Leadership Burnout
I recently gave a talk titled Leadership Burnout in the Age of AI. Below is a summary of that session with some additional thoughts.
If you’re not sure what burnout is, I recommend first reading my earlier article on the definition, symptoms, early warning signs and some broad coping strategies. You can find it here.
The Common Causes of Leadership Burnout
Burnout is caused by prolonged or repeated stress, which leads to a state of emotional, mental and physical exhaustion.
As you work your way up the career ladder to leadership, the pressures and stresses encountered compound with each promotion.
I’ve personally burned out three times in my career; each one taking me out of work for months. This has led to me finding my purpose and passion in life which is to help others struggling with burnout. I hope to teach others the warning signs and raise visibility so we can prevent burnout, or at least catch it sooner. The earlier we spot the symptoms and make changes, the sooner we can recover.
During my experiences as a founder, CEO, CTO, CPO and various leadership roles in games, tech and startups, I encountered many sources of stress. I’ve also had hundreds of conversations with other people in similar roles and each of them has shared their own stressors.
In this article I’m going to highlight the most common areas from all of those conversations and experiences. I’ll also give a few coping strategies along the way.
Wearing a Mask
When you’re a leader you have to wear a mask. You might not want to, but it’s essential at times. Maybe you’ll have things going on at home or elsewhere and will need to almost put on a disguise at work to not show that emotion or stress. Quite often you’ll be privy to heavy information the team shouldn’t know just yet, such as runway issues, project cancellations or potential redundancies. You might have to pretend to like a peer who completely drains you and makes your life difficult. You may be neurodivergent and have to act “professional” - to not fidget, to make eye contact, to check your body language constantly, to appear fully engaged in that Zoom meeting where you really wish you could turn your camera off.
The reasons we might wear a mask are countless. But unfortunately wearing a mask is very mentally heavy. You’re effectively performing a role, a pretend version of you, and any time you do that it costs you more energy than to exist in your authentic unmasked state.
Coping strategies:
Find an outlet such as a peer group, coach or therapist where you can be fully authentic and unmasked and talk about your worries.
Outside of your work, drop the mask as soon as you can and let yourself relax.
Meet someone in a similar role for coffee and talk honestly and openly about how you’re feeling or your worries.
Over time if this mask becomes too heavy and feels like too much of a burden, it might be worth considering whether changes can be made at work or in your life to mean you don’t need to wear the mask so often - or at all.
Model appropriate honesty with your team when it’s safe to do so. This will help you unmask a little and lighten your mental load while improving psychological safety with your team. The more you open up with them; the more they’ll feel safe opening up to you when they’re struggling too.
The Loneliness of Leadership
Loneliness is a huge problem for people of all stages of life and career, especially in the era of social media. We’re hyper-connected and yet have fewer meaningful connections. We often talk about loneliness in this context but not the special kind of loneliness faced by leaders.
Being a leader is incredibly lonely. It’s hard to make authentic connections when you have to mask so often. It can also be difficult making friendships on the team when technically you’re the boss. There’s always going to be a barrier in the way to friendships with people when you’re more senior than them and might be the one who will make decisions about their job, appraisals, promotions and so on.
Coping strategies:
Find a social group or meetup - somewhere you can be fully you. And it doesn’t have to be about your chosen career or industry. Embrace your hobbies, find a sports club, or just go to your local coffee shop regularly. You never know where you could meet a new friend, but it all starts with getting out there and finding a connection over a shared interest.
Imposter Syndrome
In my coaching sessions I meet many leaders who are new into their role and struggle with imposter syndrome. Feeling like an imposter can lead to a lot of self doubt and added stress. This is a big topic and can take a while to solve - it’s not easy to do it justice in a short section.
One of the best things I’ve learned having struggled with imposter syndrome myself is that feeling like an imposter often shows that you genuinely care about the role/thing. That in itself can be reframed as a positive.
Most people, even the celebrities and influencers who fill our screens, will have felt imposter syndrome or nerves at some point. Many of us feel this way in new roles or after a promotion. Remember that if you were hired into this role, they wouldn’t have picked you if they didn’t think you were capable of succeeding. Try to have the same faith in yourself as others have shown by supporting you in this role.
If you’re a founder or the head of a company and you created or chose the difficult role - you’ve already proven that you deserve to have a good go at it by having the courage to try. Hire good people and they’ll help steer you in the right direction.
If you want to beat the imposter syndrome, a good starting point is to try your best and practise being humble. If you don’t know something; ask someone. Learn from those around you. And always hire people who are better than you at specific things.
Decision Fatigue
When you’re a leader, people will often come to you with questions, needing approval for tasks or expenses, or look to you to sign off on a project. On top of that, you’re constantly making decisions about the business, which tools or technologies to use, which projects to start, should you reduce scope or extend a deadline? Each day leaders make many decisions and that constant context switching takes up a lot of mental energy.
Coping strategies:
You don’t have to make every decision yourself. Delegate! Trust your team, and train up those who need extra support to be able to make the decisions.
If you find yourself saying “I’ll just do it myself” because it’s quicker - catch that and stop it. Your team won’t get quicker at helping you with things if you don’t give them the opportunity to try and learn/fail.
Remember to prioritise tasks and decisions based on what is urgent, and what is important. Not all things fit within these categories and you can shelve these for a later date.
If you’re unsure on a decision or keep ruminating on options, flip a coin. No, genuinely. Flip a coin. In that split second or two before you know the result, many people find their intuition and gut instinct will tell you how you hope it will land. It’s up to you whether you then go with the result of the coin toss or follow your intuition.
If it’s not 100% yes, it’s a no. This one can be hard to implement, but unless you’re wholeheartedly sold on an idea (or outvoted), there’s probably a better answer or solution. Park it until you have more information, ideas or data.
People-Pleasing & Boundaries
Protecting your team from stress often means you shoulder extra problems yourself and forget your own boundaries and mental health in the process. Perhaps you’ve struggled to set boundaries with your clients, your investors, another leader or co-founder? Sometimes it feels easier in the moment to people-please; to keep your head down, smile and nod. But long term that doesn’t work. Long term you lose your boundaries further and can end up in a position where you’re sacrificing your own needs, wellbeing and happiness for the sake of others who have overstepped.
Once people learn to walk over your boundaries, or they see you’re a people pleaser, it’s hard to come back from that. Slowly pushing back can be empowering, but it upsets the status quo that those people are used to and you may experience resistance to that change. Keep going though. You are the one who can best protect and champion your own needs and boundaries. And by doing so you’ll help empower others to stand up for themselves.
Many people are raised to be people-pleasers. It’s something that society and the corporate ladder often benefit from. But it can be really detrimental to your own mental health to always put your own needs on the back burner. I often quote my favourite saying at this point in a presentation: “don’t set yourself on fire to keep others warm”.
Coping strategies:
Practise saying no. It’s not easy at first, so try it with small things. Standing up for yourself is a muscle; begin small and over time you’ll get stronger.
State your own needs. If you’re taking on too much or are overwhelmed; ask for help, speak up. You’re entitled to be listened to and have your request heard. Now, that doesn’t mean it’ll be actioned, but you’ll have done what you can to state your needs; how you act on a potential “no” in response is up to you.
Read the book Unf*ck Your Boundaries by Faith G. Harper.
Be kind to yourself. Becoming a recovering people pleaser and learning to set boundaries is a journey. I’m still on that journey myself and it’s taken years to make some progress. Don’t expect to fix this one overnight.
Always-On Culture
This topic is worth an article in its own right. Emails, Slack, social media, our phones. The constant ping of notifications and the expectation of an immediate response is overwhelming and yet many of us have got used to a continuous level of stress surrounding our devices.
Add in hybrid or remote working and there’s an additional level of overcompensation to want to “appear” like you’re always working and available. You’re likely getting more done at home without the office distractions and yet fear appearing away on Slack in case leadership above you, or your peers, think you’re slacking (pun unintended). What if your team needs you urgently? How would they possibly cope if you aren’t there at a moment’s notice?
And how often do you switch off your notifications? Take a walk without your phone? Go on holiday and not think about work?
Since the smartphone came into our worlds, we’ve seen the always-on culture take hold in ways many of us didn’t ask for.
Where is your phone now as you read this? Is it next to you? What about the social apps and Slack? Are you keeping one eye on those while trying to also read? Many of us now constantly multitask and context switch, adding to our mental exhaustion and reducing our focus on the important tasks we need to complete.
And then what happens if you have an idea at 10pm? Do you post it into Slack or Notion? Have you considered what happens if your team sees this? They’ll feel like they also need to be online, and thus the cycle of burnout works its way down to every layer of a company. Eventually no one is safe from the apps and feeling like they need to always be online.
Coping strategies:
If you need to send a Slack message to someone outside of work hours (bearing in mind timezones); schedule it for when they next will be at work. Do not rely on them to have their notifications off or use their own boundaries as an excuse. The team you lead will mirror your actions, so if you’re online, they will be too.
Protect your evenings and weekends visibly and encourage your team to do the same. Champion downtime and rest.
Try turning off notifications for all non-essential apps (especially social media) to help you step away from your phone and the compulsive doom scroll.
Charge your phone outside your bedroom at night, and if you can, turn it off at night to increase the barrier to entry for checking messages. I know this isn’t always possible if you’re on call or have caring duties, so choose what is right for your situation.
Test your fears. Often we’re scared to switch off as leaders in case everything crashes and burns. I sometimes call this the “house of cards” feeling. But this is unsustainable. Take your holidays, delegate your tasks, and switch off. Take that lunch break or a coffee break mid-morning without looking at Slack. Notice that rarely does anything go wrong.
Establish communication rules for the team; e.g. no Slack outside work hours. Give them your mobile number in case of emergency.
The Impact of AI on Leadership
Whether you love it, hate it, or are somewhere in-between; AI is having a huge impact on people’s stress levels.
I’ve written a long-form article previously on how AI is impacting burnout. If this topic resonates with you, I definitely recommend giving it a read as it has a lot of specific examples and strategies to help. You can find it here.
Many people around the world are stressed about the ethics of AI - especially copyright infringement, its impact on the environment, their job security. And we’ve seen numerous employees from the big AI firms publicly state they’re worried about the safety of the technology and the potential threat to human life.
AI is a huge topic and even those fanatical about the genuine positive uses of the technology (scientific research, medical diagnosis, coding etc) are often conflicted by all of the negatives that come with it.
As leaders and founders we can often speak up about our feelings towards AI, but not always. Sometimes we have to mask and hide our concerns because AI brings investment and keeps the lights on. Sometimes we have to toe the company line on AI even if we completely disagree. But all of this masking means that our teams then feel unsafe voicing their own concerns, leading to a potential spiralling of stress.
It often feels like you’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t. Using AI often feels unethical, harmful to the planet and brings about potential distrust from employees and your community. Not using it can mean it’s harder to find funding or your company will be seen as slow or behind. The mental load of carrying both sides of that debate often weighs very heavy on the people making the decisions.
Earlier in the article I covered decision fatigue, and this is exacerbated in the age of AI. We have new tools and technology constantly and it’s an impossible job to evaluate them all and keep up.
I also covered the always-on culture and AI brings about a nefarious new side of this called tokenmaxxing. Each message you send to AI is split into “tokens” (roughly a short word, or part of a long word). On many plans, your usage limit is based on compute-time and/or tokens and resets on a schedule. When you see your LLM of choice tell you that you can’t send more messages until 5pm; that means you’ve used up your tokens or compute until then. Tokenmaxxing is a new term used for when you’re constantly logging in to your AI tools at 5pm, 10pm, 2am, or whenever it’s told you, so you can restart chats or processes as soon as your allocation resets - thus maximising what you can do with AI. I’ve spoken with countless founders and leaders who are deep in the tokenmaxxing pit and it’s impacting their sleep, their home time, their relationships. Avoid this trap; it’s the new compulsive doom scroll for the AI era.
Coping strategies:
Read my full article on how AI is impacting burnout: https://www.catburton.co.uk/blog/impact-of-ai-on-burnout.
Know that it’s ok to have a nuanced opinion. If you really dislike the environmental and copyright issues around AI; but have to use AI at work or can see some good uses of the technology, that’s ok. None of us like AI slop - it’s a complete waste of resources; but many of us might like specialised AI that can solve specific problems such as finding cures for diseases. I suspect many of us do not want to see a broad super-intelligence created; that carries serious risks. Be nuanced. Some people might disagree. It’s ok. We don’t have to be black-and-white in our thinking.
Build psychological safety with your teams by engaging in nuanced conversation around the pros/cons of using AI.
Remember it’s impossible to keep up with all the advances in the tech. That’s a full-time job by itself. Don’t set yourself an impossible goal.
Stop tokenmaxxing at 2am if you’re doing that! :)
Being the One to Reassure Others in Times of Uncertainty
We live in very uncertain times: AI, job instability, difficulties fundraising, redundancies, company closures. And that’s just some of the uncertainties at work. Quite often as leaders we have to be the ones to put a brave face on things. It can help our teams if they can rally around us. We can boost their confidence and show them the way. But when you’re also unsure of the way forward yourself it can be exhausting to pretend to know all the answers. In times of instability; the best thing we can do is focus on the things that we can control.
Coping strategies:
Reducing costs and outgoings so that you can increase runway (both at work and at home).
Plan in shorter cycles; we can’t predict where tech will be in 6-12 months so stop trying. Plan with what you know now, and leave the rest to be confirmed later.
Go easy on yourself. We live in turbulent times with a large amount of stress both at work and outside of it. It’s ok to not have all the answers.
Final Strategies for Avoiding Burnout
I am hoping that somewhere in the above sections you’ll have found one or two tips that will work for you and will help reduce your stress levels at work. Here are a few final coping strategies and things to remind yourself of:
Self-care isn’t selfish
Learn to recognise the warning signs in yourself (e.g. sleep disruption, cynicism, irritability, feeling more unwell than usual) - I list more of these in the Introduction to Burnout article.
As they say on planes: put your own oxygen mask on before helping others. You won’t be able to support your team well if you’re burned out.
It’s ok to compartmentalise “work you” and “personal you” - just remember that mask comes with a heavy mental cost and it might not be sustainable long term.
Demonstrate healthy work/life balance to your team; and help yourself in the process.
Try and get out for a 15-minute walk each day in nature if you’re physically able - do this without your phone. Listen to the wind in the trees and the singing of birds; it will help reset your nervous system.
Book your holidays before you need them to keep your battery topped up.
Practise setting boundaries with your phone: turn off notifications; charge it outside your bedroom; switch it off from time to time.
Remember that rest isn’t a reward, it’s part of the process.
Use your work organisation’s resources - many have private healthcare or employee assistance programmes.
Find a mentor, coach or advisor who can bring in a fresh perspective on your challenges.
Look after your physical health as much as your mental health. Sleep, exercise and good nutrition all contribute to a happy and successful life.
Seek professional help as early as possible if you’re worried you’re burning out.
I Can Help
If this article resonated with you and you’d like support with the stressors around leadership, AI or burnout, I’d love to help. You can find details on my coaching services here or feel free to send me a message.
For more general information on burnout, the symptoms, causes and some general tips for support, see my Introduction to Burnout article.
