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Thursday, September 26, 2024
Transitioning into management should be an exciting new chapter in your career.
It offers the opportunity to make a bigger impact in your business, bring out the best in others, and enjoy a healthy work-life balance.
However, many managers find this transition overwhelming. Studies suggest that over 50% of managers experience burnout, turning what should be a rewarding phase into a daily uphill battle.
If you’re feeling constantly overwhelmed, behind on tasks, or stressed about work, you're not alone.
The good news?
It’s fixable. In this article, I’ll walk you through six proven steps that will help you prevent burnout, based on my personal experience and work with hundreds of managers.
Who Will This Article Help?
If any of these situations sound familiar, this article is for you:
- Always saying yes, even when your plate is full.
- Taking work home, unable to switch off.
- Constantly feeling behind or overwhelmed.
- Stressing over everything you take on.
- Being busy but not seeing progress.
Just before we jump into the 6 steps to fix it, let's look at why burnout is so common in management.
Before you get promoted to management you are recognised and rewarded for being a good task completer.
You are assigned work and set working hours. The more or better work you get done in those hours the more recognition you get. It also tends to serve you well to avoid conflict.
This is similar to what is expected of you in school so it’s fair to say this conditioning has been positively reinforced into you for a minimum of 10 years.
Then, because you’re such a good worker you get promoted to management.
Saying yes to everything and avoiding conflict may have served you well to date but it will send you to the burnout zone as a manager.
You are no longer recognised and rewarded for how hard you can work but the results you get.
You’re going to get those results through a combination of strategic planning, leveraging a team and analysing performance.
Implement the 6 steps in this article and you'll get yourself on track to move into the thrive zone.
You have to be clear on what success looks like, not for just you but for your team (your success is the teams success), and how it is measured.
Without having clear measures of success the default measure of performance becomes busyness.
That’s not good for you, your team or the business.
In a perfect world this would be made clear to you by the business or your line manager but as we live in such a fast paced world this often isn’t in place.
So if you’re starting from scratch set aside some time and ask the questions:
- What does good look like in my role?
- Why does this team exist?
- How do we measure performance?
- What positive things result from us doing a good job?
- What negative things result from us doing a poor job?
From these questions create 1-3 measurable KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that tell you and your team, black and white, if you are or aren’t performing.
This is going to take a bit of work.
But how do you judge if you’re doing a good job without these? You can’t.
You can work with your team on this and your line manager / boss.
Getting serious about these questions shows that you mean business and garner you respect in the business.
I’m sure everything in your mind is screaming to avoid measures… why do you think that is?
Because you’re a human and you’re nervous about failing or being judged badly. So you’ve got a little bit of mindset work to do. Point number 2.
To thrive in your management position you’ve got to level up your mindset.
This requires effort, discipline and a willingness to embrace short term pain for long term gain.
This is an ongoing journey with a steep learning curve at the start.
But as you make progress, and realise you are the master of your mind, personal development becomes a liberating life long journey.
Here are the most common mindset issues you will have to work on initially along with a few tips:
- Imposter Syndrome
- Fear Of Failure
- Fear Of Conflict
The presence of these are just a sign that you have a normal functioning human brain.
Over 300,000 years the human mind has evolved certain traits to increase your chances of survival.
These ‘traits’ were useful for when we lived hunter gatherer lifestyles (over 90% of our existence) but can be unhelpful when left unchecked in the modern world.
For example, in the treacherous outdoors anything new (like eating a new mushroom or taking a new route) could have meant death.
New job or promotion? auto response ‘you’re not good enough for that, better stay where you are.’ That’s imposter syndrome.
Falling out of favour with the tribe and getting kicked out meant almost certain death to the hunter gatherer.
When you think about setting goals or measuring performance (like we talked about in step 1) your minds automatic response is ‘but I might fail… if I fail that will look bad on me, i could lose my job… then I might not get a new job… I won’t be able to feed my family… I could end up homeless!’ That’s where your fear of failure comes from.
So the important thing for you as a manager is to start to understand this part of your mind so you can see it for what it is - a largely redundant evolutionary survival system - not an accurate perception of reality then take the steps you need to take to thrive in your career.
(I go deeper into this and provide more tools on my growth without burnout mindset remap course)
As a a manager you’re going to have a lot of different projects and tasks going on at any one time.
No doubt you’ve also got an amount of ‘perfectionism’ within you.
This is partly good - because you do things to a high standard, and partly bad - because perfect is impossible to achieve.
Perfectionism becomes an issue when you are convincing yourself that nothing you do is ever good enough.
The two major fallouts of this are
1. You don’t enjoy any of the work you do because you’re stressed thinking it’s no good
2. You let all of your tasks take too long again because you’re never satisfied with them
Don’t get this under control and you’ll be a combination of chronically stressed and overworked.
To overcome this commit to the 80% is good enough mindset. Your work doesn’t need to perfect, it needs to be good.
By committing to finishing your tasks when you think they are 80% good enough you will notice over time that very little ever comes back to you and what does come back to you is then easily fixed.
Over time you’ll realise that by doing this you get tons more done and feel significantly less stressed.
The next point will help with this too.
To enjoy management you have to get a good grasp on capacity. Not just your capacity but the capacity of your team.
Without understanding capacity your default setting of being overly optimistic will lead to you constantly over committing yourself and your team.
I work with business owners, leaders and managers across a huge scope of business sizes and industries.
Overwhelm and burnout are common issues I help people with. Often the biggest breakthrough clients have is when we zoom out and look at their capacity vs their commitments.
95% of the time they are over committed.
Why is this so common?
Because it’s easier (in the short term) to be busy and say yes than it is to spend time reviewing your capacity and analysing your commitments.
Solution: Start applying arbitrary timeframes to everything you commit to and do, then proactively plan it into the calendar.
Are you going to get your time estimations wrong? Of course.
But, the more you do it the more you develop the muscle and more of a ‘sixth sense’ you create for it.
The important thing isn’t getting your time estimations 100% right but the process it forces you to follow. By applying a time you then have to look at your or your teams calendar and see where that activity is going to fit.
What if it doesn’t fit? Then you push it to a later date, say no or establish with involved parties what’s more important and what can be moved.
If you don’t go through this process I guarantee you’re saying yes to too much, limiting the performance of your team and experiencing more stress than you need to.
The Eisenhower Matrix divides all ‘tasks’ into four different categories.
You have to have good awareness of Q1 - urgent and important and Q2 - Non urgent but important tasks.
If you want to achieve great results, have a team that admire you and enjoy the journey you must proactively plan time for Q2 throughout your year.
Q2 Tasks at work could include:
- Reviewing last quarters performance
- Setting a strategy for your team
- Developing your team
- Taking your team through personal development plans
- Setting new objectives for improvement
- Getting feedback from your team or customers
- Reviewing feedback from your team or customers
But what do most managers do?
They reactively deal with what is thrown at them day to day, bouncing between putting out fires, responding to ‘important’ requests or emails and dealing with issues in the team.
A fact of life is there is always a never ending list of issues and problems.. this isn’t special to your industry, business or team.
If you don’t proactively plan time for important non urgent tasks, all of your time will get spent on problems, issues and the day to day.
You’ll be busy, you’ll get stuff done but no innovation will take place and nothing will improve.
To be clear - a team or business can perform well like this, lots do, it’s just not enjoyable and leaves you way short of your potential.
If you give two people 6 hours to chop down a tree who’s going to get it done faster?
The person who goes at it hard from the get go.
Or the person who spends the first hour sharpening their axe?
Here’s what I’ve found to be a solid minimum viable product for time commitment to Q2 activities.
I recommend starting with this then adapting it as suits:
Yearly - 2 full days with your team to review year and plan for next year
Quarterly - 1 full day with your team/line manager to review quarter and plan next quarter
Quarterly - 60 minutes individually with your direct team on a personal development plan
Weekly - Half day uninterrupted strategy time for you to plan, assess capacity, learn.
Weekly - 90 minute meeting with team to connect and review performance
We provide more in detail guides and support for this in our levelled up leader course
As a manager there’s a high percentage chance you’re going to find yourself over working, due to some of the reasons we have covered in this post.
There are going to be times where going above and beyond and doing a bit extra is the right thing to do.
But when that becomes your modus operandi you’re on the pathway to a lose/lose situation where you get burnt out and your business loses out on your talent.
Implementing everything we have covered in this post is going to help reduce the likelihood of this but, this final point is my favourite.
Something I’ve learned about myself and the hundreds of passionate people I’ve worked with is we’re hard wired to enjoy working hard.
We like our work, we like applying ourselves and love getting results.
You wouldn’t want to change that about yourself. The challenge is that if you’re honest, you’re work sits at or close to the top in your mental list of priorities.
Left unchecked that can lead to your passion for work coming at the expense of other important areas of your life such as family, relationships and health.
So how do you prevent that without trying to change who you are?
You create non negotiables.
Every 12 weeks commit to two daily, weekly and 1-2 monthly non negotiables you are going to make stick.
Examples of these could be:
Daily: 3 healthy meals / finish all work before 4:30pm
Weekly: Uninterrupted night with partner / 3x gym sessions
Monthly: Day away somewhere new with the kids.
Over the past five years working with leaders and managers I’ve recognised that one mindset shift has the biggest positive impact on all areas of life and performance.
Prioritise yourself more than your career or business.
This final tip helps you make that a habit.
Please don’t tell yourself that management is meant to be hard.
Management can be fun and rewarding. If it’s not right now, you’ve just got some levelling up to do.
Implementing these 6 steps will get you well off the path to burnout and on the path to the thrive zone.
This isn’t a definitive list.
There are many more things you will need to learn on your journey to your maximum potential but these steps will propel you into the position where you can embrace and enjoy that journey.
If you found this post useful you’ll love my levelled up leadership course. You can sign yourself up or jump on the waiting list below.
If you found this useful and know that it will help other managers get out of the burnout zone and on the path to fulfilment, please give it a share.
Thanks for reading, Mike
I am a best selling author, business owner and consultant. As a previous military intelligence analyst, resident with monks and burnt out business owner, I now help business owners, leaders and managers create cultures of health, happiness and high performance without burnout.