Brendan Reid is an accomplished career coach, author and executive. He shares leadership lessons and career advice on his blog, www.brendanreid.com, and in his popular book, Stealing the Corner Office.
I burned out.
I burned out so hard.
I could feel it coming, I tried to stop it, but inevitably it happened. I became an extra-crispy, deep-fried, burnt out leader.
It was a while ago, but I remember it like yesterday. To the casual observer, I was still at the top of my game as a C-level executive for a multi-billion dollar company. But on the inside, I was frayed, weakened. Small things were getting to me. Obstacles I would normally run through, seemed painful. I couldn’t shake off tough feedback or office conflict like I used to. I was out of gas, well before the finish line.
It took many years before I could appreciate the mistakes I made. That, in many ways, my burnout was my own doing. Had I known then what I know now, I may have been able to stop it. At the very least, I could have managed it better than I did.
If you’re starting to feel burned out at work, or if you’re already a little crispy and need some help, today’s article is for you.
The burnout phenomenon is widespread in Canada. No less than 35 per cent of us report burnout at work, according to a 2022 survey commissioned by Canada Life’s Workplace Strategies for Mental Health and conducted by Mental Health Research Canada. And, in industries like healthcare and finance, those numbers go way up. A full 53 per cent of healthcare workers and 39 per cent of finance industry professionals report burnout.
Gen Z and Millennial professionals are hardest hit, reporting burnout rates of 51 and 55 per cent respectively, according to a 2024 report by recruiting firm Robert Half.
In my career, I constantly wrestled with the following question: Can you be happy and successful at the same time? It strikes at the heart of the burnout issue for me. Intuitively, I knew the answer must be yes, but for me, that combination has been elusive for as long as I’ve been asking the question. I constantly found myself trading success for happiness, whether I needed to or not. And that trade led to burnout for me as it does for so many others.
I struggled with burnout until I came to one key realization. In your career, like in most challenging endeavours, the lion’s share of the effort comes at the beginning and the lion’s share of the reward comes at the end. And there are often years or decades separating them.
Imagine two intersecting curves, where the effort curve starts high and very gradually reduces over time and the reward curve starts very low, stays low and then rapidly increases in the final stages. This is probably the best visualization of how your career will likely progress, and why you cannot allow yourself to burnout early. If you do, you will miss the most lucrative and enjoyable years. You must be there, with all your energy, at the end of the race or you will have made all the sacrifice, but never enjoyed the benefits.
So how do we do that?
The good news is you are not powerless against burnout. As I discovered later in my career, you can be successful and happy at the same time. The trick is in becoming more ruthless in your prioritization and more calculating in how you throttle your energy expenditure.
Here are a few of my favorite techniques for managing burnout while maintaining career momentum:
1. Build a win-shield
A win-shield is an exercise in ruthless prioritization and delegation. It is designed to temporarily reduce your total energy expenditure at work without sacrificing your performance or reputation. A win-shield will protect you when you’re feeling burned out and need to decompress for a while. It is based on the concept that your success at work generally comes down to a few big wins each year. People don’t remember the small things you do – it’s the big wins that determine your career success.
When you feel you’re at risk of burnout, take these steps to build your own win-shield:
- Identify 3-5 major wins your boss will use to evaluate your success this year
- Aggressively and fully delegate all other projects to your team
- Dramatically cut all meetings related to these non-win projects
- Reallocate saved time to allocate large calendar buffers to help you recharge
- Execute your major win projects to maintain career trajectory while recharging
Essentially, you are temporarily cutting all activity that doesn’t directly relate to your success-defining wins to build space for you to decompress. You do significantly less work for a few weeks or even a few months, without sacrificing your reputation. And as a bonus, you strengthen your team by delegating more aggressively and staying focused on the most important projects only.
2. Proactive versus reactive wellness
Too many of us wait until we’re completely burned out before we take care of ourselves. Skipping vacations, forgoing diet, sleep and exercise, missing out on the joys of life. As easy as it is to fall into this trap, it’s not as productive as it might seem on the surface. If our favourite athletes ran themselves into the ground and couldn’t finish the season strong, we’d be the first to criticize. But when it comes to our careers, we willingly burn ourselves out before we get to our most important games.
My advice is to treat your personal wellness with the same respect you’d expect professional athletes to do. Build routines, be proactive, pace yourself. Acknowledge the reality that your career is a marathon and design a life and work style that builds strength and energy for the final stages.
3. Find motivation in the work itself
For many of us, burnout comes when we’ve run out of interesting sprints to pursue. We’ve had a few promotions, we’ve taken on some big projects, we’ve accomplished some major goals. As the years go by, it can get harder to find fresh, exciting things to get your energy level running high again.
I’ve spent a lot of time studying the happiest and most successful leaders I know. I share these lessons with my executive coaching clients. One thing they have in common is they find real joy in their daily work. They tend not to burn out because they aren’t motivated by sprinting toward external things like promotions and praise. They’re motivated everyday by doing great work and building a great team. They don’t burn out because they find energizing fuel in the work itself.
If you’re susceptible to burnout like I am, I recommend investing more time in mastering your craft, developing your team and other similarly steady-paced endeavours. You’ll find something energizing every day, but at a pace that can be sustained for much longer.
A lot of high-performing leaders are susceptible to burnout. I can think of a few times where I flamed out in spectacular fashion. It took a few of those major burnouts and some deliberate reflection for me to build the techniques I relied on so heavily in the later stages of my career. They were extremely helpful for me, and I hope they will help you too.
This column is part of Globe Careers’ Leadership Lab series, where executives and experts share their views and advice about the world of work. Find all Leadership Lab stories at tgam.ca/leadershiplab and guidelines for how to contribute to the column here.