7 Signs Your Team is Burnt Out and You Might be to Blame

There are two primary choices in life: to accept conditions as they exist, or accept the responsibility for changing them. – Denis Waitley

We have all grappled with burnout whether it has touched us personally or we see it in the lives of our teammates. According to Merriam-Webster dictionary, “burnout is the exhaustion of physical or emotional strength or motivation usually as a result of prolonged stress or frustration.” Sound familiar? If you think your team may be experiencing more than normal burnout, take a look at these 7 signs that indicate the burnout may in fact be rooted in you – the leader.

1. You no longer (or simply don’t) write encouraging notes to the members of your team because you think they will get a big head and start to underperform.
2. You consider their business trips as vacation time and deny their next request to actually spend time away from the job. Leading me to the next point…
3. Your team always has a great deal of unused vacation time left at the end of the year because they feel guilty leaving or as if the workload won’t allow them to. Furthermore…
4. You, as the leader, personally have unused vacation time left at the end of the year. As the leader, you may feel you need to set an example by always being at the office, but if the leader is burned out, EVERYONE can feel it.
5. You don’t know why people keep quitting. Here is a hint – it’s probably you. People don’t leave jobs or organizations, they leave bad managers. Have you lost several team members recently?
6. You fail to recognize your team members’ families when you see them outside of the office, or even worse, when they are visiting in the office.
7. You believe changing someone’s title equals a great promotion that they should be happy with that for the next several years to come. Who needs more money or engagement strategy when you can give the satisfaction of a title change on a business card or LinkedIn profile?

If you recognize some, or all of these traits, in your organization you may be burning out your team whether you were intending to or not. There is not a magic bullet you can take to have an engaged team or a work environment that people want to spend time in, but there are some easy steps you can take that your team will feel instantly. If you do not know where to start, please be on the lookout for next week’s post where I will share some ways to alleviate burnout in your organization.

[bctt tweet=”There is not a magic bullet you can take to have an engaged team.” username=”ronkitchens”]

Always Forward
Ron

Question: In the meantime, what are some things you think you can do to reduce burnout in your organization?