Breaking up with burnout: 4 steps

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Korn Ferry was and remains a giant in the world of executive recruitment and has gone on to establish its management consulting services with equal success, affording the company access to many of the world’s business thought leaders and executive management teams, all of whom offer insight on the challenges confronting corporate organizations in 2022.

Personal burnout

One of those challenges, personnel burnout, has long existed but never received the magnitude of consideration it now is receiving because stigma suffocated a willingness to discuss it openly. But as this stigma now encouragingly lifts, so is the curtain that covered the magnitude of the burnout crisis that stigma once concealed. Korn Ferry shares this startling statistic from a survey they conducted last year: “89% of professionals say they are suffering from burnout, with the vast majority (81%) reporting they are more burned out now than they were before the pandemic.”

Burnout is widespread

In this report, Korn Ferry addresses two important questions—and provides the answers to both. First, why is this crisis of burnout so profound and widespread? Answer: “People who burn out often take on more and more, which then leads to more burnout out because they become known as the people others turn to and say, ‘Oh, look, she can do it’,” a Korn Ferry Advance career coach explains. In other words, a little burnout leads ultimately to a lot of burnout because the underlying factors contributing to the burnout never change.

Step #1 Do not quit your job

So what can executives, managers, and employees do to end their own burnout struggles? A few concrete options have proven successful to date. Step one might contradict the emotionally-charged instincts of a burned out employee: Don’t quit your job. Quitting is not ultimately a solution because the stress that accompanies work life almost always is simply replaced with the new stress of losing the income one needs to meet obligations and survive.

Step #2 Be more social

Instead, Korn Ferry urges, burned out employees have three pro-active steps that actually should help fully, or at least partially. First, don’t retreat into isolation. In fact, be more social. Communication with others, and even hearing the struggle of others, humanizes our respective condition and eases burn out’s burden by providing a healthy escape from professional obligations.

Step #3 Set up boundaries

Second, Korn Ferry urges, set boundaries. A lack of such boundaries typically was at least one underlying factor in burnout’s emergence in the first place, and an absence of boundaries will almost certainly guarantee its continuity. A big part of barriers starts with an appreciation that, while instinct may lead one to feel obligated to be immediately responsive to work-related emails and other tasks whatever the day or hour, “very few jobs truly require you to be on call 24-7,” this report reminds us.

Step #4 Remain passionate

Finally, difficult as it may be, do not lose your passion or permit it to lead you down the path of burnout.  Human instinct may lead one to resent the totality of a job when there really are only one or a few components of it that are uninspiring, or there may be better and more gratifying roles in an organization. If a current function or job has led to burnout, don’t hesitate to identify other functional roles that might prove less taxing and discuss them constructively with your manager to assess if they are possibly viable options. Whatever the outcome of such a discussion, figuring out what one doesn’t want to do is constructive because it is one big step closer to understanding what functions actually are appealing.

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