We R Human

You're not a great leader for noticing burnout.

If all you do is keep pointing it out & complaining about it,

At best, you're a powerless empathizer.

At worst, you're virtue signalling & don't really care.

As the leader, you have to start doing something about it.

🕯️ Here's 3 tips to combat burnout:

1️⃣ 𝐅𝐨𝐜𝐮𝐬 𝐨𝐧 𝟐-𝟑 𝐁𝐢𝐠 𝐏𝐫𝐢𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐬

🧱 All real value that every team generates can be narrowed down to few core actions.

Put all your effort behind creating excellent outcomes for those.

And allow your team to relax on all the others.

Because if everything's a priority, nothing's a priority.

2️⃣ 𝐋𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐎𝐟𝐟𝐢𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐄𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐃𝐚𝐲

If you preach work-life balance, but send emails at 9PM...

Set a bold precedent by publicly signing off at the end of the day.

Or proudly annouce on Slack when you're taking a short break.

Your team will only start taking care of themselves,

⛱️ After seeing you take care of yourself & draw boundaries.

3️⃣ 𝐋𝐚𝐮𝐠𝐡 & 𝐂𝐫𝐲 𝐓𝐨𝐠𝐞𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫

Inject humor & vulnerability into conversations.

🤣 Find moments of playfulness with your colleagues & riff on it for a bit.

Seek opportunities to open up about your personal challenges & invite others to share.

What gets us through the toughest times is our friends in the foxhole with us.

🤜 The next time you see burnout, do something about it & don't just be a statistic.

Leaders often fail to set up Goldilocks goals for their teams.

🔸 As the new CEO, Sangeeta was an incredible storyteller.

⛰️ She knew how to get her people excited by charting an ambitious bold path for the company.

Yet a few months in, her team felt removed from their visionary boss’s objectives.

Knowing the business' actual constraints, they saw her goals as unrealistic & ignored it.

🍜 This is a big hot porridge bowl that teams don’t think they can finish.

🔹 Then there was the recently promoted VP of Products, Sarah.

👩‍💻 As a smart operator who was one of them, her team respected her.

In reality, her team meetings were just individual updates & her problem solving one leader’s issue at a time.

Without anyone real owning the cross business features & issues, progress was slow.

🍚 This is a small cold porridge bowl that no one thinks is worth finishing.

Instead, great leaders know how to bake the perfect performance challenge.

1️⃣ They craft goals hard enough to require their whole team to work together.

But easy enough to see meaningful results soon so that it doesn’t demotivate them.

2️⃣ They set up challenges with deadlines near enough to be urgent.

But far enough to give the team time and space to own the problem.

🔸 For Sangeeta, she needed to find an early win that the team could have taken to feel confident.

🔹 If Sarah had asked her team to solve the most pressing issues, they could have really rallied.

👊 Great leaders know how to feed their teams, one goal at a time.

A buddy of mine in college would say this every time he made a new friend,

𝘐 𝘢𝘮 𝘭𝘰𝘰𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘸𝘢𝘳𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘧𝘪𝘳𝘴𝘵 𝘧𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵.

And whenever he said that, I would look at him like he was crazy.

One day, I asked him to explain this crazy theory.

He said, 𝘕𝘪𝘬𝘩𝘪𝘭 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘬 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘪𝘵. 𝘌𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺 𝘯𝘦𝘸 𝘳𝘦𝘭𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘩𝘪𝘱 𝘪𝘴 𝘢 𝘧𝘢𝘬𝘦 𝘳𝘦𝘭𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘩𝘪𝘱.

𝘞𝘦 𝘥𝘰𝘯'𝘵 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘬𝘯𝘰𝘸 𝘦𝘢𝘤𝘩 𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘸𝘦𝘭𝘭 & 𝘸𝘦'𝘳𝘦 𝘫𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘸𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘣𝘦𝘴𝘵 𝘴𝘪𝘥𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘰𝘯.

𝘉𝘶𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘮𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘸𝘦 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘧𝘪𝘳𝘴𝘵 𝘧𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵, 𝘸𝘦 𝘯𝘰𝘸 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘬𝘯𝘰𝘸 𝘦𝘢𝘤𝘩 𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳.

And that always stuck with me.

⚔️ Most of us avoid uncomfortable conversations like the plague.

Any tension in the workplace just stresses us out.

And if we get "feedback", we feel attacked & exhausted afterwards.

🧐 But what if we reframed it in a different light?

🙌 What if we saw conflicts as our most authentic selves really meeting each other.

Then we wouldn't dread having a talk with a coworker who keeps letting us down.

We'd see it as a chance to understand what they're going through & to assert ourselves in a real way.

No matter how messy or volatile it gets, as long we're still respectful of each other

We're always going to come out of it a little bit wiser

A little more honest & true to ourselves.

👊 And believe it or not, a bit more closer with each other as well.

Don't lie, we all have our favorite direct report.

And most likely, it's the one we see in person.

💻🏢 As more companies head towards a mixed model of working remotely & in-person, tensions will arise.

🤼 It's going to pit teammate against teammate.

It's because managers give preferential treatment to employees who show their faces in the office.

The reason is because of proximity bias.

🏏 We unconsciously favor whoever is closest in time & space to us,

Here are 3 ways we might be playing favorites:

1️⃣ We prioritize their goals and needs

Employees in the office might find their projects being fast tracked or given more resources.

SHRM reported that 42% of managers forget remote workers when assigning tasks.

2️⃣ We are less frustrated when communicating with them

Remote employees will find themselves getting a little less time and patience when talking to us.

67% of managers believe remote workers are more replaceable than onsite workers.

3️⃣ We give them them more freedom

There will be more micromanagement of those who work from home than those who don't.

Even though they're 15% more productive.

🤜 If we want to lead better in the hybrid work world, let's check our biases at the door.