Executive Vitality™: Understand How to Avoid Burnout

Executive Vitality™: Understand How to Avoid Burnout“Burnout is about resentment,” says the CEO of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer, formerly of Google.

“[Burnout] is about knowing what matters to you so much that if you don’t get it, you’re resentful.”

EXCN asks you to ponder: what would happen if you encouraged everyone on your team to spend more of their day, or their week, doing the parts of their job that they love most, even if that part is off-strategy?  What if your employees could avoid working on things that created resentment in their lives?  Example, Joe loves the gym at 6:00 a.m. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, but has to go to a meeting on Wednesday that requires him to forgo his workout that day. What if you could give Joe his workout time back?

How could you do this?

  1. Ask. Find out what gives each of your direct reports the most sense of empowerment, meaning, and satisfaction at work; what parts of their jobs they love and what parts give them tension or frustration, or interferes with other parts of their life.
  2. Only remove aspects of their work that a direct report says he or she wants removed.  Aspects of work that seem distressing for you may give your direct reports joy and reduce resentment and burnout.
  3. Follow up with your direct reports to assess their happiness (job satisfaction), energy level, innovation, productivity, clarity…and keep supporting improvement in these areas.

If you do these simple things, you can have huge returns from each of your direct reports and the team overall. Here is what we think will happen:

  • Improved job satisfaction and engagement
  • Greater energy and vitality
  • Net increase in productivity
  • Less chance of burnout
  • Better retention of high performers
  • Opening the door to creativity and innovation

Try it out and let us know what happens. Please click here to tell us what you think.

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