What Is Driving Burnout Amongst Managers? Clearing Misconceptions.

by Thulasi Mohanadas,
published June 13 2023. 

This is the first of a three-part series on burnout amongst managers. In this first blog post, I talk about the common misconceptions of burnout and why this is continuing to undermine the solutions organisations are putting in place for their employees.

According to recent research conducted by Benenden Health, a not-for-profit healthcare provider, burnout among managers is at an all-time high in the UK: 61% of managers reported suffering with burnout and 20% have either resigned or thought about it due to the negative impact on their mental health. Whilst 34% of managers reported that working longer hours was the main cause of burnout, it is “anxiety about the future of work” that tops the list – cited by 46% of study participants. This points toward aspects of burnout that organisations can easily misunderstand.

In popular imagination, burnout is often conflated with exhaustion as a result of work overload. Managers and team-members who are burnt out are often advised to take time off, take frequent breaks, and reduce back-to-back meetings. Such respite from work is a necessary part of the solution, but it does not address the much deeper issue of lack of control, which directly feeds into anxiety.

As human beings, we have a profound biological need for control.

We are creatures of choice. Nothing unnerves us more than feeling like we are out of options or without choice.

Power and control are so central to who we are that they create physical effects in our bodies: They help release dopamine (which increases pleasure) and inhibit cortisol (which reduces stress).

Burnout and lack of control have a strong correlation.

This helps to further explain the high levels of burnout during the COVID-19 pandemic, which created unprecedented levels of professional anxiety for many of us.

What is burnout?

Burnout is not a medical condition. Chronic burnout can severely impact a person’s mental and physical wellbeing, which may lead to medical conditions and affect other aspects of a person’s life. Burnout is a strictly occupational phenomenon. The International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) defines it as:

“. . . a syndrome . . . resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.

Burnout is characterised by three dimensions:

• feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion;
• increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and
• reduced professional efficacy.

Burnout is a combination of these three factors. A recent HBR article written by Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter suggests that, when accurately measured, only 10-15% employees meet the burnout profile. Over 50% of employees meet one or two dimensions of the profile, suggesting that they may be on the route to burnout. The remaining employees appear to fit the engagement profile. So you can start to see how nuanced peoples’ experiences are.

Model of burnout illustrating the interaction of three facets of burnout and why current organisational solutions to burnout are limited.

It becomes even more nuanced when we examine how the workplace factors predict the different facets of burnout.

The Areas of Worklife Survey (AWS) measures six components of workplace culture deemed critical to ones’ relationship to the workplace: workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values.

Maslach and Leiter (2021) report that when data gathered using the AWS is examined, it illustrates different patterns for each burnout profile:

• For managers who feel overextended - the key problem is workload (high demands and low resources)

• For managers who feel disengaged or ineffective - the key issue relates to fairness, equity, social rewards and recognition.

• Managers who feel burnt out experience problems in multiple areas of workplace culture.

So, what does this mean?

The often well-intended mistake that organisations make is to offer only respite solutions (i.e. using rest as a solution to exhaustion). This does not address (1) the work overload issues with this dimension and (2) the other two dimensions of employee burnout. The experience of employee exhaustion is only one of the burnout patterns that exists. Organisational solutions need to address the full range of expressions and experiences of burnout.

Resist the Lure of ‘Quick Fixes’

Burnout occurs as result of a pattern of experience at work. It develops over time. This means that quick fixes do not work. Organisations, leaders, and HRDs need to be prepared to have conversations that go beyond the superficial reasons and causes. They must avoid misdiagnosing the problem as a simple case of exhaustion, offering a simple solution of time off.

Organisational responses to employee burnout must go deeper than that. Remember, burnout is contagious, precisely because there is an interpersonal dimension to it. When your manager is burnt out, he or she is more than likely to “pass it on” to their team through emotional contagion. This is why a deeper intervention is necessary to address all three dimensions of burnout and their underlying causes.

To address burnout amongst managers fully, organisations need to consider two important facets of control:

self-efficacy: feeling in control over ones’ tasks
power: the ability to influence others

Final Thoughts

The workplace is a psycho-social environment. Burnout profiles can vary across occupational groups and organisational departments. Burnout is complicated, and whilst it is not a mental health diagnosis, it can interact easily with other mental health difficulties such as depression. Often organisations do not have the internal expertise in workplace culture, occupational stress, and mental health. Misdiagnosis and misapplication of solutions can further complicate and intensify the problem.