Michael Leiter

Burnout researchers have pointed at this for a long time.

Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter, whose work is behind the most widely used burnout measure, describe workload as one of six drivers of burnout.

And right alongside it is control, whether you have a say in how the work gets done.

People can carry heavy loads when they choose them, and the loads mean something to them.

Very common, very natural, and slightly softer.

It's the phrase you use with a colleague when you don't want to sound dramatic.

I'm frazzled.

This one is wonderful.

British speakers often say at the end of my tether, which is the same image, an animal tied to a post and it's gone as far as it can go.

Now here's my moment of uncertainty, and I'd like you to weigh in.

If a colleague asks how you are and you're genuinely struggling, which of these would you actually say? Depleted feels a bit too formal for a hallway.

At the end of my rope might sound alarming.

And the first breakthrough of the shame came when I read long-term burnout researchers.

They've been researching burnout since before I was born, Christina Moslock, Wilhelm Selfhilly, and Michael Leiter.

I was reading one of the things that they, one of the studies that they did, and it said, you know, 80% of your burnout is your workplace's fault.

That wasn't, it didn't allow me to eliminate shame completely because remember I worked for myself.

Um, I'm a big believer in Christina Maslach's work.

She's a burnout expert, has been working on that for 30 years, and her latest book, The Burnout Challenge by she and Michael Leiter, was really revelatory to me and spurred, uh, a whole lot of work that I do on the burnout s- on the burnout side.

Because what I was seeing with my clients is they get to a point of burnout for lots of different reasons, and when they get to that point, then there's this superfluous standard advice, take a vacation, work, work less, work out more, get more sleep.

These things that are... that everybody knows that we would be doing if we could, if we would, we could-

Unfortunately, burnout and the conditions for burnout are probably not going away anytime soon.

The Burnout Challenge by two incredibly talented organizational psychologists, Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter, transformed how I approached my own burnout because that book gave me the language that I needed to have more effective conversations with stakeholders who could impact my experience beyond me just saying, hey, I'm burned out.

I don't feel well.

What I believe is transformative about that book is that in that book, Maslach and Leiter create a framework that describes burnout as a mismatch between what a worker, regardless of the profession, needs and what the environment is providing.

There was no information about whether or not the colors of the walls in our homes, uh, changes our stress levels.

So when I started pulling apart mismatch, and the original mismatch sentence comes from the burnout researchers, the Christina Maslach, Wilhelm Schaufeli, and Michael Leiter.

They wrote this sentence that basically sums up to, to this idea that the largest driver of burnout in a workplace is a mismatch between a person and their role, their job role.

Hmm.

So I want you to grab your cup of coffee, and let's get started.

Last week, I had the opportunity to sit down with a group of CEOs and business leaders who are my friends and colleagues, and we got to talk about strategic planning for their company.

We talked about strategy, goals, growth, where their company was going, what they wanted to accomplish, what they needed to change, what opportunities were in front of them, all the things we're supposed to talk about while we're building strategic plans.

And it was a really good conversation, and we had some really good barbecue.