The High Burnout Organization

What sorts of organizations burn their people out? In our research on how to Perform, Grow and Not Burnout our team has been interviewing people from org’s around the world to learn what is causing the current high rates of burnout and what can be done about it.

We learnt there were both individual factors AND organizational. We heard many examples of org’s that were aiming for high performance but did so by sacrificing the wellbeing of their people. This was no one's intent. It was just the way systems that we are in have drifted over time. We need to pay attention to the conditions of our organizations. They are impacting the health of individuals, families and the organizations themselves.

Here are 7 recurring patterns we heard about the organizations where people burnout . The more you have the greater the risk. No organization has all the conditions, I hope :)

1. High workload, insufficient resources

Many people burned out when there was a sizeable mismatch between the work they were expected to do and the resources available to deliver on it. This could be in terms of time, budget or people. The solution for many interviewees was that they worked into the evenings and neglected self, health and family.

•  “We were chronically under-resourced. After I and other managers burned out they got a consultant in to assess what happened. He said there was systemic under-resourcing and that they were wrong-sizing the roles. He found that my job was actually 3 roles rather than 1.”

2. A culture of fear, threat or emergency

We heard again and again that people in high burnout cultures didn’t feel safe. 

• “There were senior executives who were throwing stuff around and swearing. The CE was very aggressive. Everything was a crisis. He’d say, “Get everyone in here, pull in this expert, sort this out over the weekend. You had to be in the tribe of the crisis managers. That is where the safety was.”
• “Excessive hours were the norm. So was fear, and adrenaline. 
• “I had to put on a lot of armour and talk and act in a certain way to survive.”

3. Treating people like expendable resources

There is a great book out now called Belonging. Owen Eastwood describes how high performance cultures create a sense of belonging. This allows people to focus less on whether they are accepted by the tribe and more on how they can contribute to the mission. The high burnout organizations followed a different playbook.  

• “There was no trust because if you did something wrong you would be persecuted and the next one out the door. Our manager made a mistake and then he was suddenly gone”
• “We had people dropping like flys and the attitude was, well they were just not good enough”

4. A system designed for insecurity

An eye opening pattern was how many people believed that the performance management systems and metrics of their organizations were designed to create insecurity.

• “Our company hires insecure, overachievers. Insecurity is the common consistent gel across the system.”
• “The performance review system then drives a fear of you not being not good enough. There is an endless need to prove your worth. The people who make it to the top still worry about their review”
• “Anyone who wakes up and stops being defined by their review has to leave because that is the whole game.”
• “27 KPI’s in a year burned me out. If you don’t hit them you don’t get a 4 rating so you won’t get onto the fast track.
• “It is predicated on a fear of hitting your numbers. They use metrics and the Performance Review to drive the pressure. If performance rating goes flatline at 3/5 or your nine box slides to mid or lower you are gone”

Those are the first four. You can read the next 3 patterns in Part 2.

In 2023 we are hosting small discussion groups on burnout. If you experienced some burnout in 2022 and would like to join a group to learn about the findings of the research and discuss them with other people please contact lisamackaynz@gmail.com