Is Burnout Affecting Your Team?

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Perry Holley:
Welcome to the Maxwell Leadership Executive Podcast, where our goal is to help you increase your reputation as a leader, increase your ability to influe others, and increase your ability to fully engage your team to deliver remarkable results. Hi, I’m Perry Holly, a Maxwell Leadership facilitator and coach.

Chris Goede:
And I’m Chris Goede, Executive Vice President with Maxwell Leadership. Welcome and thank you for joining. As we get started as usual, I want to send you to MaxwellLeadership.com/ExecutivePodcast. You can download the Learner guide, which is something that teams use and individuals use, but we’re seeing a lot of teams actually use that as part of their team meetings. They’re discussing the content, encourage you to go there and download that. Also, if you have a question or a thought or an idea or a topic, Perry always pays me under the table to make sure that I can help keep these things going. After the amount of content he’s created for us, you can leave that information there and we would be more than happy to help you with that. Well, today’s topic is burnout affecting your team.

Chris Goede:
This is an important question and I think something that leaders need to be aware of, not only in themselves, but as you’re talking about right here, your team. Oftentimes we feel the burnout as leaders. Everybody is probably listening right now goes, oh yeah, I’m burned, I’m tired. Are you paying attention to what that looks like on the team? And if not, what’s going to end up happening is quietly your teams are going to begin to kind of fall apart a little bit and you’re going to be able to notice it in different areas of the business if you’re paying attention to what that looks like. So we’ve talked here in the past, and a big word in this industry has been about quiet quitting, where, you know, employees mentally check out and. And kind of stay there with you, but they’re. They’re completely gone. But today, this podcast, you’re hearing a new term from Perry, Holly, and he has pulled out all the stops.

Chris Goede:
So I can’t wait to hear where we’re going today.

Perry Holley:
I wish. I wish it was me. It’s not me, but. But the term is quiet cracking. And are people cracking up? And they’re doing it quietly because they don’t want you to know. But it comes from a study by Talent LMS that found that more than half employees, 54%, were reported feeling unhappy at work. Some occasionally, some constantly. But more than half of the workforce was kind of quietly suffering in their work.

Perry Holley:
And it gets worse. Some of the research from Upwork found that 77% of executives say that AI is. While it’s boosting productivity, 88% people are feeling that because people are suffering, they’re losing the productivity gains that they should be seeing. So it’s really quite bad considered quite quitting. At least they’re there, quite cracking. You don’t know that people are suffering. And this burnout. And there’s the pace and lots of things that are attributed.

Perry Holley:
We can talk about that. But that as a leader, I really want to get to. When I heard this, I go, I can see this. This is a pace that we’re running, and we love what we do. I don’t think there’s a lot of people, people on our team that don’t just love what we do, but there’s a lot. And it’s just one thing after another. And the challenges that we face and our people quietly suffer.

Chris Goede:
And I love this. I was just thinking about the fact that because of what we do, we love what we do, the pace we go. There are times where we are cracking and we’re verbal about it. And what we’re bringing to the table today is that it’s probably happening as well, but it’s happening quietly. And that’s where you really, as leader, got to have your antennas up. And so the study that Perry’s talking about also discovered that only one in four companies offer formal AI training. I think this is. This is super important because everybody’s saying, hey, use the tool.

Chris Goede:
Everybody’s using the tool. But what’s the structure of how best to use the tool and what does that look like to help you in what you’re doing and do it in a way that you can have a repeatable process of how to use AI for your tool. So just for clarification, let me come back. Quiet cracking isn’t like quiet quitting. Right. It’s not about someone choosing to just coast and they want their paycheck on Friday. It’s an involuntary emotional and mental breakdown happening right under the leader’s nose, right on the, on the team. And so talent LMS defines it as a persistent feeling of unhappiness that leads to disengagement, which we talk a lot about here.

Chris Goede:
Poor performance and an increased desire to actually quit to look for something else out there. And so these employees aren’t slacking off, they’re just silently drowning while trying to keep their head above water.

Perry Holley:
And one thing I picked up from the reading about it was that it’s one person related. It’s like you take a stone from the highway on your windshield, you get a little nick on your windshield.

Chris Goede:
It’s not much. I have one. Yeah, it keeps spreading. I know exactly where you’re going.

Perry Holley:
Yeah, that’s right. You don’t think much of it, and all of a sudden it slowly, over time, it begins feed its way across your windshield. Similar with our team. They look okay on the outside. They may be, you know, frazzled and tired, but they look okay. They’re showing up, they’re doing the work. It’s not like the kawaii queen, they’re continuing to push, but inside, how they’re feeling is a bit fractured. And by the time you catch on, it could be too late.

Perry Holley:
I mean, burnout’s a thing that really catches on you. Research researchers did say it looks a lot like burnout. And then some of the things I just wrote down, like lack of motivation, irritability, that explains a lot about what’s going on with you. Feeling useless or angry, but because it happens gradually that people don’t often even realize it themselves. But they’re experiencing these terms of, of burnout. And you know, the Gallup as they always put a number to this that says it’s really affecting productivity, is really driving 438 billion in lost productivity because people aren’t able to do what they.

Chris Goede:
You know, they’re there to do. Yeah, they’re skilled to do. It’s almost like a perfect storm of what some industries and some organizations are feeling. Right. The job market’s cooled down a little bit. It’s not as strong as it was. People are feeling stuck in, in their current role. The rise obviously, as Perry was talking about of AI has increased the, the pressure of performing and producing and turning around things quicker without increasing clarity and learning.

Chris Goede:
And development budgets, which could help this, especially in the AI world or others, have been cut in a lot of places. And we often say in our world that discretionary funds at times when our people or our teams need it, if the organization as a whole is feeling a little bit stressed, they pull back the discretionary funds, which is where that L and D budget and training comes from. And so then if you add in a leader or a team or organization that maybe is not understanding their people, we talk about this at level two, in the five levels. Understanding that some need recognition, you know, some are going to need a different opportunity, some need a little bit more communication. All of that. If you’re not doing that well, level two is going to lead to this burnout feeling where they don’t necessarily know that’s what’s happening. But it’s. You’re going to see that as they begin to crack.

Perry Holley:
And before we get to the. So I want to give some practical ideas on what to do about it. But recognizing it, I think is a big deal because I think I’m just looking at our team again. People are running hard and they’re, they’re doing their jobs and they. I know we all kind of probably go home exhausted at the end of the day, but one of the business psychologists, Danielle Hague, said that quiet cracking kind of slips in under the radar. But what it might look like is slower on decision making or less collaboration or maybe more mistakes, dips in creativity, dips in energy. But it kind of shows up as a slower version of disengagement. So we talk a lot.

Perry Holley:
Gallup surveys about engaged workforce disengage for different reasons. I had not really considered this that we always think about know parts of the job or, or the person’s having issue. This one is, causes disengagement because of something you’re feeling. The, the employees feeling on the side so that you won’t see an in productivity collapse right away. It’s it kind of happening slowly. But that’s where as a leader we, we can be so focused on what, what’s going on in the business and all that we’re doing. I don’t really take time to take check in right. You know, emotionally or psychologically with my team that are they doing okay with that.

Perry Holley:
So by the time you notice it it could be, it starts to really show up, could be too late. So I want to see these signs.

Chris Goede:
Well, and I was thinking about the work that you did with Valerie on resilience. And you know, one of the first things that she talked about and you guys went after is how do we as leaders begin to identify that in ourselves first? This is a little bit harder, especially when you just talked about it. It’s not about our teams feeling overworked while that probably is happening. It’s about them feeling overwhelmed. And the feeling, the pressure, the weight that comes with that. Now I just said the word feeling in a sentence twice more than I probably said my entire life. Right. But that’s, that’s what we’re talking about.

Chris Goede:
I love how you said it’s. It’s about the feeling that overwhelmed, not overworked kind of overwhelmed, which they may be. They may be cart before the horse there, you know, and you look at the two of those, some of the research they actually were looking at how many tools are we using, really what I call digital tools inside your business? And this does not surprise me because there are so many different tools we’re asking our team to actually use in their daily work. AI is now another one. And you think about not only the overwhelmed feeling of learning it and mastering it, but then switching from platform to platform to platform and the amount of wasted time. There’s just a compounding fact that that has happened. And then you look at, we were joking about this just a little while ago, personally looked at this because we came in here and I was like, hey, I got a hard stop at X. I gotta get outta here.

Chris Goede:
And he’s like, dude, between you and I, our back to back meetings, like which one of us is going to learn first? But when you look at our calendars and you’re carrying multiple projects, you understand that as well. There’s zero focused on work time. I was having a conversation with an individual the other day and I heard them say their executive day. And it, it grabbed me. So I made a little note, let them finish what they’re talking. I said, hey, before we go real quick, tell me about this executive day. They’re like, oh yeah, Like I have to have one every week, which means that’s my day to, to think and to move the needle on some things, to solve some problems. And I was like, I’m making a note right now.

Chris Goede:
Yeah, I’m like, now the question is, will I stay with it, Right? But I got to do that. And I think leaders, I think we got to pay attention to that because when you don’t have that focused time on the business or an individual contributor, that’s where you’re going to start to get to that burnout. You may not know it, but you’re going to begin to kind of to feel it. And so you gotta gotta get that focus time back.

Perry Holley:
It’s so funny because I’m traveling next week and I the way things are working out, I’m gonna have to fly in in the morning and. But I know the Atlanta traffic and the flights and all that and it’s gonna be on a Friday. I should just come home and just you know, catch up and get my expenses. But no, somebody says they want to have a coaching call, you know, I could probably do four o’. Clock. You just opened that door.

Chris Goede:
Yeah. I’m thinking why would I we self sabotage ourselves with all this. But yeah, but it’s a. That’s real right? Like versus saying no, this is what I have.

Perry Holley:
Right. Yeah.

Chris Goede:
And it’s hard to balance that to want to serve other people and where you’re at and try to be as efficient and productive.

Perry Holley:
But yeah, but we’re burning out. So let’s get to the practical. What can we do about this quiet cracking? Can we help them? One of the first and this again talent LMS had some suggestions on some of their research around training and development. Do you think, wow, why would that. A lot of what overwhelm feels like to people is doing things. Especially they. They called out in the initial surveys around AI being such a big deal. Well, I don’t know AI.

Perry Holley:
I don’t know how to use AI. I don’t you expect me to do with AI. Is AI going to replace me? I’m right. What are you trying to. And all these, all this overwhelm begins to come. So training and development. They found that people that felt like they had the training and support were more secure in their roles and that it really wasn’t about skills, it was about confidence building. So I love that second one was.

Perry Holley:
And I think you mentioned it briefly earlier was recognition and connection. Letting people know you appreciate them, you see what they’re doing and building regular feedback loops. We’ve been talking a lot about feedback lately how important that is to people to know how am I doing and getting some help with that. Training your managers to spot early warning signs that we mentioned earlier that irritability or low motivation that might show up, maybe emotional withdrawal but being able to just recognize and connect with people on a level that you, that you, you notice something’s up, something’s how you doing, what’s going on?

Chris Goede:
Yeah, you just sense something a little bit different in the way that they’re showing up. And then third, and we’ve talked about this as well, the psychological safety part of, of leading people, where you’re creating a culture where they feel comfortable saying, hey, I feel something a little bit different. They may not be able to use the words that they say, overwhelmed, but you can get to that point. And I come back to even just using some scales that we’ve talked about before, where I go, hey, on a scale of one to 10 with no sevens, how do you feel about this right now? Like, where are you at right now? What does that, you know? And that may get them to open up a conversation about what’s going on there. And so leaders, you have to remember this is not your fault if they feel that way. However, it is your responsibility to be aware of it and then to help them fix it, help them work through what that looks like. And so that means that in order for you to be able to do that, you’ve got to be healthy yourself. And John Maxwell says the first person that you have to lead is yourself, which is often the hardest person.

Chris Goede:
I say all the time, I am the best salesperson Chris has ever met. Like, I can talk myself in or out of anything in a hurry. But if you’re burning out and you say this right, I mean, if you are watching you all the time, and so it’s contagious, and so if you are, you are definitely not going to be able to. To help your team work through that. So you’ve got to set boundaries. You got to make sure you’re filling up your cup. The other thing I was thinking about too is when you think about leadership being contagious and people are watching you all the time, if you’re not aware of this and you don’t begin to see some of this in other, other team members, I promise you, the other team members are watching and they’re going, do I feel overwhelmed too? Like they’re beginning to see a little bit of difference in Perry, and it may begin to rub off. And that’s why I think it’s so important to not only help that individual right away, but then I think it protects the team.

Perry Holley:
Tell me this. You do a really nice job, I think, of watching the workload on people on our team. Is there something you other signals that give away, or is that just part of your normal discipline that you just Checking in with people and saying, how, how’s it? Because I know you when, even when I came in. And you, you know, I’m working on a few projects that we’re trying to move forward. We talk about the project, but then you say, how are you doing with it? But is that just part of the regular check in or do you. Or signs you see what are you.

Chris Goede:
So there’s definitely signs that I see that make me be more intentional at certain times. But I would say overall it’s just a rhythm that I think leaders should ask and be a part of. I think people ask me, you know, of that and then I’m able to communicate that it also, there’s a negative context to that because I will jump in and rescue, right. And try to take things off people, which is not what I should be doing at certain times and situations. And so maybe I’m looking for something I can help with or I can serve and pull back off of their plate if I sense that or figure out a different way to go about doing it and use my resources to be able to do that. So I think it’s a consistent thing that I do. But there are times when I can tell by body language, by missing deadlines, by shortness and response, whatever it might be, I can. When you know your people well enough, you begin to kind of sense that and I think you’d be aware of it.

Perry Holley:
I’ve actually seen it on this team where you know people’s personalities, you know, how we’re, we’re a close knit group, we know each other pretty well. Then all of a sudden somebody snaps a little quickly or you know, erupts on something that they normally wouldn’t. And I’ve seen you come alongside and go, hey, what’s going on?

Chris Goede:
Yeah, you’re okay. This, I had example just a couple weeks ago. One of my team members, I, I sensed something. I could just tell, yeah, we, we work together, we all know each other. And so I said, hey, how you doing? And I got, I’m doing good, thanks. Why’d you ask? I mean, I was just checking in on you and I left it right like that. Two days later they came back and they said, hey, thanks for asking. I’m going through some stuff right now.

Chris Goede:
And I was like, good, let me know if I can help you in any way. I will. But I felt like they just, I think they noticed that I noticed and then I noticed they weren’t telling me the truth. But in the moment. But I’m not going to prod you know, because sometimes it may be personal and. But if it’s professional and I can help and we can figure out a new way to do it, then that’s absolutely what I want to do. But I think it’s just that leader’s intuition. When you know your people well enough to be able to sit in that and trust it, to ask the question and nothing may come of it, but something may come of it.

Perry Holley:
I know you also know what’s going on in our lives and that I even had, I even saw social media bragging on you that, yeah, he knew I was going through it and he called me early. He knows I’m up early and he checked in with me early because I thought, yeah, that’s what you do is that you know something’s going on, you can’t really do anything about it, but you can let them know that I’m with you.

Chris Goede:
Right.

Perry Holley:
And if you need anything, we’re here.

Chris Goede:
Yeah.

Perry Holley:
And I thought those seem like little small things and they are. Except when they’re for you and you think that was really big.

Chris Goede:
Right.

Perry Holley:
As busy as you are. You took time to check in with her and she, she recognized it. I thought, yeah, really kind of cool. So, you know, I think a little practical things as we wrap up and I’ll turn it back to Chris, but you know, making sure you understand how many priorities somebody’s working on in a week. Do they have 12 things or do. Can you make it one or two? You know, something you mentioned about executive day, but we have a meeting after meeting after meeting. Can we batch our meetings so that people have some more deep focus time that they can actually work on their work? We mentioned AI and you mentioned tools, other things. Can we limit the tools? I was on with a coaching client the other day and they said they use slack.

Perry Holley:
They use. I mean she listed like four, four or five things that she’s constantly watching on her communication with the, with the team. And she. And I can tell her when I’m on the zoom with her. She’s. Her eyes are constantly darting to see.

Chris Goede:
If something happens, what’s coming up.

Perry Holley:
I know she’s in overwhelm to do that, so. And I know this is going to sound funny coming from me, but you need to say no more.

Chris Goede:
I’m sorry, I wasn’t supposed to laugh. You’re getting better. You’re getting better. Yeah. As we wrap up, you know, I was just thinking too, I was having a conversation right before we came in here about a team member where our IT team is asking them to switch platforms for a certain thing. And this individual was making their case to me about why they don’t want to. And I had to sit back and go, okay, as a leader, you know what’s more important right now in this moment, with what’s going on in their life and all the craziness they’re working on, Force them to change the platform or just stay on that platform right now and we’ll get to it later. And you, sometimes you have to do that because, man, we have.

Chris Goede:
So every organization has way too many tools that they’re using. So as we do wrap up, here’s my challenge to you. Quiet cracking may be silent, but it is not. Your people are telling the story every single day. What’s the story? Are you able to be able to be aware of that? And if you can’t, the cost is going to be significant because you’re going to have disengagement, you’re going to have lack of energy, lack of creativity, you’re going to have lack of involvement in meetings, whatever, whatever it might be. And so we’ve got to make sure that we are detecting it early so that we can make sure that the culture is really focused on learning, innovation, care for your. For your team at level two that we talk about all the time, which then drives level three in the production. And you do it in a way that keeps them from getting to burnout.

Chris Goede:
And I love what you said earlier. It’s like they almost don’t know. And it’s that feeling of overwhelmed versus being overworked. And there’s a difference. And so that’s the mindset shift I think I want us to have coming out of today is we’re going to all work hard. We’re all going to work more hours than we have to. All of us probably overworked. But do we sense and know when our team or you as a leader is overwhelmed? I think that’s the key for me today coming out of here is to be able to really be aware of that, because that’s the difference.

Chris Goede:
And what we’re talking about today, that can impact not only you as a leader, but your team.

Perry Holley:
And I don’t think we understand the power we hold as leaders to maybe release a little that overwhelm just by acknowledging and telling you, I’m with you.

Chris Goede:
That’s good.

Perry Holley:
All right, great stuff. As a reminder, if you’d like to learn more about our offerings about the five levels of leadership, if you’d like to leave us a comment or a question. If you want to get that learner guide that Chris mentioned, or learn about our other podcast offerings, you can do all of that at MaxwellLeadership.com/ExecutivePodcast. We love hearing from you. Very grateful you spend this time with us today. That’s all from the Maxwell Leadership Executive Podcast.

Transcript created by Castmagic.