Women at Work - Managing Burnout

Episode Date: April 15, 2019

Stress can enhance our performance at work, but not if it leads to burnout. We talk with an expert on workplace well-being about how women experience burnout and how to manage its causes, symptoms, and repercussions. Guest: Mandy O’Neill.

Over 40,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at netsuite.com slash women at work. Amy Bernstein, what do you want to know about burnout? What does burnout mean to you? I have burnout on the brain these days, partly because we were preparing for this episode, and now I feel as if I see it everywhere. Am I seeing it everywhere? Is it a figment of my imagination? How about you, Amy J? I want to know if I have burnout. I'm a little afraid of having this conversation because maybe I've been burned out for a long time and not noticing it. So it's one of those things, do you look closely and discover things you don't want to discover?

Oh, God. Yes. I mean, I have been burnt out and gotten over it, but I still feel like I'm constantly on the verge of burnout. Like it's around every corner and it's terrible. So I just want to know, like, what causes burnout or why does it keep coming back? And is there anything that I can do about it? Oh, yeah. What do we do about it? What do we do about it?

Yeah. Testing, yeah. What do we do about it? What do we do about it? Testing, testing. To get answers to our questions, we reached out to Mandy O'Neill, who joined us from a studio in Berkeley, California. I can hear myself really well. I wonder if I turn up. There she is. That's good. Mandy's an associate professor of management at the George Mason University School of Business, and she's a senior scientist at the University Center for the Advancement of Well-Being. Hi. Hi, Mandy. This is Amy Bernstein. And this is Amy Gallo.

Hi there. Hi, Mandy. This is my voice. Okay, cool. Yeah, this is fun. So, Mandy, let's start by defining our terms. What do we mean when we talk about burnout? So like most things, there are as many definitions as people who are interested in it. But for a lot of academics, we really look to Christina Maslach's 30 years of research when we think about what burnout means. Emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and really a decline in a sense of personal accomplishment. What are the particular workplace stressors that lead most to burnout? Well, just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I think so too is stress.

And the point there is that perceptions matter. So something that's extremely stressful to one person might be just fine to somebody else. But if we look at the stressors that kind of crop up again and again and again, a couple of things come up. One of them is resources. Resources include both the money and promotions and benefits, but they also include the psychological resources. And I have really seen this in my own work in health care, where I've studied hospitals and health care systems that are some of the most resource rich.

And not surprisingly, these are also places where I see the least amount of burnout. So it could be just a visionary CEO. It could be a wonderful client population. It could be just, you know, a great financial bottom line situation. But these are the organizations where the resources are there to support the staff. And that includes, by the way, not just pay, but it includes the ability to do things in your free time that matter for you. So for example, time out of your workday to have a project around, you know, pet therapy or whatever your interests

are. So it doesn't necessarily include money. It includes time and autonomy. And then in contrast, in organizations that are resource poor or where things are bad, it's some of the worst levels of burnout. And I really think the two are strongly related. So this could be just terrible physical working conditions, not enough staff, not enough resources to just do the work and do it well. It could also include a cutthroat bottom line results or into culture where the funding's not coming through, the innovations are not coming through. And so the CEO is cutting everything that he or she can possibly cut to just make the numbers with the bare minimum resources. I see burnout very, very strongly in those situations. Can you talk about focus problems as well and how that might lead to burnout?

This is a great question. Women have always had a second shift. They've gone home to more work. They're often the people who are responsible for the household finances and the childcare. I caught my mind wandering one time already about kids' summer camps, and it's only February. I mean, this is not, I don't need to be thinking about these things. But this creates some well-known problems with distraction. In the literature, we sometimes call it cognitive load. So it's, you know, you have to do something,

but you're asked to memorize, you know, five numbers while you're doing it. Well, necessarily that's going to cause a focus problem. So I think that being aware of the second shift that happens outside of work and the extent to which women are taking it on more might explain why you sometimes see these focus problems coming up. And that's one of the ways in which the mindfulness concept is just so timely, especially for women, because it forces you to really focus in on the present in a very purposeful way. And I think it's a really brilliant set of interventions for everybody, but particularly in this case for women. What about the thing that everyone equates to burnout or everyone links to burnout? Long hours.

Yeah. I mean, long hours are definitely not all created equal because you can have long hours filled with work that you love and you can have long hours that make you feel like you have nothing in life besides work and it's draining you to the bone. So I think it really depends on whether you're into it. But I don't think that long hours per se are the problem. Although I do think it's a contributor, particularly if what you're doing in those long hours is taking you away from other things that are important to you. Friends, family, relationships, health, working out. Or it's work that you just don't enjoy. And, by the way, you can't finish in work hours. So have you felt burnt out before? Can you give us a sense of what it looks like? I have. It's actually one of the reasons that I took my entire family and I from our home on the East Coast out to University of California, Berkeley on sabbatical. It was because

I was feeling burnout. I started to recognize the symptoms in myself. It grew over time. And like any good researcher, I tried to apply it. You know, we call it me-search to myself and said, I'm feeling burnout. I probably need to do something about it. What were some of the symptoms you were seeing? Yeah. I mean, in some ways, it's very close to the literature, which is kind of weird, because I started to look at my students. So this upcoming year will be my 13th year as a professor. And we have wonderful students. And I've taught so many students and so many wonderful experiences and stories and personal situations.

But I had gotten to a point where some of the stories and you might say some of the excuses, personal situations, my dog ate my laptop. I just couldn't feel anything anymore. I started to look at all of my students and all of the personal circumstances and complicating factors as just one big blur. And I didn't feel anything. It's like my compassion valve had shut down and my heart felt like coal. And I thought, this is not good. I'm a naturally warm, compassionate person.

And something's wrong here when I can't feel their pain anymore. And I look at all of what's going on in their lives and all their complications and it just blends together. It's really that depersonalization. That was the biggest symptom for me. Two things seem noteworthy about your experience there. One, that you weren't feeling compassion for people you normally did. So a lack of compassion, but then also that you weren't feeling like yourself. And I wonder how much that feeling like you don't even recognize yourself is part of burnout.

You know, it's such an interesting insight and one that I don't think has been really explored deeply. But yes, a big part of this is knowing yourself and what are your own triggers, if you will. And, you know, someone who's just not naturally compassionate, this could be the status quo for them. They don't really have very strong emotional reactions to their work or to the people. And so in some ways, burnout might look a little different. But for someone like me, who's emotional and effusive normally and deeply compassionate,

something was wrong when I couldn't feel that anymore. Let's just turn for a second to your work with women in burnout. You've been working with a group of Berkeley MBA alums. Can you talk a little bit about what you're seeing there? Yeah, this was one of the most interesting and surprising findings that we came up with. So this work is with Charles O'Reilly at Stanford University. And we had been studying a group of Berkeley MBA since 1987. So it was an amazing opportunity. We knew pretty much everything you could possibly know about these folks. And then

we studied them over time. So we were really interested in how their careers evolved and how it developed. And Charles and I were particularly interested in the case of women. So as we were studying them, we had a little way to kind of predict who among them was going to be the most successful. And we defined success somewhat narrowly in terms of how much they were earning, promotions, things like that. So the computer could actually, based on all that we knew about them, make some predictions about who was going to be the most successful. And the interesting thing that happened is that initially, the people who we would have thought, based on our research on the cultures that they were prone to entering, the kind of work they were going to do, their own

personality traits, the computer thought these were going to be the most successful people. And indeed, initially, they were the most successful. They were earning the most. But what we discovered is that over time, as we continue to follow them, this group of women who were the most successful initially, and who the computer thought were going to be the most successful over time, were also the ones who were dropping out completely at higher rates. And this was very weird to us because we said, wait a sec, wait a sec. If we had stopped this study after only a few years, we would have said these women are just maxing out their career potential. But as we continue to follow them, something changed,

something happened. And we think what happened is that they were experiencing burnout so severely that the so-called opt-out option was more attractive than trying to do something else or, you know, trying to job craft or all the things we know more about. We think they were just plain old dropping out. Wow. So do you think women experience burnout differently from men? So it's interesting. I think that like most things, the internal psychological and emotional experience of burnout is probably pretty similar between men and women. What I do think differs, though, is how people deal with it. Because one of the things we know about men and women that differs quite substantially is how they express emotions. So we know, for example, that men and women mostly feel all the same emotions, and for the most part, to the same extent. But we also know that they express them differently, and there are some emotions that are not as appropriate, let's say,

for men and women to express. So this is one aspect in which I think women actually have an advantage in that historically speaking, it's been more acceptable for women to express a wider range of emotions in general than men. And so when burnout happens, it seems to me that it's more likely that women are able to express it more than men. Now, there's another question about what happens in the workplace when they do express the emotions. And I think that's where we see a much narrower band of acceptable behaviors in some ways. But the issue that I think is so important to think about is that what do you do with

those emotions when you start feeling them? We know, for example, that men tend to suppress emotions more than women. And we also know that emotion suppression is one of the worst things you can do, particularly for negative emotions, because not only do they not go away, they crop up in other ways. Memory, interpersonal relationships, health, well-being, it's really not good. both on historical research on emotion regulation and my own research on men in masculine intense professions, that emotion suppression has particularly pernicious effects for men and in particularly under stressful situations. So if women can express a wider range of emotions, then what leads to women experiencing burnout differently? Yeah, so one of the things that I think happens has something to do with the burnout itself, and it has to do with what they do with the burnout. So in terms of the burnout itself, we know, for example, that women are the people who are asked

to do these kind of, you know, office chores, if you will, you know, cleaning the coffee pot or, you know, being the emotional support for the colleague who's going through a rough time. So there are all these invisible tasks that women both take on because of, in some cases, expectations about who should be dealing with it, but also in some cases, kind of their natural proclivities. So they're taking on more at work, which you would say probably contributes to burnout in a more comprehensive way than it does for men. But at the same time, women have different opportunities for dealing with burnout in the sense that it's more acceptable for them to express vulnerability, sadness, depression than it is for men. And interestingly, in terms of opting out, historically, women have had

opportunities outside of, you know, getting to the C-suite that are much more acceptable for them than men. So they get to a certain point and they say, you know what, to the C-suite that are much more acceptable for them than men. So they get to a certain point and they say, you know what, I don't have to do this anymore. I have a perfectly acceptable alternative, which is, you know, name your alternative. Take on my own small business. Go work for a client company, maybe less pay but better hours. Honestly, stay at home with my kids, you know, write a novel, whatever it is. These pathways have been much more acceptable for women to explore than for men. That's so interesting. It is.

What does the future hold for business? Can someone please invent a crystal ball? Until then, over 40,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform. With real-time insights and forecasting, you're able to peer into the future and seize new opportunities. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at netsuite.com slash women at work. That's netsuite.com slash women at work. Hey listeners, if you want to hear from more leaders to help you answer questions like, should I talk about my anxiety at work?

Or how do I claim my leadership power? Then you should listen to TED Business, hosted by Columbia Business School professor Madhupe Akinnola. The show features TED Talks about everything from setting smart goals to the latest on DEI in business, followed up with a mini lesson from Mudupe on how to apply these lessons in your own life. Listen to TED Business wherever you get your podcasts. So how does chronic stress fit into all of this? Is it the same as burnout? Does it lead to burnout? Stress is such an interesting concept. We also know a lot about stress. And one of the interesting

things about stress is that it has a physiological profile that differs from burnout. And it's actually quite functional if you think about it. So what stress does typically, and you know, I have a cold right now, so I can tell you this, but when you have a lot of stress, your body usually starts shutting down or reminding you or giving you these clues that this is too much. You need to step back. So you'll often get sick or you'll often be super tired and your body tells you you need to get some sleep. This is actually a very helpful thing because it's your body's way of saying you need to change something here and if you're not going to change it the body's not going to be able to perform optimally burnout is a little trickier in a way because unlike stress and they're related so people

under stress will often experience burnout but people keep going with burnout and that's something that's a little bit unique about it is that they're not necessarily on the couch sick all the time or, you know, their body is really telling them quite strongly they need to stop. It's subtler than that. And they can keep going and they do keep going, which is part of how it gets to be chronic. And what about depression? What's the connection between depression and burnout? In some ways, depression and something related to anxiety are easier to treat. I mean, it's a great thing that you can go to the DSM-IV and get a diagnosis. There are symptoms. There's a lot of research on it. You can go to a doctor, either a clinical psychologist or

a psychiatrist or social worker and say, here are my symptoms. And they can say, I am diagnosing you with something. We don't have that yet for burnout. The research, in the grand scheme, the research is actually quite new, even though we have about 30 years of it, but there's no psychological syndrome that you can treat, and there's no medicine that you can take. So you're not working on a vaccine for burnout? Not yet. I do like to use the antidote of companionate love and how that tends to help with a lot of workplace situations, including burnout. But yeah, at this point, it is just a metaphor. So I just want to ask about that. What I think you're saying is that if you have a pal at work,

that really helps. Is that the notion? Absolutely. It is not an exaggeration to say that I have spent the past 10 years of my life coming to the conclusion that having affectionate, caring, close relationships at work makes almost everything better, including burnout. So we use a term called the emotional culture of companionate love. Having close relationships, having people who know you really well, having people who care for you, who look out for you, who support you, it just generally helps. It's not a solution for everything. And it's not to say that it's the only thing that you need, but it really does seem to be a wonderful aspect of workplace culture that helps with a lot of things, including burnouts. So what have you done to build yourself back up? You know, are you feeling relieved of the burnout you were feeling before? So it's interesting.

There were some learnings that came with this because my first reaction was, this is not right. I'm recognizing the symptoms. I probably need to do something about it. In my profession, we have this wonderful opportunity called sabbatical. Some corporations have it as well. So we did have an opportunity in my case for me to say, I'd like to go on sabbatical. Some corporations have it as well. So we did have an opportunity in my case for me to say, I'd like to go on sabbatical. I'd like to pull myself out of the classroom for a couple months, really do deep dive into my research and into another aspect of work where I could

essentially recharge my battery, rebuild up the skills that I felt like were lacking a little bit when I was so overwhelmed with the experience that was causing the burnout. So we came out to California and almost immediately, I mean, there's something about being on Berkeley's campus. It's so gorgeous. And the eucalyptus groves and the trees and the kind of intellectual climate that almost immediately I started to feel those feelings go away. But it was also an important lesson because when I would go back into the classroom and into the situations that were sometimes causing burnout, it would come back again. And so what that triggered for me is that you can't just run away and then come back again and expect it's going to be different. You actually have to think through how you're going to change some things about yourself and about the situation so it doesn't happen again as soon as you get back in that situation at work. You left one work situation to go to another work situation. It's

not like you went to a yoga ashram, which I think is interesting that, you know, you were still pursuing your interests even though you were feeling burned out. You weren't pulling the cord. That's the thing that's really great about work, and we have a much deeper understanding of, thanks to the work of Amy Wojniewski and others, on job crafting, which is that with any job, you usually have different aspects of the job. And it's not the case that every single aspect of the job will be the one that's really pushing you to the point of burnout. So in my case, I think it's a good example of how you job craft a little bit. You focus on another aspect of the job that

maybe hadn't been receiving as much attention that's still within the domain of your work, but is not the same one that might be causing you as much depersonalization, as much of that cynicism that comes when you start feeling the burnout. And I think that our job is a little unique as professors because we go back and forth between teaching and research. But I think a lot of jobs have this where maybe it's a certain client who's just, you know, really, really pushing to that edge. And you can shift off that or maybe you can change the focus of your work or even change where the work occurs in the day. You know, email, for example, is a syndrome that a lot of people are wrestling with. There's a lot of ideas

of how to deal with that and a lot of solutions for how you can mitigate against the feeling of, you know, just I can't handle one more email in my inbox. It's somebody asking for something. How can you see burnout coming on and headed off? Because I know in my own experience of burnout, I don't realize I'm burnt out until I am way burnt out. How can I avoid, you know, getting to the end of the burnout road? How can I just avoid the on-ramp altogether? Yeah, this may sound silly, but one of the things that we're just now finding out about its importance in the workplace is sleep. So I think the sleep researchers are cheering because they've been saying this for decades, but we're just now realizing the importance of getting a good night's sleep in terms of coming into the workplace and being your best self.

So having good interpersonal relations, doing your work, performing well. So I think that that's one thing. A second point is getting that colleague to come out and have a coffee with you early on. Because one of the things that happens, we have this metaphor called the fish and water effect, which is you're swimming in the water and you don't know you're in the water. It takes someone outside of the fishbowl to look in and say, hey, that water is really dirty. So I think that's where it's really helpful to have what some people call a board of advisors, you know, sort of a personal board of advisors. And this could be colleagues at work. This could be friends in your personal life. This could be partners, family who can look in and say, you know, I've seen this before. I've seen you go

down this road when you yourself can't see it again because you're that fish in water. You're just swimming along. And another metaphor that's kind of fun is the duck, right? Like, you know, you look fine on the outside, but underneath you're paddling like you know what. I think it's important for people to be able to look inside if you yourself can't look inside and say, hey, this is happening again.

Okay, I'm never going to get the fishbowl out of my head. I know. I mean, what fishbowl are we swimming in? And how dirty is it? Yeah. But on the individual level, so if you're emotionally exhausted, if you feel emotionally exhausted, what do you do to not feel emotionally exhausted? Aside from sleep and, you know, find a group of people that you trust who can kind of rejuvenate you? Is there anything else that you should be doing?

There are little things and there are big things. One of the little things that I found most compelling lately is this notion of belly laughs. And it's going to sound a little silly, but I actually saw some research by a health community epidemiologist researcher whose metric for how well people are doing is when is the last time you had a belly laugh? And the audience, yeah, the audience kind of, not quite belly laugh, but, you know, chuckled uncomfortably. And I realized, oh, this is genius because belly laughs at work are a great indicator of a lot of things, including the strength of the relationships that you can draw on to really deal with some aspects of work that are just unpleasant, the kind that contribute to exhaustion, to depersonalization. To be able to laugh about it

has this physiological and emotional response pattern that's one of the best forms of medicine that is, you know, also, by the way, one of the cheapest. Another interesting kind of small thing that has a fair amount of research to it is gratitude. We're learning a lot about it in the workplace, including the fact that it helps as just a form of emotion regulation. So something that's making you so angry, if you actually force yourself to reframe and say, I'm so grateful for these students because the fact that they are so curious, the fact that they are so interested in getting a degree allows me to do the work that I love. And I'm so grateful for that. And yes, they're frustrating. But to really reframe some of those negative emotions as gratitude helps enormously and is not the same kind of pitfalls that happen when, for example, you just suppress. You feel the emotions coming on and you just put the lid on it and hope it goes away. That never works out. Whereas I think reframing, honestly, avoiding some of the situations, And this can include toxic colleagues.

I mean, we haven't talked much about the flip side of colleagues, which is they're not always the best source of support or fun. They're actually quite annoying and frustrating. And it's not even the clients. It's the people down the hall from you. So how do you deal with them? One of the strategies is avoidance. So if there's an opportunity to take an office a little far away or if your organization is incentivizing people to work from home because they're running out of office space, that may be a time when you raise your hand. Even if you're, you know, a really crazy extrovert like me and say that's something I could do to really reduce the exposure to this person who's contributing to my burnout. So once you've done those things, you avoid the jerks, you get more sleep, you're more grateful, have a few belly laughs, how do you know that it's worked? How do you know that the burnout, you've turned it around?

For me, it was starting to feel compassion again. It was starting to feel the emotions that I recognize in myself when I'm not feeling burnout, when things are good, when the equilibrium is where it should be for me at work. So I think starting to feel those emotions, starting to recognize yourself, and really starting to see the symptoms go down, whether that's illness, whether that's days that you just can't get out of bed to go to work, whether it's yelling at your children or your spouse, whatever those symptoms are that you start to recognize and the people in your life start to recognize the symptoms of burnout, when they start going down and you start getting, the flip side of burnout is engagement. So when you start getting engaged in your work again, when you start getting excited to go to work, to see your colleagues, to dive into the projects, including the difficult ones and the mountain of emails or case files or whatever it is, that's to me a symptom of the burnout going down because the engagement is going up. episode of burnout and, you know, you're reengaging and so forth, how do you make sure it doesn't come back? How do you make sure that you don't kind of lose your grip there?

At some point, I think everyone has to do some introspection and ask what's really important and what you're willing to do for a paycheck and for how long. There's really good evidence that above a certain point, money doesn't matter. And the certain point varies depending on what part of the country or world you live in, but the money is not necessarily going to bring happiness. The other thing to think about is what are your values? We had this really interesting study we just published with Ken Matos and Julie, where we found that we were looking at these people who described themselves as having toxic, abusive supervision and were in cultures that can best be described as win or die. So this is pretty tough.

So we were studying this group of workers and what we discovered is that some of those workers also reported the highest levels of engagement. And we were shocked. We thought for sure this has got to be the worst of the worst. I mean, having a toxic boss is bad enough, but being in one of these cultures, no, they reported some of the highest levels of engagement. And we looked into the data more and realized that for some people, they love this work so much. They are so interested. They are so interested. They are so engaged. They find so much meaning and purpose that they're willing to put up with a lot, including some very, very stressful work conditions. For other people, that's just not

going to work. And it doesn't matter how much money they're getting paid. And it doesn't matter how interesting they find the work. They just refuse to be in situations characterized by this sort of toxic environment. So I think that the metaphor that Jane Dutton at Michigan gave me once is you have to follow your North Star. And I like the metaphor for a couple of reasons. One is that the North Star is not something you're going to find tomorrow or next week or maybe even in 10 years. But it's what you're gradually, consistently, purposefully moving toward. And I think that people sometimes don't think about the North Star because they're surrounded by what's in front of them,

the endless task list, to-do list, the competing demands. But it's important to step back a little bit and say, listen, this is working for now because something I have in mind is that I want to buy a house that's important to me. So I need to save up or I need to get this experience because it's going to allow me to go off on my own and have so much more credibility. Or at some point, I want to give back to the community in a way, but I need, you know, the financial footing or the contact. So whatever the North Star is, I think that it's really important to look at that. And then at some point, if what you're doing is not moving in the direction of your North Star, it's important to really take a very hard look at yourself and say, do I need to? Do I want to keep doing this?

Is it good for my health, my well-being, my relationships to keep doing this? Mandy, I want to ask about talking to your manager when you're feeling burned out. I can imagine that would be helpful on one hand, but I also can imagine that's an incredibly difficult conversation to have. How common is it for people to tell their managers? It depends. It really depends on the manager and the type of relationship. So if you have a manager who is a toxic manager or a narcissist or someone who is just bleeding

you dry for the corporate bottom line, this may not be the kind of person you want to talk to. If, on the other hand, you're in a workplace culture that's characterized by trust and psychological safety and strong, close relationships, then I think it's very important to communicate this. And actually, they may be not only supportive, but actually going through it themselves, and that can deepen the relationship. Okay, Mandy, here's a tricky situation for you. I'm a manager. One of my direct reports kind of seems to be burning out, is demonstrating all those symptoms. How do I bring it up? Do I bring it up?

So it's really interesting because, generally speaking, the power research suggests that as you experience the psychological effects of power, which happens when you become a manager, you actually are paying less attention and you're missing a lot of things. So I would say, generally speaking, it's really important to give the benefit of the doubt and not assume, particularly as a manager, because, again, if you think about the importance of your words and the importance of your emotions and how that might come off to the employee,

I think a much safer route is just to be sincere and genuine and say something like, how are you? I think people are often quite surprised at how just a simple, genuine gesture of concern and caring can really speak volumes and allow people to open up so that you don't have to actually make any assumptions about what they're feeling or thinking. You can just ask them about their experiences in a way that makes them feel psychologically safe. That's probably good advice on a lot of fronts. Yes. Again, because, you know, imagine if they're not burnt out at all. They're just kind of a introverted, not very expressive person. And you're completely interpreting their outward behavior with no idea about what's going on internally. I mean, that could be really distressing. And what if you're the boss and you're burnt out? Is the way you express burnout or talk about your

feelings, does that have to change because you're a manager? I mean, to some extent, being a manager has one of these unique advantages of everybody's paying attention to you and the emotions that you express are even more contagious than emotions expressed peer-to-peer. So on the one hand, they're probably noticing it a lot more than you think, but then there's this other really interesting set of findings around the benefits of helping others. So if you're burnt out, there's this really cool research by Jamil Zaki and others on how being kind to others and having empathy for others actually helps you. Adam Grant is a real pioneer in this space as well on the benefits of helping. So ironically, even though you're burnt out, helping other people with their burnout may make you feel better in addition to hopefully making them feel better as well.

So it's kind of one of my colleagues has this phrase I like reciprocal feedback loop. So it's kind of one of these things where, you know, you're feeling burnt out, but you help people and it helps you and it helps them. And it's kind of the virtuous upward positive spiral that we like to see at work. Well, this has been so interesting, Mandy. Thank you very, very much for all your insight. Thank you, guys. This was a lot of fun. What does the future hold for business? Can someone please invent a crystal ball?

Until then, over 40,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform. With real-time insights and forecasting, you're able to peer into the future and seize new opportunities. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at netsuite.com slash women at work. That's netsuite.com slash women at work. So, Amy, when we first sat down for this conversation, you said that you were a little bit afraid. You were afraid you might find out that you're burnt out. Are you burnt out? I think I might be.

Oh. I mean, I don't need to rethink my whole career, but I did yell at my daughter this morning. And I think I'm tired and have been working too much. And I need to figure out how to do a little bit of what she's talking about. The reframing, the gratitude, even maybe even some job crafting so that I'm focusing on things that I really care and feel valued in so that when I'm home and, you know, 11 year old isn't getting out the door as quickly as I want, I make a joke. I'm not as generous in my interpretations or, you know, I'm not as available to colleagues with time and to help out. And that's not me. And being able to recognize that maybe, being more aware of that, I think will be helpful in just showing me, okay, this is, I'm feeling burnt out. I need to do something about this. Maybe I should be proactive and curb some of what's happening here. I was also really struck by what she was saying about the second shift and focus. For me, that's also the days where I feel most burned out. So let's say I'm in a meeting that runs a little late and I know it means I'm not going to be able to pick up my daughter.

I'm in that meeting. I can't just say, oh, you know, the meeting ran late. Let's keep going. I have to text someone to go get her. I have to text my husband to make sure he understands. There's so much else to take care of besides the job. And it all depends on you're getting out the door at 4.52. Exactly.

And if not, it all falls apart and requires 15 texts. And then I'm texting while I'm in the elevator and I'm not really listening to what's happening in the meeting. And, you know, like it's there's so much going on. And I think that multitasking is is for me one of the largest contributors to whether I'm burnt out or not. What if one of the things you're feeling is, you know, one of the causes we talked about for burnout, like you don't feel valued or seen or recognized? That's so tough. Because you can't say, hey, scale 1 to 10, what do you think of me? Or please tell me I'm good.

Yeah. That is so tough. How do you handle that? I have a secret trick. And it's really, I'm embarrassed to confess it right now. No, tell us. We won't tell anyone. I go and check the stats on some of my most popular articles

and just look at the numbers and they make me feel better. It's a little sad. It's a self-affirmation. It's like positive. But honestly, when I'm feeling really sad, I'm like,

I'm just going to go look at those numbers. So what if you don't have that? What are you doing? I mean, I think you do have to find, there is likely evidence somewhere of your value. I have a friend who saves any complimentary email she gets in a folder,

and that's what she goes to and she reads. And sometimes she'll, even if she's having a bad day, she'll excerpt them and send them to me and just say, I just read this and I feel better. Well, so she is a pal. Right. Yes. True.

But I love the idea of having a sort of a pick-me-up folder. Yeah. Or like just a compliments folder because we all receive compliments via email all the time. Why not keep them somewhere? I'm committing to doing it right now. That is such a good idea. Oh, my gosh. That's a great thing to do. I love that that there's also a call for more letters from our listeners

oh i love those i know those are those don't those make you feel great they really do yeah yeah so keep those coming yeah can we talk about what to say to a manager if you are feeling burnt out? I definitely would not use the word burnt out. I would be afraid to because I think it has a lot of negative connotations of I can't handle it. I'm not on top of my game. In the past, when I've talked to managers, I think I've been trying to cue that I was burned out. I've said things like, can we talk about my workload? I'm feeling a little overwhelmed with this specific thing, right? I haven't been broadening it out so that it's an overall feeling, but trying to really be specific. And I do generally try to come with solutions in mind. I think what gives me pause when thinking about should I talk about burnout is people are very helpful. And I found especially managers will want to help out and try to do a lot of work to, you know, alleviate your workload or, you know,

give you the support or the time you need. My big fear is that that instinct to protect me will hurt my career in some way. You know, taking things off my plate. Like I'm so reluctant to do that because I'm like, I need lots of things on my plate so that I can show that I'm a good worker and keep my performance up and advance. So that's something I struggle with quite a bit. But if you're not asking for protection, if what you're asking for explicitly is help in setting priorities

or setting a schedule for yourself so that you can take care of everything with the appropriate amount of attention, that's a different thing. You're not saying, you know, take my work away, and you're not saying do my work for me. You're saying help me figure out how to do my work really well. But I understand the concern because the fear might be that next time a big important project comes along, your manager says, well, maybe Nicole's not cut out for it. She had trouble with that other thing before, right? I'm not sure how you guard against that. And I think that's partly why I've never used

the word burnout because I don't want to be pegged as someone who can't handle it. It's really interesting because I would think as a manager, I mean, I have a lot of respect for people who ask for help in order to get their work done well. These are people who are committed and who, you know, don't have either the autonomy or the experience to figure these things out on their own. And, you know, that's what we're here for. We're here to help people excel, right? Well, I think, I imagine a lot of our listeners don't have managers who are as good as you, Amy. So I think we also have to think about, well, what, so how do you frame it in a way that for the manager who will think less of you, how do you frame it in a positive way that still gets you the support or help you need. Wow.

And I think that making it temporary, right? This is a time period where I'm struggling with X, Y, Z. Once we get past that, right? Sort of really making it a focused need could probably help. Or, you know, saying, listen, I'm going to need one more week to put the finishing touches on that report. Just taking charge. And if your manager says, well, I really needed a Tuesday. You can say, then it's like bargaining. Okay, I can get it to you Tuesday, but I'm going to need another week to get the other two things done.

Amy, as a manager, have people come to you and said, I'm burned out? They have come to me burnt out. I'm not sure anyone's ever said, hey, I'm burnt out. I was really listening to Mandy's advice about how you handle that because it's a tough one. I've dealt with it by just asking them to unpack whatever it is that's so upset them. And usually there's something about workload. There's something about feeling unappreciated at work.

And there's something going on at home. Right. It's a combination. It's a combination. And people get overwhelmed. We all do. And so the conversation isn't about how come you're falling apart at work. It's how do we make work fun again? that spark of joy back, I want to do. One of the other hesitations I have about confessing burnout is that I assume my friends, my colleagues, my manager are also feeling burned out.

And I feel like it's a bit of a burden to have to now deal with my burnout on top of everything else they're already but are you but if you confess it are you saying here's my problem you solve it or are you doing it in the spirit of hey are we in the same boat here right let's help each other that's a good point you can do it in a way that's commiserating and supportive or seeking support without making it someone else's problem. Yeah. I mean, it's really comforting to know you're not the only one. That's true. That's our show. I'm Nicole Torres.

I'm Amy Gallo. And I'm Amy Bernstein. Our producer is Amanda Kersey. Our audio product manager is Adam Buchholz. Maureen Hogue is our supervising editor. Thank you. We created Women at Work thinking it would be a six-episode podcast, but thanks to your enthusiasm and encouragement, we're still at it. The best way you can support this show and keep us going is to subscribe to Harvard Business Review. By doing that, you not only support the show,

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