don’t know, maybe we should talk about that. I am a little tired. Is that burnout?

Mon-Chaio: Maybe. Burnout is a phrase that we now hear a lot. Everybody talks about being burnt out with work or with child care or any number of different things. Mostly I think in the professional sphere with work. And that got me interested to learn, is that sort of a, uh, a social slang type of thing? Is there any research around burnout? Is it real? Can we quantify it? And if we can, does that help us make better decisions as individuals and as organizations.

So that was my interest around it. What about you, Andy? Did you have a specific reason why you’re interested in talking about burnout?

Andy: I think it’s something that has come up a few times in prior episodes. I didn’t do a search, I thought about doing it, but I’m pretty sure we’ve talked about it a few times. And it is something that I was interested in prior to all of this, because I myself, I think, went through burnout. So most of my research in this episode is going to come from that time of my life when I was experiencing that, and I, as you might expect I do from this podcast, I spent a bit of time researching burnout to see, well, what is it? And am I experiencing it?

Mon-Chaio: That does sound a lot like you, Andy, so I’m not surprised. By the way, our cheeky – I’m using a British phrase here, in deference to you, Andy – our cheeky reference to burnout, I don’t think we’re feeling burnt out on the podcast. So don’t worry, listeners, I think we have quite a ways to go here, lots of topics to talk about.

Andy: No, and, I think as we talk about it, it will become a little bit clearer why we’re probably not feeling burnt out on it. Because it is a fair amount of work. We do have to fit this in with other things we do. So why wouldn’t we be feeling burnout? And I think we’ll maybe get to that.

Mon-Chaio: I love it. As we do, perhaps we should start with what is burnout? Is there some sort of scientific or community agreed upon definition of burnout that we can use to ground our conversation?

Andy: Well, I think we just start from the words. It’s being out of burn, right?

Mon-Chaio: So that’s, what? No more fuel, no more reactants. Is that we’re talking about?

Andy: And that is kind of a jokey answer, but in some ways it starts to get to the beginning of what it is, I think.

Mon-Chaio: And I was surprised. Andy, I know you did research on this when you were feeling burnt out prior to us ever starting the podcast, but my research on burnout started actually on this episode. What I was surprised about was how much research has actually been done on burnout. I think the earliest paper that I found was in the early 80s.

Andy: Yes, that’s when I think it really picked up. I believe, I don’t have it in front of me, I believe the term was coined, like in 1974.

Mon-Chaio: Oh, okay. Okay. I think there’s been a lot of research around this and the researchers have generally aligned on a definition of burnout that has three pillars. Would you agree, Andy, that most people are aligned around that as sort of the foundation of how to talk about burnout?

Andy: Yeah, I believe it’s these three pillars that, assuming we’re thinking about the same three pillars, I believe it’s these three pillars that have become the mostly accepted definition that people work from.

Mon-Chaio: And there’s definitely different ways of talking about the pillars and names. I think the one I’m going to pull from might be from the original paper. But the three pillars, they were from a paper by Maslach. And she defined them as pillar 1 is emotional exhaustion, pillar 2 is depersonalization, and pillar 3 is reduced personal accomplishment.

Andy: Right. And, just to say how much those three names might vary, the way I learned about it is, exhaustion. Just exhaustion, It’s emotional and physical exhaustion, because it will hit both of those. Cynicism, which I like that as the name for it. And professional inefficacy, so the feeling that things you do just aren’t doing anything.

Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.

Andy: So these three pillars are what I think all current definitions of burnout really rest on. The underlying idea is that it will exhibit itself in this way. So people will feel really tired, they’ll feel just emotionally drained, where, well actually managers, quite often, we might be emotionally drained as we’re dealing with the emotions and the stresses of team members around us.

I think there’s a part of this as well, which is that it’s not necessarily a short term thing. This isn’t like you end your day and you’re like, oh I’m drained, I’m burnt out.

Mon-Chaio: Hmm.

Andy: It’s that you never really recover, I think is where the burnout really starts to happen. Because it’s not just I had a bad day. It’s, I can’t get back into having a good day.

Mon-Chaio: And we can talk about why that probably is the case. I don’t know that in any of the research I read, they talked about time scales for this type of burnout. So I don’t think specifically I’ve read anywhere that you can’t be burned out for a day or whatnot. But when we get into the causes of burnout, I think maybe then we can talk about well, why is it unlikely that you can be burnt out for a day and not burnt out the next day?

Andy: Yeah. And I think most of us, when we start feeling it, we can’t identify it. And you may not notice all of the aspects of it, but you can start noticing something’s not quite right. And I think one of the things to know as well is that, why would we be talking about this? Well, one of it is for your own personal monitoring.

But the other thing is also, our listeners often are leaders or managers. To know what to look for, and to know what might be happening, so that you might be able to help someone through this, and either do it yourself, with the caveat, you’re not, probably not, a trained mental health professional, so possibly getting them to someone else who can help them, and recognizing, as we get into this, recognizing that part of the help for them may be changes to what’s happening in the workplace

Mon-Chaio: And you’re right, Andy, like as an individual, I think it’s pretty important to be able to assess whether you’re burnt out or whether it’s something else. But I think it’s way, way more important for organizations.

And there’s this concept that burnout is very structural. It’s not about a one to one. It’s not about a you as a leader and them as an employee type of relationship. And when we talk about causes and potential causes of burnout, we can talk about why that’s the case. So I think it’s even more important for leaders of organizations to understand what burnout is and why the things that they do may be causing or not causing burnout.

And the other thing I think we should touch on real quick before we go into maybe the causes is, as I was doing my research, one of the things that came across the most clear to me is around the relationship between burnout and physical and emotional changes that happen in people.

So there is a meta study that was done, I think almost 10 years ago – I didn’t look to see if there was a newer one – which found very, very strong correlations between experiencing burnout and things like type-2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, hospitalization due to cardiovascular disease, muscular skeletal pain, gastrointestinal issues. There was a few things that were less correlated. Things like insomnia, where some studies said, yeah, there’s correlation. Some studies said there’s not really correlation. But the ones I listed previously were all very strongly correlated. And so those are very serious issues.

It’s not just, oh, I’m feeling a little down. Maybe, you know, I should take a vacation. So I think it’s really important as leaders to realize that burnout does have serious issues beyond maybe I just want to quit or I’m not doing my best in the organization.

Andy: Yeah. And I can say, so, as I said, one of the reasons I already knew a bit of this literature was that I had kind of gone through some burnout myself. And when going through that, it was in some ways like that I was under a constant stress response to everything. And so like it would be very easy for me to just get my heart suddenly pounding when nothing really is going on. You said insomnia is not necessarily correlated. I wouldn’t sleep very well.

So all of these different things going on, and one of the things in there is that stress response. We know that that’s also very strongly correlated. So if one of the impacts of burnout is that you kind of feel this constant stress response, as well as probably all sorts of other things, yeah, that’s not going to end well for your body.

Mon-Chaio: Right. Um, I probably mentioned it before, but high cortisol levels, the stress chemical, for extended periods of time, well known that that’s not great for the body.

Andy: So, what causes it? Where’s this come from, Mon Chaio?

Mon-Chaio: What causes it?

Andy: I think the biggest misconception that I learned when I first started looking into this …

Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.

Andy: … and when I would talk to people, if you bring up burnout, one of the first things that often I’ve seen people come up with is, you just take away work.

Mon-Chaio: Mmm hmm.

Andy: You’re like, oh, you just have too much work to do. And while that’s not unconnected, it’s probably not the only factor. And you can also actually increase burnout by taking away their work sometimes.

Mon-Chaio: Yeah, I think the research that I found, it sort of says the same thing, Andy. I’ll rephrase in another way and you can tell me whether it fits with what you’re thinking or not, or what you read maybe.

Based on my readings of the research, it feels like what they call high demands or job strain, the amount of work placed upon you, is pretty integral to burnout. They say it has a very, very high correlation. But the opposite is not necessarily true. Which means just removing that does not remove burnout. Kind of a weird thing, right? So you think about, well, I can’t be burnt out, generally speaking, if I have low job strain, but also removing job strain doesn’t remove burnout that already exists. That’s kind of the way that I saw that. But overall, I think that, yes, there are a few other factors that all together create a system or an environment, which is more conducive to burnout. A couple of those that I want to point out, they mention high work privacy conflicts, high insecurity at work. And mobbing, which honestly I didn’t dig into what mobbing meant, probably doesn’t mean mob programming would be my guess since article is not from … it’s from quite a while ago.

So you can already see, right, beyond this idea of I’m overloaded with work, there are these other factors that play in that make burnout more likely and are more highly correlated to being burnt out. In fact, there’s a quote from one of the papers, it says, “we would like to point out that strong intercorrelation between workplace factors as a matter of principle make the identification of a single psychosocial workplace factor being associated with especially high or low risk of burnout difficult.”

And that’s what we’re talking about with saying just increased job demand or just increased job strain is not going to be the cause of burnout.

Andy: Yeah. And the stuff I’m looking at, it says the same kind of thing: increased workload has a consistent relationship with burnout. And it says, especially with emotional exhaustion. It says, individuals who lack sufficient time and support to recover fully from demanding work are vulnerable to chronic exhaustion.

And so it’s not necessarily the amount of work, but it’s the toll that the work has.

Mon-Chaio: Right. And so then we can start to talk about, well, let’s say you have a lot of work. There’s always a lot of work in tech, especially in VC-backed startups. So it might be interesting for listeners that are leaders there to say, well, I can’t like reduce the amount of work – which, I’m sorry, you can reduce the amount of work, that’s another episode – I can’t reduce the amount of work. But I’m still interested, hopefully you are, listeners, in reducing the chance of burnout.

So what does that mean? What can I do? Within the amount of work that everybody still has?

Andy: I think one part of it is around these support structures for that work. Do they match – and this is I think going to get to a central theme – do they match with the way that the person wants to and can approach their work? But also, does it give them support in doing that work?

So for instance, if you have someone who has never worked on performance tuning before. And you give them the work of performance tuning. But you give them almost no support in that. And so the workload is maybe something where if someone knows how to do it, it’s completely reasonable. But now the way that you give it to them is you just keep asking for status updates. And that’s the only support you give them.

You haven’t given them a huge amount of workload, but you’ve given them also no support, no way of recovering from that workload. And it’s kind of mismatched to their ability, possibly, to even do that work. So it’s not even the amount of work. Possibly you could take that same person, who’s never done the performance tuning before, and ask them suddenly to implement a whole bunch of stuff in CSS. And they can just go right through it, they know it all really well. So it’s not amount of work, it’s how well that person is capable of doing that work, and how much support they have to do that work, which is both personal support as well as organizational support.

Mon-Chaio: Right, I like that. And I actually like talking less about workload, and the original, I think, article talked about job demand. And at least to me personally, job demand is less about what is the quantitative amount of hours of work that you’re doing. And it’s more about what is the demand on you, both from a physical, emotional, and time state, of course, of being able to execute that in the way that fulfills what you need to fulfill as well as what the company needs to fulfill.

Andy: And so right there, this is me going a little bit off piste, I think, on the research, you can start seeing where just taking work away from someone may not make this better. So say, Mon-Chaio, you’ve never done performance tuning before, but you are an expert in CSS, and you had on your plate both of those tasks.

In fact, maybe it was one performance tuning thing, and the rest of it was CSS. And you started saying, oh, Andy, I’m feeling kind of burnt out. I’m like, okay, okay. You know what? I’m going to take all of those CSS tasks off of you, and you can just focus on the performance tuning. All I’ve done is concentrated the problem.

Mon-Chaio: Right. I love that example. That’s so clear. Yes, absolutely. And that happens a lot. Especially for senior folks. We’re talking about ICs here. Oftentimes, performance tuning is the most important thing to be done.

Andy: Yeah. We don’t, we don’t those new styles, but the site is slow. We have to get that fixed.

Mon-Chaio: Or there’s many other people that can take on the CSS work. You are the only one we trust to take on the performance tuning work. Nobody’s ever done it before. You’re the one that we feel is the most capable of learning and getting it done, despite the fact that no one’s ever done this before.

Andy: Yeah.

Mon-Chaio: So I think that’s a great example. Another that I run into often in terms of support is headcount. Very popular amongst VC-backed startups is the phrase “do more with less.” And I think “do more with less” doesn’t have to, but can often correlate with burnout because the demand and the resources are not in proportion to each other.

Andy: Mm hmm.

Mon-Chaio: And so that causes high emotional stress. Another example is all the layoffs that are happening these days. Oftentimes groups get smaller and have resources and headcount taken away, but their goals, or what they have to deliver, is the same. And that, again, can be a great cause for burnout because of the mismatch between the demand and the resourcing.

Andy: Yeah, and in fact, that even connects to what i would go to as the next reason you get burnout, where it can come from, which is control. So, this one is, if you have insufficient control, or mismatches in control between your work and your ability to shape what’s going on around you. And this one says specifically, “in a manner consistent with your values.” All of these things in some way, start becoming about whether or not they’re consistent with your values.

But that mismatch of control and layoffs. or that kind of like, just do more with less, what those are is indicating that there are things that are fundamental to what you’re trying to do which are not in your control. And that mismatch of what’s in your control and what’s not may not align with your values of what you believe you should be in control of.

Mon-Chaio: Yeah, I like the way that you put that. I think the values are super important. I think beyond values, we talk, well, maybe not we, I, I talk a lot about AAA organizations. And part of that is around control, right? Do you have a very clear sphere of what is or isn’t in your control? And when I think about AAA – for those listeners that are just listening to this episode and haven’t listened to ones in the past, the three A’s are authority, autonomy, and accountability – often times you get a mismatch where you have no authority, but you have accountability.

Or, let me put it a different way, not enough authority. Often organizations will give you as a leader 20 percent authority. Oh, well, you don’t get the headcount lever to pull. You don’t get the time lever to pull. You can’t renegotiate with the customer because the PM has already negotiated with the customer. You can’t drop this other feature because somebody else says it’s really important. You can’t split your team in two because we don’t have another manager that we can, you know, that sort of a thing, right? So here’s a few tiny levers to pull, but you’re still accountable for something much larger than those tiny levers are going to be able to achieve.

Andy: Yeah, so there can be that structural mismatch which causes constant, like, what’s going on here. But you can also have a personal mismatch with what you are given control over. So, as an example, you could say, you’re a AAA organization, and as part of your autonomy, you have control over your own infrastructure. But maybe I’m an engineering manager and I don’t believe that I should have autonomy over that. I think that it’s actually just a complete distraction and every time it comes up I’m just like why am I having to spend my precious workload emotional cycles on trying to figure out why Postgres is swapping to disk. And sure, yeah, I get to delegate that off to my team, but why is my team having to deal with it? I don’t want them dealing with it.

And so you can get this mismatch in what is it that you believe you should be doing? And so someone might say, oh here, great. You have all of this control. There’s no reason that you should ever feel like something’s wrong. But that’s not necessarily true.

Mon-Chaio: I very much like that example too, Andy. Andy, you’re, you’re, you’re example man today! I love both your examples. They’re great!

Andy: I’ve thought about this a bit.

Mon-Chaio: Perhaps from personal experience even. Maybe now’s a good time to talk about models of burnout. I think we both came across one called Areas of Work Life that seemed to resonate with us and I think when you were feeling burnt out yourself, you actually used that model to try to figure out what parts maybe were causing your burnout. So …

Andy: Yeah, so what I did, as I said, I was feeling burnt out and I thought, am I feeling burnt out? What is burnout? Let’s have a deep thought about what this is that I’m feeling. And I looked up research and I found stuff. And I came across Maslach’s research. And in there, there was an article from 1999. Not the newest thing, but it laid it out in a way that I could get my head around. And it gave me something that was fairly actionable.

And a key part of it is there are what are called inventories. They’re tests you can take to measure your level of burnout. There’s a Maslach inventory. There’s a few other inventories. The problem with them is I can’t find them online without paying like $30, and I’m a cheapskate. I’m not going to pay $30 to get access to one. I probably should have, it wouldn’t have been a bad thing. But I didn’t. What I did instead was I read this article about the six areas of work life.

And the six areas are, I’ll just go through them really fast, it’s workload, as we were just talking about. Control, as we were just talking about. Rewards, which is the recognition that you get for doing things in your organization. So it’s from people who are the recipients of your work, or colleagues, or managers, or external stakeholders. And it’s what kind of rewards they give you and when they give you rewards. There’s community. This is, as it says, subjective appraisal of your social context. So this is, do you feel like you’re part of a group? And do you feel like you’re part of a group in a way that you want to be part of a group? So I’m going to always bring it back to the, it is not just the organization, but it’s also the person. Which means that neither side gets to say , oh, it’s just the other person, it’s the other side of this relationship. Then you have fairness. This is that question of, do you have a sense of mutual trust among people in the organization? Are decisions being made, are rewards being given, are promotions given, is work doled out in a way that you consider in some way fair? And it says: “fair decisions are those that give due consideration to the diverse conditions of staff members.”

So one part of fairness is, are you able to avoid the curse of competency? Is it only the really competent people who get all of the work, and the people who aren’t very competent don’t get any work? Hey, that’s not very fair! That’s actually how that’s how you burn out your competent people, by the way.

Mon-Chaio: And, I will add, interesting thing about fairness, at least to me, is that fairness is not equalness.

Andy: Yes, absolutely!

Mon-Chaio: And that’s very, very tough for an organization, especially large organizations that worry about things like lawsuits or whatever, right? Because the law tends to not be about fairness, it tends to be about equalness …

Andy: Yeah.

Mon-Chaio: … as a proxy.

Andy: And an aspect of people’s assessment of fairness – so in this example of like, the competent person gets all of the work and the incompetent person gets almost no work – the answer is not to give them equal work.

Mon-Chaio: Mmm hmm.

Andy: The answer for fairness probably is to fire the incompetent person.

Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.

Andy: That is, from the competent person’s standpoint, probably the fair thing to do because it addresses community as well as fairness. So these are not necessarily even easy things to address, is why I bring that up.

Mon-Chaio: No, and I think your example of firing the incompetent person can be very fair. And if I were a leader in that position, I probably would think that’s the most fair thing to do. But given the structural parts and how you’ve built your company, that might not be the fair thing to do. Right? And so there’s your point again around it’s the company, the individual, and the matches, and who you have. And if you hire new people, fairness might look different than it looked for your old folks.

Andy: And then the last of the six is values. And this is not the overlap of your espoused values with the company’s espoused values. It’s the overlap of partly your espoused values, but also your theory-in-use values and the company’s theory-in-use values.

Mon-Chaio: Mhm.

Andy: Because if those are not along the same lines, there might be a mismatch between your values and the company’s values.

So those are the six areas. And you asked Mon-Chaio, what did I do with these? What I did was I read the article, I thought through the six areas, I put them in a notebook, and then I did an assessment of my situation and did my values align? What were the values I believe the organization had? What are the values I had? What kind of workload do I have? What do I think of my workload? Do I have a sense of community? Who is my community? That kind of thing. And it helped me clarify where some of my sense of burnout was coming from. Some of it was actionable. Some of it wasn’t. But it gave me a starting point of where was this possibly coming from and what could I do about it?

Mon-Chaio: And in the vein of baring your soul even more, Andy, would you like to talk about what you did do after that?

Andy: I talked to my managers about it. So I even showed them some of what I had come up with and why I was thinking this way. I talked to them about mismatching values.

And this was about values as in theory-in-use that I was watching versus what I heard espoused. Because what was espoused, I felt completely aligned with, but what I watched happening, I wasn’t aligned with.

So I had those discussions. It helped some, but I have to admit in the end, I quit my job and took time off to try to recover.

Mon-Chaio: And why do you think it only helped some, but didn’t help a lot?

Andy: Ooh, I think it didn’t help a lot because there were mismatched expectations, and there were a lot of things going on for the business that they just wouldn’t be able to change.

Mon-Chaio: Right.

Andy: And this gets to that the burnout is really about this mismatch between the organization and the individual on these job related elements.

Mon-Chaio: Mhm.

Andy: And in this case, the mismatch was something that possibly once things calmed down and some of the changes had occurred, the mismatch wouldn’t be there anymore. But it was a question of could I last through the time of the mismatch.

Mon-Chaio: And I want to dive a little bit more into this. There’s this concept of mismatch, right, between the individual and the organization. That is certainly true, but I think in my mind organizations bear a much bigger responsibility around burnout.

So let me read something from earlier research, so this has obviously changed as people have researched it more. This paper says: “we found a relatively consistent association between unfavorable psychosocial working conditions, such as high workload, high quantitative, mental or emotional demands, low social support, and burnout and emotional exhaustion as the core burnout component. The influence of low job control on burnout dimensions was inconsistent.” The way that I read that, and the fact that there is this concept of org mismatch, is that as an organization, you can create an environment which will most likely mismatch most people.

Andy: Mmm, interesting.

Mon-Chaio: If you’re a company, an organization and you say, look, my working environment is going to be high workload, high emotional demands, low social support. And I heard on this podcast that it’s just a matter of matching. So, it’s equally you and me, right? Like let’s just match. I think if those are your working environments, you’re most likely going to mismatch with most people. The research also mentioned, as I said in the quote, low job control on burnout dimensions was inconsistent. That makes sense in my mind because there are people maybe where low control is okay for them. They match a space where they don’t need a lot of control. And there is also a correlation that says, look, when you put these unfavorable conditions on, that I read, they generally lead to burnout.

But when you have what you might call favorable conditions, things like low workload, low mental emotional demands, that sort of thing, it doesn’t necessarily correlate to low burnout. Right? So unfavorable conditions correlates to high burnout. Favorable conditions doesn’t necessarily correlate to low burnout. All of that in my mind says that you can create better conditions which are more likely to result in less burnout. But then there is also the matching between what you do as a company, your values, and the individuals that you hire. And I think a lot of that comes down to misrepresentation of values during the hiring process, or as we talk about all the time, this concept of espoused theory versus theory-in-use mismatching regularly.

Andy: I like this idea, Mon-Chaio, that you can create a situation that almost guarantees burnout, but just getting rid of that situation isn’t necessarily enough to completely avoid burnout. And outcome of this is that a lot more of burnout is on the organization than it is on the individual.

Mon-Chaio: Yes, I agree.

Andy: I like that.

Mon-Chaio: And it fits with our socialist tendencies.

Andy: Yeah, yeah.

Mon-Chaio: OK, so, wrapping up here, what are some tactics that we can give? Maybe both individuals and organizations, and leaders of organizations, I should say. Organizations are faceless, amorphous things, but they’re made up of leaders.

Andy: I would actually say make this a discussable topic. So talk about this and work through it and see where it might be coming from if people are starting to feel it. But with the understanding that you may not find something that you can change.

Mon-Chaio: Mmm hmm.

Andy: But then my second thing would be, seriously question what you can and cannot change. So, if you sit there and like, oh, but we can’t change that, I would say, ask why. And until you can get to a really good reason about why you cannot change something, mmm, think that you can probably do something there.

Mon-Chaio: I like that. My tactic is going back to earlier in the episode, there really are physical and emotional factors for the individuals involved that are feeling burnt out. So burnout isn’t something where I feel like you can negotiate that away in an equitable way. ” I built a company that’s highly prone to burn people out. But here’s $ 7 million in stock options if we succeed. Are you willing to trade cardiovascular disease for $7 million in stock options?”

I don’t think that’s a fair conversation. I don’t think that’s a fair negotiation. And so, I think organizations and leaders need to seriously question whether their environment is more likely than not, or extremely likely to induce burnout. And if it is, understand that there’s a risk around people, and how do they change their environment such that it then becomes a more equitable conversation around, okay, now is it really just a match type of thing?

Andy: Yeah. I like that.

Mon-Chaio: Anything else? Any other tactics from you?

Andy: I’ve got no tactic, but I do want to leave listeners with a quote from an article that I found called Surviving Burnout. I say article, this is someone’s blog post. And they say: “The first thing I know about burnout is this. Burnout happens when we become locked in a cycle of caring about the results of our actions, but having no meaningful control over those outcomes.”

And so maybe that does give me a last tactic, which is, yeah, as the organization, you’re giving people a trade off here. You have a lot of control over what’s going on. And how can you give people meaningful control over the outcomes that they’re working with. And in fact, stock options, I’ll rail against them for a minute. Stock options have this underlying idea that you’re getting something of value that you have some sort of control over. And when you’re a very small company, that might be true,

Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.

Andy: But when it’s a much bigger thing, if you believe that that is your compensation and that that number just has to keep going up, you’ve been given an incentive scheme that you have no control over.

Mon-Chaio: I agree with that. Before we end, Andy, we did tell listeners that we would tell them why we’re not burnt out on this podcast. Is that something we want to talk about?

Andy: Yeah. Oh, I would say I’m not burnt out because this podcast lets me do the thing I enjoy, which is kind of looking into all these topics and then talking about them.

Mon-Chaio: Yeah, I would generally agree. The AAA around this podcast is really great. I mean, we kind of work for ourselves, so that helps. But also the demands are not more than we feel like we have resources for. And we feel like we have control over the outcomes and it’s stuff that we enjoy doing,

Andy: Yeah.

Mon-Chaio: I mean, for the most part, I don’t know. Sometimes when I’m editing, and Descript wants me to have a word in there and I just can’t get rid of it, I questioned my entire existence. So, uh, Descript, if you’re listening, come to us. We have a lot of feedback.

Andy: My favorite thing in Descript recently has been it adding words to the transcript that we never said. I was editing the transcript and it added a section to what something Mon-Chaio had said that he never said, and it completely changed the meaning. Entire sentence that he was like, we’re going to talk about this topic. I agree with it. He did not say, “I agree with it.”

Mon-Chaio: Or anything along those lines. Not anything that sounded anything like that. Oh man. Okay, well, I think this is a great place to end it. We’re not burnt out. There will be more episodes coming.

So if you have an idea for an episode, something that you wish you could research, but you don’t have time or don’t know where to look, let us know. If you dislike what we talked about, let us know. If you want to start a conversation, ask some questions, let us know. Some of our favorite times is getting emails and other communications from listeners, giving us insight into their points of view. So write to us, hosts@thettlpodcast.com or reach out anywhere we have socials.

Andy and I also consult with individuals and organizations to help them through any of these topics that we’ve discussed, such as burnout. So if you’re feeling burnt out, you would like somebody to help talk to you through it; if you’re an organization that’s trying to do the right thing and continue to be a high-performing, successful organization, but don’t want to burn your people out, let us know. We’d love to help you structure your culture, your values, your processes based on our experience and all of this validated research. So same thing, write to us: hosts@thettlpodcast.com.

Until next time, be kind and stay curious.

S2E34 – Unmasking Burnout

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Transcript

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