You can see burnout coming, but most leaders don't know what to look for

Leadership can often mean long days, a full calendar, always available, always on. You find yourself pushing through tiredness because the role demands it. You tell yourself it only temporary, but the pace doesn’t let up.

And then one day, you realise that the work that used to energise you now feels like a massive burden. Your patience is shorter than it used to be. You are going through the motions in meetings, often disconnected from the conversations around you. And you are exhausted. But, however much sleep you get, you never feel refreshed.

Many leaders who experience this interpret it as personal failure. I did, and I’ve experienced this at least 3 times in my career.

But the research tells a different story. Burnout is specific, measurable and far more common in leadership roles than most people realise, and it is worth understanding properly for that reason. If any of this feels familiar, rest assured, you’re not alone. If you are relatively new to leadership this can be a real risk, given the reality of what new leaders often experience.

Burnout has a clinical definition. Measured through the Maslach Burnout Inventory developed by psychologist Christina Maslach in the early 1980s, burnout has three distinct dimensions:

These three dimensions do not all arrive at once, and they don’t necessarily show up in the same way in every person. But together they amount to something qualitatively different from ordinary fatigue. Burnout accumulates, and once it is established, you can’t sleep it away. These signs and symptoms of stress can give you a useful early warning checklist, but burnout sits at the serious end of a long continuum.

Psychologist Stevan Hobfoll's Conservation of Resources theory describes energy as a finite resource pool. The key insight is that this pool has no boundaries between domains.

The stress of a difficult relationship at home, a financial worry, an ill parent, or a child going through a hard time all draw from the same reserve as the back-to-back meetings, the unread email backlog, and the difficult stakeholders at work.

This is why burnout often feels disproportionate to the workload, and why we often believe we are at fault. But workload alone does not account for the overwhelm we feel.

Leadership roles have specific features that make them particularly depleting, and understanding those features is the first step towards addressing their damaging effects.

The aspects of leadership that contribute most to burnout are:

The Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) Model, developed by Demerouti and colleagues (2001), explains burnout as the result of high demands outstripping available resources. Leadership roles are high demand by nature of the kinds of factors outlined above. And they often carry insufficient resources, particularly in the transition period when a new leader has not yet built the skills, relationships, and authority they need.

That transition window is especially risky. The specific challenge of shifting from doing to leading creates a distinct pressure of its own. You are expected to perform at a level your experience has not fully caught up with yet, while simultaneously learning the role, managing upward, and holding your team together. All of this happens while your personal life continues to make its own demands.

A leader who snaps at a team member, makes a reactive decision they later regret, or sits in a meeting unable to think clearly is probably not failing. It may be that they their resources are simply exhausted.

Research by Kim, Shin and Swanger (2009) on personality and burnout identifies some important patterns. Their work draws on the Big Five personality model (commonly known by the acronym OCEAN: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism). These five dimensions describe stable differences in the way people think, feel, and respond to situations (the traits that show up consistently across contexts and over time). Three of them have a direct bearing on burnout risk.

Neuroticism is the strongest predictor of burnout. Individuals who score high on neuroticism tend to engage in dysfunctional rumination: worrying about problems in loops that generate anxiety without producing resolution. This burns energy without return.  There is more on breaking this cycle of overthinking here.

High conscientiousness combined with high agreeableness creates a different risk. Conscientious people feel compelled to do everything thoroughly. Agreeable people find saying no genuinely uncomfortable. Together, these traits create chronic overcommitment: the leader who keeps taking on more, keeps delivering, and is quietly going under.

Interestingly, the same research found that, irrespective of personal traits, low skill variety is the single most significant work characteristic predictor of burnout. Thus, leaders stuck in repetitive, under-stretching roles can burn out just as readily as those overwhelmed by demand, not from too much but from too little of what matters.

It is also worth noting that burnout and engagement are two distinct constructs driven by different factors. They are not opposite ends of a spectrum.

Burnout is influenced by both high demands and low resources. Engagement (characterised by vigour, dedication, and absorption in work) is predicted almost exclusively by the presence of resources, not the absence of demands.

A leader who simply reduces their workload may feel less burned out but will not necessarily feel more engaged. Engagement requires the right skills, relationships, sense of purpose, and recovery time.

Before we get to solutions, one more distinction is worth making: burnout is not the same as over-working.

Burnout combines physical stress with a psychological interpretation: a loss of perceived control, a growing sense that the effort is not producing meaningful return, and a disconnection from purpose. Motivation (the desire to lead, to contribute, to show up) is what disappears.

So, avoiding burnout or recovering from it requires an approach that operates across multiple dimensions of your life: your purpose, your emotions, your thoughts and your physical state.

It is not necessarily about doing less work, it is about doing the right work, in the right way, having deliberately cultivated the internal resources you need to perform at your best.

There will be more on this next week.

Maslach, C. (1982). Burnout: The cost of caring. Prentice-Hall. [Maslach Burnout Inventory available at mindgarden.com] https://www.mindgarden.com/315-maslach-burnout-inventory

All of my posts for new leaders are here.

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