Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Christina Maslach on 6 Ways You Overcome Burnout Symptoms EP 314

Episode Date: July 4, 2023

On Passion Struck, I am joined by renowned burnout expert Christina Maslach who takes on the workplace's darkest secret, exposing the six factors fueling burnout. We discuss overcoming burnout symptoms and empowering employees to reclaim their well-being and productivity. Christina is the author of "The Burnout Challenge."Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://passionstruck.com/christina-maslach-6-ways-you-overcome-burnout/  Understanding and Overcoming Burnout Symptoms: Wisdom from Christina Maslach Do you want to break free from workplace burnout and create a more positive and fulfilling work environment? Are you tired of feeling exhausted and overwhelmed? Well, I have great news for you. In this episode, the incredible Christina Maslach shares her expert insights and strategies for addressing the six key factors contributing to burnout. By implementing her solutions, you will be able to achieve a renewed sense of energy, regain your enthusiasm, and create a healthier work-life balance. Don't miss out on this opportunity to transform your work experience and achieve a state of true fulfillment and satisfaction. Brought to you by Hello Fresh. Use code passion 50 to get 50% off plus free shipping!  Brought to you by Indeed. Head to https://www.indeed.com/passionstruck, where you can receive a $75 credit to attract, interview, and hire in one place. --► For information about advertisers and promo codes, go to: https://passionstruck.com/deals/  Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter or Instagram handle so we can thank you personally! --► Prefer to watch this interview: https://youtu.be/bkkIgILJ_4E  --► Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel Here: https://youtu.be/QYehiUuX7zs  Want to find your purpose in life? I provide my six simple steps to achieving it - passionstruck.com/5-simple-steps-to-find-your-passion-in-life/ Catch my interview with Marshall Goldsmith on How You Create an Earned Life: https://passionstruck.com/marshall-goldsmith-create-your-earned-life/  Watch the solo episode I did on the topic of Chronic Loneliness: https://youtu.be/aFDRk0kcM40  Want to hear my best interviews from 2023? Check out my interview with Seth Godin on the Song of Significance and my interview with Gretchen Rubin on Life in Five Senses. ===== FOLLOW ON THE SOCIALS ===== * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/passion_struck_podcast * Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/johnrmiles.c0m  Learn more about John: https://johnrmiles.com/  Passion Struck is now on the AMFM247 broadcasting network every Monday and Friday from 5–6 PM. Step 1: Go to TuneIn, Apple Music (or any other app, mobile or computer) Step 2: Search for “AMFM247” Network

Coming up next on Passion Struck. We want to feel like we belong to the unit, the team. We want to feel that we're psychologically safe, that we can raise the criticism. If we see something going wrong, we're not going to get put down, that it's okay to ask for advice or help. And feeling that we're being treated fairly

and that we're doing something that I'm feeling good about. And so that's where these matches that I'm talking about is really getting at what makes people tick. What makes them thrive? What makes them grow, develop, and do well in life. And those needs are true in the rest of our life, not just in the workplace. Welcome to PassionStruck. Hi, I'm your host, John Armeils. And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you.

Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long form interviews the rest of the week with guest ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become PassionStruck. Hello everyone and welcome back to episode 314 of PassionStruck. Right by Apple is one of the top 10 most popular health podcasts and the number one alternative health podcast.

And thank you to each and every one of you who come back weekly to listen and learn how to live better and be better in impact the world. Last week we hit an incredible milestone of exceeding 10 million downloads and we couldn't have done it without you, our incredible listeners. From the bottom of my heart, I wanted to extend a massive thank you. Each and every one of you who has joined us on this inspiring journey. Your support, enthusiasm and dedication have been the driving force behind this incredible achievement. Thank you so much. Passionstruck is now also on syndicated radio on the AMFM247 National Broadcast. Catch us Monday and Friday from 5-6pm Eastern Time links are in the show notes.

If you're new to the show, thank you so much for being here, or you simply want to introduce this, we're a friend or a family member where we now have episode starter packs, which are collections of our fans' favorite episodes that we organize into convenient topics. They give any new listener a great way to get acclimated to everything we do here on the show. Either go to Spotify or passionstruck.com slash starter packs to get started. In case you missed it last week, I interviewed Dr. Cannell Cowan and Dr. David Kipper who have uncovered the breakthrough science of neurotransmitters and why they reveal a clear path to overcoming bad habits that sabotage your success and career love and healthy

living. We discussed their book override, discover your brain type, why you do what you do and how to do it better. I also interviewed Hillary Belling's who is a leading authority on the psychology of attention. Is the co-founder and CEO of Attentioners, an award-winning agency, specializing in short-form video strategy. Hillary has empowered entrepreneurs and personal brands to drive reach and revenue in the digital landscape. Please check them all out, and if you liked either of those or the episode today, we would so appreciate it if you gave us a five-star rating and review, which goes such a long way into increasing our ranking, but more importantly bringing more people into the PassionStark community. I know we, our rating and review, which goes such a long way into increasing our ranking, but more importantly,

bringing more people into the PassionStrike community. I know we, in our guests, also love to see comments from our listeners. Now, let's talk about today's interview where we dive deep into a pressing issue that plagues workplaces worldwide, the prevalence of instability, abuse, and bullying, despite the espouse values of respect and teamwork. Employees often feel ignored, manipulated, and undermined, leading to chronic exhaustion, cynicism, and a sense of ine and teamwork. Employees often feel ignored, manipulated, and undermined, leading to chronic exhaustion, cynicism, and a sense of ineffectiveness. This harmful cycle stems from various factors such as work overload, a breakdown of community, and a perceived lack of control. A shed light on these challenges and offer insights into improving the job-person relationship,

we are joined by Christina Maslack, the co-author, with Michael Leiter of the enlightening book, The Burnout Challenge, managing people's relationships with their jobs. Christina is a professor of psychology in America at the University of California Berkeley, and is a treblacer in the field of job burnout research. Her contributions include developing the widely recognized NASA burnout inventory assessment tool, and authoring impactful books such as Burnout, a cost of caring. Her invaluable work has garnered accolades, including prestigious scientific reviewing award from the National Academy of Sciences.

Throughout this engaging conversation, we explore practical strategies and insights to that burnout, foster healthier work environments and build stronger job-person relationships. Forciane is wealth of knowledge and research, offer a beacon of hope in the face of these pervasive workplace challenges. Tune in to this enlightening episode of Passion Struct as we uncover secrets to overcome burnout. Thank you for choosing Passion Struct and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life now.

Let the journey begin. I am so excited today to welcome Professor Christina Maslack, the Passion Stark Welcome, Christina. Thank you, I'm delighted to be here. Congratulations to you and Michael, your co-author on this great book about burnout. It was released in early November and it has been doing extremely well. So congratulations on that. Thank you so much.

I'm very pleased by all the reviews and the response. So yes. I always like to start these interviews out by trying to allow the audience to get to know you better. And maybe a lens to do this is what in the world got you to start researching but become the prominent researcher on burnout? Okay. Yeah. Interesting question. How did I find burnout? start researching but become the prominent researcher on burnout. Yeah, an interesting question. How did I find burnout? And I my joke is it found me. I didn't know about it at all when I first was going out, but I was starting my career at Berkeley and you have

to start a new line of research. I was interested in emotions, how people, what they feel, don't feel, how they cope with them. And I had some hypotheses that I wanted to study. And I thought, first I ought to go out and talk to people in different places where I think they will be dealing with maybe more intense cases of how do you cope when in the world is crashing all around you or something like that, you're an emergency responder. I started going out to interview people. I was learning some interesting things, but I was often getting a comment saying, Professor Massa, this is confidential, right? Could we talk a little bit more? Can I do some other things about the job?

And I was saying, yeah, sure. And they started telling these stories and after a while, I realized I'm hearing the same kind of basic story from people from a bunch of different professions. Many of them were what we would now call first responders and healthcare, social services, police, and ministry, etc. And as people were talking about this, sometimes they would be getting angry as they recall recall these things, or they'd get teary eyed about something that was really, I'm thinking,

I don't know what I've stumbled on here, but this is obviously something really important. So then the next serendipitous thing that happened was, I was at a dinner for new people to the university, welcome to become part of our campus. And I was chatting to a woman who was an unit of the law school. And I described a little bit of what I was hearing or had heard that day in the interviews

was a way of saying, okay, here's what I'm doing. And she said, oh, well, I don't know what you call it, but in legal services, poverty law that I just came from, we call it burnout. I was going, oh, okay. And I would always end my interviews with, do you have a way of talking about this? Had you shared these things? Is there a name for it? And people, no, no, no, no, no. So I was saying, I was trying to find concepts, detached

concern, dehumanization in self-defense, treating people like objects rather than people. And they said, no, well, how about burnout? Yes, that's it, that's it. And so it was like, OK, let me just go with that term and find out more about this. And that's how I got started quite honestly. And that was back in the 70s, 1970s. Even though I was doing other research as well during my career, I always was coming back to this because it kept

seeming like it was an important issue. And when I first wrote about it, and it wasn't for an academic journal, because they all said, ah, pop psychology, no, this doesn't happen. Only a few people, maybe. But then I wrote an article in a popular magazine called Human Behavior. And I got inundated with sacks of mail. This was in the pre-email days in the 70ss was in 76. And people just say, oh my God, I thought it was the only one. Let me tell you. My story and people would send me things.

They would show up at my office. They would call. And all of a sudden, it went viral. That little article. And that was, I think, always something that, for me, doing research and teaching in psychology, part of what we're always trying to do, I think always something that for me doing research and teaching in psychology, part of what we're always trying to do, I think, is to translate and share what we're learning so that in some sense, it can help better society.

You're giving back to the people who have given you information and then said, okay, here's what I'm hearing. What can we do with this? How could this change things? How could this improve it? So it's just always been a part of, I guess, my career and my professional commitment to write about it, to share it, to work with different organizations

and people about this. And hopefully again, share what I've learned from all the people who shared their experiences with me. Well, it's interesting. Earlier today, I released a new episode, and it happened to be with professors, Marianne Lewis, who's the dean of the Business School at University of Cincinnati, and Wendy Smith, who's at the Business School at University Delaware, and Marianne, similar to you, stumbled upon this thing called paradoxes. And so she started publishing these papers on paradoxes and literally no one was writing

about it at that point, but similar to you, she got this huge response from it. And they both now study why we need to be doing both and thinking instead of either or. Yes. As I started to think about this as I was reading your book, this whole concept of either or thinking to me really wraps itself around this concept of burnout because often cases, that's what it is. It's either you do what we tell you to do or they're going to be repercussions that don't normally benefit the employee. No, as soon as you said that, I was saying yes, yes. And we say in the book that you've

got to be looking at the job and the person, not either or is it the job? Is it the person? Is it the boss? But it's actually how well those are fitting together and mutually supporting it. So I'm a big believer in both am thinking I think terrific. Thank you for bringing that up. That's a great point. Yeah, I just thought it was a perfect fit because that's the way it should be. This is a great lead-in. I've covered this several times on the podcast over the past year, so some listeners have probably heard it, but I like to refer to the Gallup polls that are indicating that somewhere between 70 to 85% of all employees globally. So this is a billion full-time workers globally feel that they're disengaged.

And in your book, you also cite that the majority rate their jobs as mediocre or bad. What has your own research shown on why work has become an unpleasant place of cynicism and despair? It's a great question and I have a feeling there's not an easy answer to that, but I'll share some thoughts on that. And basically what we've been finding over the several decades now is that when jobs becomes out of sync with the people who are doing them, and it could be for a number of reasons they haven't been prepared well for the job, but it could also be that the job is demanding more than people can easily do and recover from that day and come back in fresh the next morning. And I think over the decades, we have been moving into a more

morning. And I think over the decades we have been moving into a more extreme work culture, hustle culture, go culture, 24, seven, all of these kind of things which are just pushing it. And the mantra that comes out a lot is basically the job is what it is. And you, if there's a gap, if there's a mismatch, if there's a bad fit up to you guy or lady, you've got to get stronger, get more resilient, just put in the hours, you have to meet that. So it's like that saying, if you can't take the heat and get out of the kitchen, well, what we've learned is you can do something about the job. You can turn down the heat. You could make the kitchen a more safe, healthy environment for people to thrive.

And there are any kind of workplace you can do that. Rather than beating them down and saying, you're just failing, you're paying, we're upping it. The mantra we were hearing many years, several years before the pandemic was, sorry folks, we're going to have to do more with less. We don't have enough money. We're not going to be hiring more people. We can't do it. But you know what? We've got more contracts. So you guys are all going to have to work more and harder and working harder is not necessarily working smarter. And so does that lead to it makes the job stressful on a chronic basis. And human beings can respond and recover more easily from an acute stressor, a crisis, we fix it, we're done.

We can recover, we can back. But if it's chronic, which means high frequency every day, most of the time it's always there, we just don't have a chance to really regroup, recover, get back and so forth. And so the fact that burnout is this response to these chronic job stressors that have not been successfully managed, which implies that it could be. That's what we're seeing.

It's not just the stress response of exhaustion, but it's the cynicism of take this job and shove it kind of thing that it really disengagement that negative cynical hostile why am I here this is I made a mistake this is stupid they don't know how to run the place, etc. And then also beginning to feel negative about oneself. What maybe why am I having this problem? Why am I not good enough? Maybe I should have been a pet store owner or maybe this kind of thing. So it's those three things actually that are burnout, it's stress, but that's actually a healthy thing for us to be able to respond to stressors, but not if we can't recover. And the cynicism about forget this workplace, this is a bad place to be, I'm voting my soul looking at myself in the

morning going in here and then feeling what's wrong with me. And maybe there's something that I get depressed, I get anxious, et cetera. So it has repercussions in terms of well-being, health, performance, all of the above. As we were talking about before we came on there today, and I'll just share this with the audience to try to be authentic and vulnerable.

These are all things that, at one point in my career, I was experiencing in full force. I was a senior executive at a Fortune 50 company. It should have been feeling like I was on top of the world, but I think burnout is similar to something called dystemia. I'm probably mispronouncing it, but it's this long progression of depression that starts out as something very small, but it incrementally gets worse. And so as it's worsening,

you're not really understanding that you're going from mild to moderate to major depression because it happens gradually over time and it just ups itself along the way. And I think burnout is similar to that. I don't think it's necessarily something, at least it didn't for me, come on quickly. I think it was years of overwork and pressure and stress and politics as I advanced my career and everything else, that just over time, a

mass to a breaking point. And when it gets to that point, like you're saying, it has ramifications on your health, both your physical health, because you're probably under so much stress that you're not sleeping well, which is leading you to cognitive issues. So you're not performing at your best. And then it often leads, I'm sure, to people feeling depressed and having anxiety and other things. And eventually, if you have enough of it to feeling numb inside, I just wanted to bring that up because I know this carries a big stigma on it and people may be listening to this and feeling some of these things and not wanting to talk about it

and I would say that's the absolute worst thing that you could do is to let this stuff faster. So I wanted to bring that up just to lay it out there so that people understand they're not alone. But I wanted to go into the origin story of this concept of burnout. You've expressed your own origin story, but I think it really goes back to the early days of Silicon Valley where employees were saying that they were working in a burnout shop. And can you talk about why that was the case

and what some of these people were going through? Yeah, it's an interesting thing if I can add a little bit to it there, because I think there's a lot of roots perhaps on these origins that go back even further and within physics and engineering. And the whole concept of stress, for example, when we think about it, you're looking at, oh, how do you build a bridge so that the stress that is put on it, the load

that is put on it doesn't make it break, that it bends and responds and works well and so forth. And I'm the daughter of an engineer, a mechanical engineer who did work on rarefied gas and space so it was relevant for the rocket program. And I remember growing up hearing about rocket boosters that burn out. And light bulbs, obviously, burn out. And ball bearings burn out. So there was that kind of concept of an of really abrasive environment without enough resources

to survive in it that that term goes way back even before Silicon Valley. But when engineers were starting to set up these startup companies in Silicon Valley Beginning that whole kind of thing. We would see ads even for burnout shop come work with us and the idea was it was short-term It's a startup. It's 24-7 remember that concept coming from there And that means we own you we can call on you at any time You're just gonna have to work whenever get the job done, it's going to be high extreme intense, whatever. You do that for two years or something, and then you're burned out, you leave with stock options, and hopefully it's successful from that. But

that kind of sprint pace, which is running all out, doing everything you can, and 24-7, which is running all out, doing everything you can in 24-7. It's hard enough in a short term, but to make it the way in which we do business, that's doing a marathon at a sprint pace. And that's not really something that people can do and be healthy and effective and be able to recover well from it, like after you stop running. I know you have to recover before you do it again. So it was interesting to hear that term, but that was starting even before I heard about it from my interviews. And I just think that kind of more extreme intense high pressure,

you haven't done enough and you have to keep going and up the thing was beginning there. And that's why the word burnout began to just stick to that, not just the light bulbs and rocket boosters, but I feel I've given everything. I have nothing left. It's just the tank is empty and I don't want to go back tomorrow morning. And what the hell is going on with my life kind of thing. And I think that's why my interviews were saying when they heard burnout, they're like, that's the word. That's that explains it.

They feel the hollow shell that everything they had going for them has just been, as you say, not quickly taken out, but I've wrote it. It's every day less and less. I can come up to be 100%. The other thing I just want to quickly mention is the stigma. There is a stigma. And even though there's more talk about it, people usually talk about the exhaustion part, which is the stress response. more talk about it, people usually talk about the exhaustion part, which is the stress response. They don't brag really about the cynicism, about the ineffectiveness on the job. And people are, I think, wise about that because in fact, they do get stigmatized.

They've told me over and over again in interviews that you say anything that suggests you're less than 100% or you're stuck on a problem and you're talking to someone to get some help and you get put down. Oh, well, you're not so good and you're getting ready to be thrown under the bus or you can lose your job. A mistake that has been happening is that the vast tendency has been to you burn out as an individual weakness failing, illness, shortcoming, whatever you want to call it, you, your problem, you have to fix it. What's wrong with you? And the stigma adds to that.

And what we're finding actually, it's as much about the job. What's that relationship that both end, if you have job conditions that are causing it, we shouldn't just point to the effects and say, well, get resilient and relax. And we should look at what's happening on the job that is causing this problem and fix the job as well as, quote, fix the person. You've got to do both. A lot of these tendencies started in these small business environments, but they've really expanded into some of the larger companies. And what's interesting is in the research that I've done over the past six to seven years,

there's been this trend in almost all Western countries where the number of people who are going into startup jobs has been on a decline for about 25 years, but the number of people who are going into these larger companies has been pretty much on a reciprocal rise. And what I want to ask is, you've been studying this for decades. What changes, especially in these mid to larger size organization, have they been making that are undermining the capacity of people to be engaged at work? Oh, wow. Interesting question. Probably again, a lot of things to think about. One of the things that I think we were seeing didn't recognize it well at first, but we're seeing it more and more is that there is this tendency to do more and say we can get more done and we don't have to hire more people. People just have to produce more and this way, take on this. Oh, by the way, let's have this one. What we should have the team do this as well.

What is being taken off the plate so that you can do plus one plus're responsible for. And people just say, I don't have private life anymore. I'm always being bombarded by stuff. And I can't sleep. I can't get away, whatever. And in a sense, we don't redesign the jobs to take advantage of the fact that, oh, well, now we're not in the 1980s anymore. We're in the in the 2020s. And would we design this job this way today, if we started from scratch? For a lot of people they say, I don't think so. Why can't we begin to make those changes and get rid of the stuff that is not really necessary, redesign things so you don't have 20 versions of it? There's little things as well as bigger things that can make the job more

doable on the one hand in terms of workload and control that you have over the job. But to your earlier point, what a lot of these extras and more things you do and you have to do the bare minimum rather than doing your very best in order to get through the day takes away the passion, the joy, the pride you taking. And damn, I'm good. I can do this. I really made a difference today. I helped people. I did this and whatever. And when it means that you can't even look back on your work and feel good about what you've managed to do for going sleep, for going time with your family

or your neighbors or whatever, then that it's eroding my soul. I don't, it's not there anymore, that passion kind of thing. So I think there's been a number of things that have just been pushing people to the limits to be able to get more, more done with less resources to have to spend on it, assuming that the outcome will be better. But if people are working harder rather than smarter, and they're doing the bare minimum

just to get through the day and finally get a paycheck, whatever, performance is not the best that you and I would want from these people, whoever they are, from our healthcare providers, from our teachers, from our tech people, the bare minimum, maybe not. So I think there's a number of things that have been happening over the years that have led to more more difficult sense of responsibility for the well-being of the people you hire to do the work you want them to do. And it's if you could buy a beautiful plant and if you put it in a lousy pot with bad soil, no water, no sun, it's not going to return, no return on your investment there, because it won't be able to thrive, it won't be able to grow. And human beings, you need the conditions that allow you to get better,

to improve, to do your best, to feel good about what you're doing. And then when you need to go the extra mile, yeah, you're dedicated and committed and want to do that. But if it kills your voice, your joy, your sense of, I'm trained, I can do the job, I want to do well, but I never get a chance to actually do that. Why would I stay? So I hope that sort of answers your question in some ways. Well, good leads into the next place I wanted to go, which is throughout the beginning of the book, you talk about this concept of mixed matches, which is throughout the beginning of the book, you talk about this concept of

mixed matches, which is really the either or thinking that we described early on. And you describe that there's six mismatches in the workplace. I was going to have you describe what each of them are. And then I was going to come back and discuss a couple, but I also wanted you through that lens to discuss why organizational ideals and employees' experiences are so disconnected through these mismatches. Yeah. So the mismatches, again, like you say, it's the either or rather than looking at how is there a better fit? It doesn't have to be perfect, but a better fit, a synchrony, where in alignment, here's what the job is, here's

what the people are bringing to it and the training and it works well. We found that there are six areas and maybe we'll find more later, but at the moment we know about six. And if the mismatches continue and cause these chronic job stressors and are not managed well for people, the risk of burnout goes up and for them in the future. There's not one that's more important than the others, but I'll talk about them in the way we talk about them in the book, which is the way people mostly know about them. And the first one that everybody thinks about and is indeed important is workload. And the mismatch there is that the demands are really high and the resources, the time, the people, the equipment, the information, whatever it is you need to do it is low. And it's going to be really hard to meet those demands

given that you don't have what you need to do that. So that overload is a problem. But often we find that a more important aspect is control, which is that you have some autonomy, some choice, some discretion to figure out how to do the job in the best way possible or innovate or of course correct when you discover, oh, problem we can't do it that way. And if you are locked in, you cannot do it unless you do it exactly as somebody else tells you to do and you never ask for any advice or opinion or how could we make this better? That sense of no control, no voice, no, I can't use what I have to do it can lead to burnout. Third area has to do with what we call reward, which is really positive feedback when you do something well.

So people think of salary and benefits, but in the research we're finding more often, it's really important, it's social recognition. Somebody notices that you did something that was really pretty cool or saved the day or really helped out a patient in a better way or managed to deal with a difficult client and it resolved well. And to work in an environment where there is no paths on the back encouragement, thank yous, cetera. People will tell me when it's really bad, it's like when I say, what's a really good day, they'll say, nothing bad happened. That's about as

good as it can get. Nothing bad. Something good. The fourth area is what we can talk about is the community, meaning the workplace community. Who are the other people whose paths you cross on a regular basis, your colleagues, boss, people you supervise, vendors, whatever. And is there trust? Is there mutual support? Is there a willingness to figure out when we disagree how to come up with a better solution? Or is it a lot of instability, bullying, throwing people under the bus, is this is where discrimination lives, this is where glass ceilings live, and harassment, these kind of things. So when people talk about a socially toxic workplace, which has been a much more common term recently, they're talking about, you don't know who to turn to, you're surrounded by people, but you don't know if

anybody is friend or foe, and you don't dare say I'm feeling stressed and I need some help or advice. No. Fairness is the fifth area and actually I mentioned one of the fairness issues. Whatever the rules, whatever the policy, whatever the practice, is it equitably carried out? Do the people who deserve to get a promotion, get it? People who have shown that they can do some new things and opportunities. Does that happen? It's a wrong person blamed when things go wrong. So this is where the discrimination really is here, because people think it's not fair. People are not being able to move forward in their career, even though they've done well. And the fairness, if people see that how we're doing things are unfair and people are lying and

cheating to get ahead and etc etc. This can drive up the cynicism about the workplace sky high. What the hell is going on in here? Why do I want to be a part of this? And finally, that's the area that is what we call values or meaning. People talk about purpose recently, but it's the thing that is, why am I doing this? Why have I chosen to be here? And am I able to accomplish the kind of things that make me feel like, yeah, I've done a good job. I'm proud of it.

I feel like I made a contribution. I'm happy to tell people about the kind of work I do. And when people lose that, they're in a place where there's value conflicts where they're having to do things that they think are ethically wrong or that are really just injurious to have to carry out and difficult to do. People will again talk about the erosion of my soul and I got to get out of here go somewhere else. So those are those six areas and they can overlap. You can have, for example, we had an example in the book

of a company that didn't score badly on reward or on workload as the CEO had predicted, but was negative about how fair things were and how unfair things were in that company. And it turned out they could change something that everybody gripped and grouse and thought was really the award going to the wrong people kind of thing and fix it so that things got better in the years that we followed up with them. It's a reward but it was the fairness issue that it was attached to the reward that really made it. the whole process worked. And these six areas are not something that you need to study up a lot on. It's very intuitive, I think, to think about. So what's good about workload, what's not so good,

what about the community, what's working well, what's not so much, where is it that we're having me really pebbles in our shoe, those chronic job stressors that are just there all the time. Yeah, so I'm glad you gave those lengthy explanations and I was going to just go into... Oh, sorry. Oh, no, I was just going to go into some of my own experiences

with a few of them. And the first one I wanted to talk about was workload because I'm not sure what the listeners feel about this, but in my career, it was always rewarded the more work you took on. What I saw demonstrated time and time again was those who kept raising their hands and taking on more work were the ones who were rewarded with bonuses, with promotions, with other things.

And so it was this pervasive environment, regardless of where I went, whether it was the military, startups, small companies, large companies that the more you took on, the underlying thought was the faster you were gonna progress. And if you started to ask for things to be taken off your plate, then there was the inside fear that people were gonna look down upon you. Second one I wanted to bring a great example up was the insufficient rewards that you talked about.

I'll do them in one example. When I went to Lowe's, some of the listeners have heard this story before, but I took on this group that out of 350,000 employees, they had the second lowest engagement score in the entire company by a lot. I did what anyone would do is I first started going out and talking to other executives, our customers of the group, and just got negative after negative about how they were functioning. Then I really started talking to the employees. Fundamentally, they did not understand how their jobs and what they

were doing on a daily basis benefited anyone or benefited the customer or benefited the bottom line. They had no line of sight between the company strategy and its pillars and its core values and wouldn't meant to them in their day-to-day life. And so that lack of having any rewards for what they were doing was really impacting them. But then the leadership team and I came up with this strategy of things that we were going to do to take the group to the next level. And I will never forget this as I started to talk to individual employees, managers, etc. and I would do quarterly meetings where we would talk about how we're performing against the strategy. But a lot of these were one-off kind of mentoring or coaching sessions.

And what came up to me time and time again is I would talk to them about the strategy and then I would say say I need to practice eyes on hands-off leadership. There's no way I can be everywhere at one place. So I am relying on you to understand the strategy enough that you yourself can take autonomy and implement it to the best of your abilities because I guarantee you if we compound that across many people in the organization, we're going to have much better ideas and make better progress. And to a person, and some of these people had been at this company for 20, 25 years, they

said I was the first leader that had ever asked them about their input and had allowed them to take control to have an impact that they could directly influence. And so that really taught me a key lesson. And in a matter of 20 short months, this group went from the second worst performing group in the entire company to the second highest performing group. And I think it was because of all these things that you're talking about, where it became a both-and. What you could think of me as management in the company, but we were working together in sync to drive for the things that we both wanted,

but we had instilled values that we all agreed to, or a reward system that people understood, and they had a community that they felt that they belonged to that was supporting them and had their backs. Yeah. And then the last thing I wanted to bring up is I saw this whole breakdown of community play out. The company I was with called Lennelese, which was a top 10 stock on the Australian stock exchange, had always been an Australian run company.

And then they ended up hiring a gentleman from England who came from the telecom industry, decided to move the company from Australia to England, listed on the English exchange, take it off the Australian. And I have never seen a faster breakdown of identity and what people thought of community in the company than what I did there. Examples to make this real for people. Yeah, yeah, that's for those great examples, thank you. But you've been researching burnout in companies now

and other organizations for 30 years. What do you think is the single biggest factor you've seen people or organizations overlook when it comes to this? I don't know if there's just one, but certainly the kind of thing you were referring to which has walk around leadership that it has so many ramifications

in terms of communication and really understanding what is going on so that when requests come up, we need this, could you possibly fund that or whatever? People understand rather than know, they understand what it's about and maybe can offer an alternative. They know people by name.

I've talked with companies where people are being asked to do something extra for the company. And it's every time they're asked to do something extra. Nothing much happens after that. People don't even know who I am, but I'm the one who went when the power went out at night at midnight and now they're asking me to do something else and it's like normally I would, but you know what? No, I'm not going to kind of think. So it changes the dynamic of the community, certainly in terms of the reward, the feedback, the asking people for their opinion, if they control that whole kind of relationship between managers at different levels, the top C suite, all the rest, and the employees, and all the different units,

at different levels, the top C suite, all the rest, and the employees and all the different units is having really two-way communication and ways of actually figuring out better solutions to this problem. How could we customize it so it makes sense for us? How do we keep it going so we get it right? That's worth more than gold in the bank. It's just really huge. So I think that's part of it. We're seeing in a lot of places that sometimes just about the in teams and units, there is a breakdown in civility in my colleague, Michael, has done a lot of research on this.

And showing that if you can begin to change the dynamics of these smaller units so that they're working more effectively with each other, you get a lot of extra positive benefits. It prevents burnout from getting worse and down. People are showing up for work and doing a better job as a result of that. So the thing I want to emphasize about these six areas is that the notion of a good fit between the job and the person has usually been talked about in terms of physical

or cognitive fit. Get the right chair so you don't have back injuries and change the way we do the assembly line so people aren't injured physically or get a disease or something. We're talking about the same concept of fit, but with regard to these really core social psychological needs that all of us have. We all want to have some sense of autonomy and competence. We want to feel like we belong to the unit, the team. We want to feel that we're psychologically safe, that we can raise the criticism, if we see something going wrong, we're not going to get put down, that it's okay to ask for advice or help. So it's okay. And feeling that we're being treated fairly

and that we're doing something that I'm feeling good about. And so that's where these matches that I'm talking about is really getting at what makes people tick, what makes them thrive, what makes them grow and develop and do well in life. And those needs are true in the rest of our life, not just in the workplace. We spend a lot of time at work. And it would be good to be able to be in a place and do the kind of

thing that you can do and get better at and contribute and enjoy the company you're with and all of those things. So that's the kinds of matches we're really talking about. Yeah, well, one of the most important ones you bring up, I think, are values because we all have our personal values, but they're also company values. And a lot of the companies I was with, I'm sure people can relate to this. Company values were displayed right when you walk in to the main walls of the headboard building. But what I found and it's come up in so many interviews I've done this year is that there is a huge massive divide between

what the company is focusing on which is shareholder value and the values of the company that people are aligning to and the last example of this was I interviewed Scott Galloway, who's a professor at NYU, and he cites this as a major reason why not only companies, but America in general is a drift, because we're lining ourselves to the wrong things. And my question for you is, how when companies are line with shareholder value and the bottom line, does it miss the mark on the human aspect? Yeah, it's an excellent question. My hunch is that when you're focusing only on the economic bottom line and you're losing sight

of the people who are actually generating what's going to be that bottom line, you've missed what is the sort of critical responsibility to make sure that what you intend to get is you've created the conditions in which it's going to be delivered well and effectively and have that value. There is a lot of research that has shown that when you neglect the well-being of the workforce and have these mismatches, that in fact, the economic bottom line is not as good as you think it's going to be. And a colleague of mine, Jeff Feffer from the Stanford Stanford Business School, has done a lot of work on this, and has written a book called Dying for a Paycheck,

came out a couple of years ago, and really showing that if you look at all the assumptions, here's what happens when you have these unhealthy mismatched workplaces, and you have all these absenteeum and poor performance, all the things that begin to go wrong. There's not data that actually shows that the economic bottom line is thriving if you ignore the human one that produces it.

So he's more of an expert on all of that data than I am. I'm not sure where we may have lost our way on this because when you think back on the history of the workplace, the innovations that have really made great strides and improvements and things got a lot better have not been because you've gotten people working too hard and they can't keep up. They're not resilient enough. It's always been with some redesign or new technology or some new thing that allowed it to be healthier. More people could work effectively, cetera. And that's where we've really made progress.

So just assuming that if people wanna make more money, they just have to work harder and harder, give up the rest of their life. For this, I think people are saying that's a bargain, I just don't wanna do anymore. And I have a feeling that the pandemic was part of this. So a silver lining and all of that was that notion of the job is what it is.

Not in the pandemic, the job had to change. We had to do them differently in many cases. And sometimes we managed to come up with good solutions. Other times it was disastrous. We learn from the mistakes as well as the things that work well. What would be a healthier, better way for people to live a life and be able to earn the money to support it, but still have friends, family, activities, contribute something, et cetera. And I think for a lot of people, it was like, wait a minute, I don't

have to commute that far all the time just to get a job. There must be other alternatives because we had to do it before. And now I'm not flying around the world all the time just to get a job. There must be other alternatives because we had to do it before. And now I'm not flying around the world all the time and missing my family or I'm not spending money on commuting and not doing anything. I'm not working, but I'm not playing and I'm not sleeping. So what could be a healthier, better way of doing this? So feeling that the shareholder value is not enough, if that's the only thing, there has to be another value that says the human bottom line of the people producing that value has to also be enough and done well.

Well, great. And for the listener, if you've never heard of this, Sir Richard Branson, I can't remember his name off top of my head, but he's the CEO of Harley Davidson started something called the B team. And these B leaders, which are people like Mark Benioff and other progressive leaders, are trying to use this group to figure out what are more meaningful ways that companies

can show their value other than trying to measure it on the bottom line. Things like climate change, other than trying to measure it on the bottom line, things like climate change, solving other big societal issues, that only big companies in the business world are going to be able to influence because of how many people they employ. You have created one of the best assessment tools on burnout. If someone's listening to this, how can they go about assessing their relationship to work? Actually, I don't think they have to go and get a research tool because those were designed for discovery, you know, what is causing burnout, what are the effects, how do we change, etc. Unfortunately, if people use those as a diagnosis, like a thermometer, do I have a fever or something, it's, placing the blame on themselves for an illness,

which is not what burnout is. To assess the six areas in our book, we have actually, I'll do it yourself, measure that people can ask questions about and say, is this working well or is it not in each of those six areas? The other point I would say is that there needs to be a shift from saying, this is a me problem. What's wrong with me? What can I do to what could we do? And we meaning who are the people I work most

closely with or the particular office or the team or the unit? Because then rather than saying who is burning out is asking the question, why are we burning out or why are some of us burning out? And it's then focusing on what are those chronic job stressors that are not working well and causing the problem. So then rather than people having to self confess, oh my gosh, I'm experiencing burnout, can you accommodate me or what can I do, et cetera?

You frame the question, how could we make things a little better here? Where are some of our pain spots? Where are those pebbles in the shoe that just drive us a little crazy and make it difficult to get things done, the obstacles? How could we begin to improve that? And it could be lower hanging fruit, smaller, but meaningful stuff that will change the work day? And that usually takes a collaborative effort because it's me and the rest of us all, we're not blaming anybody, we're just saying,

we could do a little better than we are right now. Let's figure out and let's commit to coming up with some ideas that will really help us. And that changes the whole dynamic so that we're not looking for the people to blame on the either or side. It's like an organizational checkup that you have every year, two years, something like that saying, okay, what's working well? Well, it's like an organizational checkup that you have every

year, two years, something like that saying, okay, what's working well? Well, it's not working so well. What could we do about that? Give me input. Let's all talk and let's figure out what are the pros and cons that do an X or Y or Z. Let's try it and see if this will actually make it a better. It's a rising tide that'll lift all boats and so it doesn't just have to be the burned out people They're like the canary in the coal mine as we talk about in the book. They're the signal It's not that they are not resilient enough, but they are for some reason being able to say These could work conditions are not so great and I'm not functioning as well as I could and that's assigned to say this could get worse

This could affect more people. Let's figure out what we could do to actually improve this and getting out of the finger pointing either or on who's to blame for. Let's just make it a little bit better. We had to try and do that during the pandemic. We can keep doing it. We probably haven't figured out all the solutions

that would work. But let's say we care about the people who are here who are doing a good job for us and let's see where we can actually commit ourselves to that. Well you actually answered both questions I wanted to ask you. So I'm going to I'm actually going to end on this last one. I interviewed Claude Silver. I'm not sure if you're familiar with who she is, but she has been Gary Vee's right-hand person for a very long time, and the two of them developed a new position at Vaynerax

a couple of years ago called the Chief Heart Officer. And her role is to focus on the heart of the company and to start examining employees' happiness, not only at work, but across their entire life aspirations. And to the best of my knowledge in hers as well, she's the first person to have this title. My question to you is, why haven't more companies taken this approach? And do you think it's something that they should? Yeah, that's interesting. I hadn't heard about that before. There's needs to be more publicity about what it is that her title and what she does and what she's accomplished and why it's better than other things.

What I have heard about recently has been Chief Pur purpose and meaning for the employees is important. And what is your solution? Another C suite officer who gets a nice office in a healthy salary and has to think about these things as opposed to, and what are you doing for the employees kind of things? I think having that kind of goal that makes the heart, the purpose, the meaning of what it is we're doing is an important thing. How you institutionalize it and implement it. What do you create this office? Do you create some other kinds of things? There could be multiple ways of getting action that actually hits people where they live and where they work. For me, whatever design works, and you can actually point to, this

has made a difference for our workforce, and here's why we're proud of it, and here's what we think is good about it, and here's the evidence that it's worth the investment. Go for it. Because I think, a lot of times, even during the pandemic, employees were feeling really betrayed in their companies, that they were not protected, that they were not kept safe, that they were being pushed into things that they thought were wrong or put them exposed them or it was or isolated or not getting feedback. So we really need to be able to say as we move forward, I think, that we can do better at creating these healthier environments for people, whatever the kind of work they're doing, we're smart enough, we ought to be able to come up with some better solutions that take advantage of where the world is today,

because 20 years is gonna be in a different place and we're gonna have to keep changing. So we should practice it, get good at it. One thing is for sure, the rate of change is gonna only increase, so I completely agree with you there. Well, for the audience, I really encourage you to purchase the Burnout Challenge. We've covered just such a small aspect of the overall book. And there's so many things that you can dive into, such as the social, political, and economic

factors that are making the workforce stressful. We started talking about COVID, but in the book, both Christina and Michael really talk about what the workplaces have gotten right from the pandemic disruption and what they're feeling short of. How remote working has impacted burnout, how it's impacting the boundaries between work

and non-work, the consequences of location-centric work, and so much more. So I highly encourage you to purchase this book. And Christina, if people wanted to know more about the both of you, is there one place that they can go to do so? There is a website now called theburnoutchallenge..com one word. So that would be one place or even on things like Amazon.com or Harvard University Press, they have little bios and things that you are emails and stuff that they could drop us a line. So yeah. Well, thank you so much for joining us and bringing this extremely important message

to our audience. I really appreciate it and I'm honored that you came on the show. Well, I am honored to have been asked, so thank you so much, John. I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Christina Maslack, and I wanted to thank Peaky Keating and Harvard Press for the honor and privilege of having them join the show. Links to all things Christina and Michael

will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com. Please use our website links if you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature on the show. All proceeds go to supporting the show. Videos are on YouTube at both John Armiles and Passion Struck clips. As I mentioned at the beginning, we are also now in syndicated radio on the AMFM 247 National Broadcast, tune in every Monday and Friday from 5 to 6pm. Links will be in the show notes. Advertiser deals and discount codes are in one convenient place at passionstruck.com slash deals. I'm on LinkedIn where you can sign up for my newsletter. You can also find me at John Armiles on all the social platforms where I post daily. You're about to hear a preview of the passionstruck

podcast interview I did with psychotherapist Charlotte Fox Weber. Charlotte's clients come from different walks of life and face diverse challenges, but they all share a common question. What do they truly want? In her book, I don't tell me what you want. Charlotte delves into 12 universal wants, providing a practical guide for understanding and articulating our desires to live well. The 12 desires that I identify are going to vary for each person. And I think exploring the uniqueness is really exciting and endlessly worthwhile. And at the same time, a bit of provocation helps. So something

like power, I think we all want power, but we often struggle with it. We struggle with even admitting it to ourselves. So sometimes a bit of a nudge, a bit of a prompt in therapy and in reading and in life can push for exploration. Remember, we rise by lifting others. And if you found today's episode useful, please share it with somebody else who can use the advice that we gave on today's show. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear

so that you can live what you listen. And until next time, go out there and become PassionStruck.