Heidi Brooks of Yale School of Management On How the World’s Best Leaders Build Burnout-Free Workplace Cultures
An Interview With Chad Silverstein
If people can’t find meaning in work, or can’t find some sense of connection to others in the workplace, or work doesn’t grow people, it can end up with a pretty transactional spirit. Everybody is just putting in what is expected of them. It might become normative to talk more about the weekend or things outside of work than it is to talk enthusiastically about the work we’re doing together. We’ve created a norm of disengagement, disinterest and being checked out of work. We end up with a “clocking in” mentality that depletes us further.
In today’s high-pressure business landscape, burnout has become an epidemic affecting both employees and leaders. The question is — how can companies create workplace cultures that prioritize well-being without compromising performance? To dive into this important topic, we are interviewing Heidi Brooks.
Heidi Brooks teaches organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management, directs the Program for the Practice of Everyday Leadership, leads Yale’s popular Interpersonal and Group Dynamics course, and hosts the podcast Learning Through Experience. She pioneered the concept of “everyday leadership,” focused on the “micro moments” that drive thriving at work. Drawing on research, interpersonal learning, and engagement with art, improv, and athletics, she co-creates leadership and team transformation with Fortune 50 organizations, tech companies, professional services firms, startups, and foundations.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive into our discussion, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share with us the backstory about what brought you to your specific career path?
Growing up as the daughter of a nurse, I loved the idea of being a change agent for human wellbeing. As early as middle school, I remember telling people that I wanted to be a hematologist. Still excited about this career aspiration, I initially took pre-med coursework in college but discovered that I was more drawn to the social sciences — especially psychology and public health. Both fields offered a compelling vision of what it meant to be human well at the individual and collective levels. I was so surprised by this new trajectory that I wanted to take time off to recalibrate. In the middle of a chemistry lecture, it occurred to me that I could do just that. I surprised myself by acting on it right then and there. I left the classroom to withdraw from school. I’d always been a well-behaved, cooperative student, so leaving class felt wild and freeing. After a re-orienting leave, I returned to college to graduate.
A couple of years after undergrad, I went to the University of California at Berkeley for a Ph.D. in Clinical and Community Psychology to learn about human change across the lifespan. Through truly amazing mentorship and supervision (here’s to great teaching!), I become a systems and individual change expert. I was particularly fascinated with how systems support change and growth for individuals and, in reverse, how individual members impact those systems. Eventually, this topic turned into action research on leadership and group dynamics. At that point, I felt like I had made real contact with a sense of professional purpose. I discovered executive coaching and found that I had facility with coaching and advising teams and leaders — a perfect nexus of where individual capacity and group dynamics come together.
I was so taken with this field of intervention that I found more ways to coach and advise rather than complete the last bits of my dissertation. I loved the pace of the work, the prestige and glitz of gorgeous locations and impressive brand names of well-known companies. After some amazing adventures working with large family enterprises and a bit of time at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, I faced another decision point. At a black-tie client event one night at a castle in Europe, I found myself asking whether I wanted to spend family holidays with my husband and children or with my clients (whom I adored, but family businesses tend to gather when families gather so it created a conflict for precious family time in both directions).
I was fortunate to be able to resolve this dilemma by joining the faculty of Yale School of Management, where there is a mission that spoke to me: “Educating leaders for business and society.” I’ve now been at Yale for more than two decades and feel like I am deep in the work of my purpose. The heart of my faculty role is about creating learning spaces that offer practice in everyday leadership. As people learn to learn through the wonderful and hard experiences that we humans can’t help getting ourselves into, the learning process itself becomes a norm — a way of leading through tensions and ambiguity that meet the moment and shape the future.
I’ve become a change agent not as a clinical psychologist but as a scholar, teacher, and advisor about the everyday conditions where people can thrive in complex circumstances. I love to talk with people about interpersonal and group dynamics in their work community as a place of both great potential and, too often, immense frustration and fatigue. I’m particularly interested in creating more courageous organizational communities who intentionally shape their future through a commitment to resilient interpersonal and group dynamics. That means I spend a lot of time in relatively small circles of people talking in real time about the experience of working together.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?
Since this is the five-year anniversary of the global pandemic, I’ve been reflecting on a life-changing moment in my family in March 2020. My husband Rick was hospitalized as a very early COVID patient in New York City before anyone in the U.S. knew how to handle COVID.
It was a confusing, panicky time. Rick, who is also a university professor, and I canceled our long-planned trip to California with what he called “an abundance of caution.” Within days, the university announced that all classes would be virtual for the remainder of the academic year. I was among the first faculty members to teach in this new mode.
The morning of my first core virtual class, Rick texted me with his formal, near-Elizabethan style: “If you have a moment, would you please come to the bathroom?” I found him leaning on the sink with a gash in his head, looking dazed. He thought maybe he’d passed out. His doctor insisted we go to the ER, but I — not proud of my priorities — asked if it could wait until after my class. I set our daughter to watch him and clean his head.
I taught class on edge, even falling off my wheeled chair at one point. Afterward, I drove Rick to the hospital but was surprised they wouldn’t let me in. He became one of the early COVID admissions while my daughter and I also fell ill at home.
The hospital was overwhelmed with confusion and fear. I called Rick repeatedly to get information, but he had none — the doctors avoided visiting him out of fear of contagion. He was treated like any random Black man may have been treated, which was not working. He was mostly worried about not having his materials to prep for teaching the next week.
Rick is deeply committed to doing his job well — teaching, writing, reviewing — and genuinely cares about being a good citizen. His idea of being a good citizen at the hospital was to cooperate and not complain. I begged him to wake up to the reality of how sick he was and urged him to advocate for himself.
Less than 36-hours after a premature hospital discharge, I woke to the sound of banging in the bathroom. I found Rick on the floor in some sort of seizure, banging his head against the wall with blood smears tracking down from his usual height. His eyes were rolled back, and he seemed to be choking. It was the most frightening thing I’ve ever seen.
After calling 911, I noticed a suitcase in the corner with a book on top. I realized Rick had gone to his office in the night, unable to sleep because he felt unprepared to teach. I was so relieved that he made it back home before his collapse, but I was also shocked that his commitment to work had driven him to risk his life for class preparation while severely ill with COVID.
The next hospital stay was touch and go, but I was determined to do what I could. I made dozens of calls with the stubborn persistence of a nurse’s daughter, and this time, the hospital stay was entirely different. The healthcare system was learning rapidly — it had only been a couple of days since he was last there. This time, multiple physicians made a point to visit and Rick had a proper chart. A patient advocate kept me informed. After undergoing experimental treatments, Rick improved. And — in what seemed like a miracle — he was alive.
But we were all still quite ill and slept and slept and slept. In mid-May, we emerged into a bizarre New York, full of sirens and empty of almost all else. Every night at 7pm, I eagerly joined the only sign of life in NYC as we knew it — a rousing round of appreciation for the city’s healthcare workers. People opened windows and stood on balconies applauding for minutes on end. And I meant every clap, every hoot, every night.
For a while there, my priorities felt crystal clear — it was a blessing to be alive and to have made it through. We were keenly aware of losing extended family and dear friends to COVID-19. Everything seemed like a privilege and wonder. Every moment felt fleeting and vulnerable and temporary and precious — each conversation, each sip of orange juice delivered from the local store, each morning waking up being able to breathe clearly. We recalibrate what matters and how we want to live. We sell our large family house and buy something smaller with a better view so we can enjoy the moments more. We wonder if we may have been more susceptible to COVID just because we were run down and burned out before it hit.
In 1971, researchers Philip Brickman and Donald T. Campbell demonstrated that after a huge life event, whether suffering an accident or winning the lottery, humans have a predictable spike of good or bad emotions. Eventually, their “baseline” — the level of happiness or sadness they had before the huge event — returns. Over time, I returned to my baseline. I welcomed this interview as a reminder. Like most people — including my husband (who is recovered and well) and people who work for me, as you will hear below — I am susceptible to burnout. We have a lot to learn about creating the conditions for managing our work, our health and our lives more wisely.
You are a successful leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
This sounds like a question about my impact. I think others are better positioned to speak to my impact on them. When I saw this question, I asked a few people for input. I heard themes of authenticity, embracing failure as a learning opportunity and my favorite: EDGE.
Being real: Early in my career, especially when I was a newly minted Ph.D., I assumed that my professional value came from the ideas and documents I produced. Yet time and time again, it was my way of holding space that had lasting impact. It’s a lesson that I’ve needed to learn again and again — that my ability to be real and present is a primary source of impact on people in the spaces I inhabit.
Embracing failure as part of the learning process: One of the clients I work with told me that the biggest value I bring is as a failure expert. I love that framing. I create conditions where we can learn through inevitable failure as we try new things. Failure is not the point — improving and developing is the point — but it’s hard to get better at new things if we cannot risk trying them out. These aren’t necessarily large or catastrophic misses. I normalize attending to the “micro moments” that didn’t work out the way that we planned. At this scale, we can afford to fail and learn from experience. Learning from failure is simply an essential ingredient in our capacity to learn and grow.
EDGE: Some people have labeled this as an affinity for danger because my eyes sparkle and I get really interested as people stretch themselves into vulnerable but worthwhile interpersonal risks. While introducing me for a talk recently, a colleague I admire described me as bringing “edge.” For many people, edge means risk or even fear. For others, it’s about a surface hipness or currency. For me, when we are at the edge of our comfort zone, it is a place of possibility, defined more by ambiguity than danger.
Another colleague told me that I have a way of naming things that is simultaneously disarming and inviting — feedback I’ve gotten throughout life. When I was younger, people often experienced my affinity for edge as blunt and intimidating. As I’ve learned to walk through the world in a more grounded fashion, I don’t get that feedback as often (though I reserve the right to use all of what I bring). And edge has become a place of deep generativity for me. These days, much of my impact comes from my ability to help groups of people face transformation that requires courage and development. We are more resilient than we think. We can gracefully handle far more challenges than we tend to believe.
Let’s now jump to the primary focus of our interview. Can you share a pivotal moment in your career when you realized the importance of creating a burnout-free workplace culture? How did it influence your approach to leadership?
Note: To provide an important caveat, my answers are not clinical guidance or advice. Burnout can develop into issues that require medical or professional intervention. It’s important to reach out to medical, mental health, and/or HR professionals for support.
When valued workers burn out, everyone loses. “Burnout free” is a good goal, but the truth is that burnout is an ongoing risk. I think of it as similar to muscle atrophy: if there is too little prevention and health promotion via exercise, muscle atrophy naturally starts to set in. It’s the chronic exposure, the prolonged periods without exercise that is most damaging. Ending burnout means evolving norms to address the chronic and prolonged exposure to the stressors that produce burnout. I’d like to share a story of how I learned about the impact of overwork on my own team.
A few years ago, I took my senior team on a retreat after a period of hard push. Everyone was working hard and excited about the work. We were producing great stuff. But people were tired — too tired. Several key people had come down with colds. I thought that a retreat, by definition, was going to be rejuvenating for us. I assumed that an amazing time with our team would serve as enough of a remedy. I can generate lots of ideas and projects, which — because our work is centered on my work and staff have to execute the plan after the retreat — means different things for me than for them. And I had been particularly generative around that time.
Admirably, the staff sat me down and basically rang an intervention on me. I learned that, because we all care about what we are doing — and because of the way I push people and run my team — we tend to run pretty hard all of the time. I wasn’t sensitive enough to the impact of always running hard even when we all believed deeply in what we were doing and we loved the work and each other. What I learned over the course of the retreat was that team thriving requires capacity for ease as part of the definition of ongoing success.
We started referring to our time as the “ease retreat,” adding walks in the woods, storytelling, and meditation. We had an open discussion about burnout and overwork. We talked about why people had felt hesitant to acknowledge their fatigue. I think we succeeded in making those topics discussable and started to become accountable for managing the dynamic together. It was good learning for me — that a concept of excellence must include enough resilience and recovery for the system to be able to work at its best. We hadn’t yet reached burnout — but we had some of the early warning signals, and the intervention was right on time.
Most of us recognize the need for physical recovery demands. For example, you can’t work every day at full pace at the gym without enough time for your muscles to recover. It is a standard part of strength training to have a healthy rest and recovery period. Since we respect that need in our physical system, we can apply the same respect to the cycle of work depletion and recovery: humans need, for the sake of meaningful performance and continued enthusiasm and commitment, periods of recovery to support the capacity for strenuous exertion. Those periods can strengthen and support overall capacity and perhaps most importantly, support sustainable productivity. Healthy systems know how to recover back stronger when given the conditions for recuperation and learning.
Today, my team has evolved norms of checking in on energy and engagement in more regular ways. I don’t think we are out of the woods of being susceptible to burn-out because of the risk of overwork, the threat of disconnection related to asynchronous work in separate locations and because the general atmosphere of agitation takes a toll. But I do believe in the norms that keep us paying attention to both the products and the process of our work. And I feel more attuned to the impact of my own work style and demands on the team. We are always navigating and attending to this ongoing dynamic.
What are some of the most common causes of burnout in today’s workplaces, and what signs should leaders look out for in their teams?
A recent study by educational technology company Moodle and Censuswide reports that 66% of American employees today are experiencing some sort of burnout. That includes a staggering number of young professionals with “81% of 18–24 year olds and 83% of 25–34 year olds reporting burnout, compared to just 49% of those aged 55 and older.”
The research firm Quantum showed similar results in their 2024 report. “Despite increased awareness and efforts towards employee well-being, burnout remains prevalent in today’s workplaces. Our research shows 37% of employees report high burnout rates.”
There are reports that burnout is costing businesses an estimated $125-$190 billion per year in physical and psychological healthcare costs and an estimated $2 trillion in lost productivity. Given the scope of impact on business and society, we may need to regard burnout as a public health crisis. The World Health Organization calls burnout “a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed,” manifesting through “feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and reduced professional efficacy” — making workplace culture interventions not merely beneficial but essential for organizational survival.
In their 2016 paper “Understanding the burnout experience: recent research and its implications for psychiatry,“ Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter define burnout in social context:
“Burnout is a psychological syndrome emerging as a prolonged response to chronic interpersonal stressors on the job. The three key dimensions of this response are an overwhelming exhaustion, feelings of cynicism and detachment from the job, and a sense of ineffectiveness and lack of accomplishment. The significance of this three‐dimensional model is that it clearly places the individual stress experience within a social context and involves the person’s conception of both self and others.”
This definition points to burnout as a response to interpersonal stressors. It’s not defined as a characteristic of the person or a medical condition. Much of the public conversation about burnout focuses on individual experience and what individuals can do to prevent or remedy burnout on their own. We are missing the very important placement of burnout within the social context, particularly the interpersonal context.
We can also notice that Maslach and Leiter refer to chronic interpersonal stressors. We can learn about what people experience as an interpersonal stressor on the job. Leaders can get truly curious about the everyday interpersonal experiences that are stressful and depleting for people in their organizational context. When we really look to see what kind of experience people are having, we can start to connect the dots about how these particular everyday experiences may wind up being ongoing stressors and risk burnout.
Using this definition, we can ask some questions: In what ways do the everyday conditions of our organization create the kind of chronic interpersonal stressors that lead to burnout? Can we talk about these dynamics in generative and curious ways? And, how can we co-design a better workplace experience focused on sustainable productivity?
Too many workplaces are doing a brilliant job of creating the conditions for burnout. Here are five signs to keep an eye out for.
Overwork: For many, the burnout equation seems deceptively simple: too much work leads to burnout. In fact, that is one of the metrics that studies like those from Moodle and Quantum are measuring. Conventional wisdom ties burnout to a broad definition of overwork. The demands are complex, the pace is hectic and the weekends are too short. It’s true that many jobs have been recrafted as a result of the pandemic and other employment fluctuations. My clients and former students report that jobs have been reshaped with more and new facets. The clash between home and work demands was a visible crisis during the official span of the pandemic, but overwork continues to be a factor and we haven’t fully recalibrated or figured out how to shape our work in response.
The line between home and work eroded and — while we seem to be back at work — the line about when and where work gets done by whom and where is still quite confusing for many. As a result, even high achievers and stellar performers struggle to get their job done in the normal cadence of their day and feel under pressure to get the work done without speaking up about their overwhelm. Most of us need to reevaluate the scope of job expectations in a concrete, technical way. I am a fan of job crafting as a useful intervention in this arena. However, updating job descriptions and hacking daily routines to include individual talents and passion isn’t a whole solution.
The “too much work” narrative is overly simple and insufficient to describe what’s really happening. It’s not unusual for important work to have periods of demand that are important for the outcomes — it’s part of the package. Let’s not make that wrong. While overwork can produce exhaustion and require recovery, the conditions for burnout develop as a response to prolonged interpersonal stress. Overwork does not define or fully explain burnout — which is more than exhaustion. Where overwork really gets worrisome is when people do not feel psychologically safe enough to effectively address the impact of their work.
This may be an odd thing to say: I’m not really sure that overwork is the problem. Since I’ve already told you that I err on this side of the equation, you may decide that I am an unreliable narrator here and I can see that. However, I am worried that our simple narrative of overwork is lacking. I have seen too many examples of people of all ages who are not working very hard and who are burned out anyway. Their state emerged not from work exhaustion after hard work well done, but from a combination of toxic work conditions, chronic loneliness, ineffective recovery mechanisms and terrible workplace discussability that lack acknowledgement of these experiences as work-relevant.
That said, nothing on this list stands alone. Workplace thriving takes place in an interdependent ecosystem. We tend to like a simple story with obvious actions that we can take to solve the problem. I’m afraid burnout may not comply with our preferences for a simple story and easy answers. We’ve got to wrestle with this one, and pay attention to emergent learning as we go. The new face of work demands, the new shape of work, the expectations of the younger generations, the agitated populace in most countries, our pace of work, the overwhelm of available information without a clear source of truth, the political tension, the lack of everyday patterns of seeing and knowing your colleagues, are all incredibly complex problems. We have a lot to learn about how to understand and produce thriving for business and stakeholders in these changing times.
Let’s think through some of the other factors to look out for.
Toxicity: A quick route to burnout comes from a workplace norm of continual toxic exchanges including shaming, blaming, undercutting, inauthentic and misplaced toxic positivity, gaslighting and contempt. Expressions of contempt down-regulate the immune systems of the people on the receiving end, and yet there are whole industries where these behaviors are commonplace. It’s not okay to fry people’s immune systems, then gaslight them by acting as if it’s their fault. We need to be able to recognize, name and interrupt toxic dynamics. We need to raise our basic standards for how we treat people in the workplace. When leaders fail to interrupt this cycle, employees tend to assume that the leaders (and organization) condone the toxicity, especially if people with power in the system are not held accountable. Creating a culture of healthy everyday exchanges is a leadership responsibility, but formal and informal leaders cannot do this alone. This kind of environment has to be co-created and maintained by group dynamics and norms.
Disengagement. Many people feel not only unknown and unseen at work, but also fear being visible because they are reluctant to take an interpersonal risk to expose themselves to criticism and evaluation. Fear at work is an everyday experience. I recommend Amy Edmondsun’s book The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. As her research shows — and I have witnessed countless times — fear leads people to stay quiet, avoid calling attention to themselves and get work done under the radar by limiting themselves to transactional contributions. Disengaged employees may be trying to protect themselves through distance and avoidance.
Withdrawal, withholding and avoidance probably begin for good reasons, including the undiscussability of overwork and toxic interactions mentioned above. Sometimes people react to difficulty by putting up walls of self-protection that don’t play out well. For example, they perform the minimal acceptable requirement on projects and deliverables. To protect themselves, they draw what they perceive to be cleaner boundaries, but often without discussion. This kind of withholding of effort and voice has an impact both on the employee and on the team dynamic. When we respond to ongoing stressors by chronic shielding and distance, we actually wind up caring less. We are not refueling the tank, and work becomes depleting in an ongoing chronic way. That’s a contributor to burnout.
Caring about something is enlivening. Being genuinely interested in what we’re doing is part of how we avoid burnout. If people are mired in boredom, frustration or resentment, they cannot experience that reinforcing energy of interest and absorption. Though it may seem risky to care, caring may also buffer us from burnout when we dare to be interested and invested in what we’re doing. Even though disengagement habits emerge from valid reasons, it can end up working against the process.
And it is possible to care and be invested and still burn out. I know a lot of executives who care about their work like their life depended on it — and they still burned out. In many of these contexts, part of the burnout was about investment and caring that didn’t get negotiated into workable efforts and shared purpose and accountability in the team, combined with feeling unseen and alone and perhaps doomed to these dynamics as part of the fabric of work. In a 2018 study by researchers at Yale University and the University of Leipzig, Germany, which focused on detailed narratives from a representative sample of the U.S. workforce, the authors concluded: “nearly half of all employees were moderately to highly engaged in their work but also exhausted and ready to leave their organizations. This should give managers much to think about. Meeting the needs of these employees can support employees’ wellbeing, as well as organizational productivity. Understanding the profiles of engagement and burnout may help supervisors and organizational leaders to identify employees who are motivated but also at risk for burnout and turnover, and in turn address the employees needs to make sure they continue to thrive and contribute to their organization’s productivity.”
Disconnection: Not only do people self-protect by disengaging from work visibility, but they also disconnect from work interactions. When other people on the team are self-protecting in the same way, this creates even further disconnection. I have seen from many years of working with people and groups that disengagement breeds disengagement. The more people shield from caring and from investment in the work, the more they become shielded from the caring and investment of others. Ironically, this distance from others creates a disconnection that can create more, not less interpersonal risk. We wind up being less able to find each other and connect. If interest drives individual investment, joint interest is deeply bonding in the workplace. We’re not only there because we care, but we’re there with other people who care and whom we care about. This kind of erosion of relationship and connection with others in your setting promotes disconnection that further wears people down and removes the buffer that connection offers.
Norms: Work is a social context where people are generally looking to fit into the way things are done, whether those norms are explicit or implicit. I would get particularly worried about burnout in workplaces that lack shared meaning, or where there is little sense of connection or where people don’t feel like they can unleash their potential.
If people can’t find meaning in work, or can’t find some sense of connection to others in the workplace, or work doesn’t grow people, it can end up with a pretty transactional spirit. Everybody is just putting in what is expected of them. It might become normative to talk more about the weekend or things outside of work than it is to talk enthusiastically about the work we’re doing together. We’ve created a norm of disengagement, disinterest and being checked out of work. We end up with a “clocking in” mentality that depletes us further.
This is the group dynamic version of burnout. Everybody comes in with a little bit less than they did the last time, and it just keeps getting more and more constrained in the smaller world of everyday norms. The system itself needs some vibrancy. But it’s often not safe to talk openly about this. If we can’t talk about our work with a sense of passion or broach tensions between people, we lose access to other resources that interrupt burnout. Perhaps especially when combined with overwork, toxicity, disengagement and collective disconnection, these kinds of norms may set an environment ripe for the grip of chronic interpersonal stressors.
These warning signals operate on at least three levels: in the self, in between people and in the group dynamic. The cumulative effect of ongoing exposure to these factors is the danger zone. Humans can only sustain meaningless, repetitive action without purpose for so long. This is how we’re actually very different from AI. Praise to AI for any incoming reprieve from meaningless human tasks, and praise to humanity for actually caring. We can’t get out of being human that way. We do, however, have agency and choice about creating conditions that work for humans to thrive at work.
How do you personally balance the need to drive results with the need to ensure employee well-being?
I’m not sure that we can ensure employee well-being, or that it’s even appropriate to try. By this, I mean that personal well-being is just that: personal. It’s not necessarily the business — nor responsibility — of the company. What is the business of the company and what work does impact is the ability for the employees to contribute and thrive. I’m pretty sure there is considerable confusion out there these days about who is responsible for what. I don’t think that I have all the answers, but I am pretty uncomfortable with a kind of intrusive, over the line, “Father knows best” patriarchal attitude of the employer. To be sure, there should be every effort to make sure that people are not harmed by work equipment, conditions of work or preventable work duress including mismanagement and abuse. But there is a line wherein employee personal well-being is simply the domain of the person.
With that caveat, I understand where the question is coming from. Organizations have an impact on employees’ ability to thrive, and that includes the concept of well-being. Being responsible for impact makes sense to me as a fundamental tenet of leadership. When I think about how I personally balance the need to drive results with being responsible for my impact on my employees, the question feels like a bit of a paradox. I certainly recognize my inclination to drive people hard — something I didn’t realize early on when I just thought we were doing a good job. Over time, I learned to better recognize the impact I have on others and to be more responsible for that impact.
Because I usually sit at the top of teams that I run, I experience my power differently than my team may experience their power. I have a sense of choice. I might be driving myself hard too, but my own misjudgments are my own issue. And I have a lot of choice about the way that I work. So, if I decide to get up at three o’clock in the morning and work, that feels good as my choice. If I send out 3:00 am emails to other people, they may not experience that as a choice. Being aware of the impact of our asks is part of the ongoing learning. I try to stay open to that kind of learning, especially when I don’t feel like it because I am busy, or it involves hard conversations or I’m just not in the mood.
The paradox is that, in some domains, high standards are not that negotiable with me so there is an ongoing tension to navigate between driving for results and supporting human thriving. I want to keep high standards, and create conditions where people thrive. I am committed to being able to talk with them about that. I also can’t make people well. All I can do is create the conditions where they’re clear that they have the space and resources to take care of themselves, including talking with me about what’s too much and what’s too little, what’s engaging and what’s not bringing out the best of them. A lot of this gets balanced out by a third pathway of acknowledging both realities at the same time. That the work is demanding and we really care, and we need to promote thriving to sustain our work. Rather than just avoiding the negatives, can we also maximize the positives? I find that works best when we can see and discuss what people are experiencing and co-create a path that works. This can be the hardest part of work, even for those of us who spend our time as process experts in this domain.
I’m advocating for building the kind of relationship quality, group norms and psychological safety where you can navigate this tension of driving results and managing well-being through communication with employees and colleagues. An environment that can build and rebuild psychological safety is an environment where people have explicit and implicit permission to be real in conversations about the impact of pace and volume and group dynamics. This condition is foundational to being able to balance the inherent tensions between work demands and human well-being.
What role does communication play in creating a burnout-free workplace, and how can leaders foster open dialogue about mental health and work-life balance?
This question naturally follows my last response about co-creating the conditions for sustainable productivity. What is communication in this case? I’m not talking about unilateral transfer of information. Widely shared posts may communicate values and give people a picture of what is happening, but they are usually unilateral — communication in one direction. Co-creating and co-designing workplace experience requires real communication — mutual communication that involves an exchange in both directions. To navigate the dynamics of workplaces that can build and maintain conditions of sustainable productivity usually requires a learning culture. Since working against burnout in our workplaces is going to be an ongoing process, we cannot rely on simple fixes and hope that the problem will go away. We will need to keep an eye out for whether the conditions are supporting thriving or supporting the conditions for burnout. And it will be difficult to do that without communicating about human experience. I’m talking about communication where both parties are curious, listening deeply to understand the experience of others, sharing their own experience and asking to learn more.
Some of these basic communication behaviors require learning for leaders and teams to get out of norms with new skills and choices: curiosity instead of accusation; kindness instead of blame; self-disclosure instead of hiding.
I’ve heard a lot of managers talk about feeling stressed because they genuinely care about their employees. For good managers who care deeply about their teams, employee stress is part of their own strain. Since there is so much agitation and people seem so exhausted, they often feel at a loss — they are just not sure what they can do about people who are feeling anxious and not doing well and languishing. It’s great to make wellness resources available, for example, that people can access. No one seems to be convinced that unlimited PTO is the answer or even that more focus on weekends and OOO and weekends is helping much.
If your organization only has top-down communication, you are missing a huge opportunity to understand what is happening with everyone’s work and the end product. This is the domain that I consider everyday leadership. At any given moment, you’re probably having an impact on others. If we accept my proposition that a good amount of burnout is bred by disconnection from self, others and purpose — individually, interpersonally, and at the group level — it’s imperative to create moments of impact that feel enlivening, that build connection, that help people feel seen and heard and safe enough to risk saying what matters to them.
What is your take on traditional corporate norms, like long working hours and “always-on” availability? Are these practices outdated, or do they still have a place in certain industries?
Though I am seeing a drastic reduction in weekend and evening emails, I don’t have much judgment about these typical practices in themselves because they vary by company and industry for good reasons. I do worry when there does not seem to be any choice or agency around controlling pace or push. There should be times of big push and times that are calmer, but a lot of places have lost sight of pace variation. I get most worried when there are norms that are suboptimal or damaging with little awareness of the cost or little ability to impact the dynamic.
I’m concerned and amazed at the creativity and commitment around activity monitors like Hubstaff or ActivTrak, which are designed to provide visibility into activity and productivity patterns of remote workers. On the one hand, we have stressed managers trying to show proof of work out of a disengaged workforce. On the other hand, we have quite crafty employee approaches for jamming monitors and automatic refresh techniques to appear actively engaged while being monitored. I’ve heard a few good stories of people who feel validated for all the time and effort they put in that had previously gone unnoticed. But most of the stories seem to be undermining confidence, connection and purpose-based systems of accountability. I’d love to hear from people who have experience using these systems wisely to support sustainable productivity and help managers and employees alike in this complex dance of accountability.
In general, I am interested in the impact of the norms and whether companies, teams and leaders can change when they wish to do so. When we look at norms like these, it’s important to ask the question: is this enlivening or depleting? Is this what we want? Are we able to change it? The answer may look different for different stakeholders, so it’s important to get diverse perspectives. I want to hold onto what works and see if we can let go of what is not effective even if we think it should work. I don’t think we know yet how the productivity monitors are going to play out when it comes to burnout and engagement dynamics.
Given the prevalence and cost of burnout, it makes sense to learn about the risk and cost of burnout for a broad set of stakeholders. When companies make long hours and “always on” a pattern that can’t be interrupted, ask your team and yourself: how are our working hours working for us? Are we actually getting stuff done and creating a thriving workplace? How are we doing on thriving and employee retention? Can we act effectively on early warning signals of burnout dynamics? Do we respect recovery from burnout as a sign of high performance? If we can look at these questions, perhaps we can learn our way forward.
Ok, let’s dig into actionable strategies. Based on your experience and research, can you share “5 Ways to Build a Burnout-Free Workplace Culture”? If you can, please include examples or stories for each.
What do you say to skeptics who believe that creating a burnout-free culture may come at the cost of productivity or profits?
That’s real, especially when we think in short time horizons and focus on putting out fires today. When we think a little further out, losing employee productivity to burnout and employee exit are also costly. So, there needs to be a way to think about learning to address the conditions for sustainable productivity while still running the business.
The classic tension between time orientation — get results now — versus developing capacity for the future is a polarity that leaders are constantly facing. We know that most leaders and companies err on the side of privileging immediate results but one cannot entirely abandon developing capacity for tomorrow without consequence.
Can you share a real-world example of a team or organization where prioritizing employee well-being led to unexpected or exceptional results?
I’ll use a metaphor first from the public health world. There is a continuum from health promotion to prevention to addressing individual cases to addressing systemic causes. We can approach burnout in the same way. If you’re going to wait until a significant percentage of your employee population is burned out, it’s going to be a very hard thing to fix. That is like, for example, not immunizing your entire population and then thinking that only once we have high enough levels of disease that there’s evidence of a problem. If we don’t inoculate or act until then, it may be too late. It will require Herculean efforts. That is a serious risk for many organizations in regard to burnout. Promoting well-being and honest dialogue is a type of prevention.
I’m always taken with a team or organization that makes credible commitments to employee thriving and well-being and which employees believe in and take advantage of. I’ve worked with companies who love the 4-day work week or a similar departure from the 5 day/9–5 schedule. I know of many companies that honor (or try to honor) the no-meeting Fridays. I love the presence of a great health plan and wellness facilities.
Despite being on course to see $94.6 billion in global annual company wellness by 2026, wellness scores and burnout scores continue to move in the wrong direction. On the one hand, too few people utilize these options. But I think the challenge is fundamentally deeper. As I have tried to emphasize in this article, the source of burnout is less individual than it is part and parcel of our social context and interactions. The chronic stressors live in the unhealthy waters of the space between us and how people experience themselves in that space. As far as I am concerned, the group is stronger than the individual, so when the challenges live in the group dynamic, the group dynamic will triumph and individual efforts will be insufficient to combat the larger story. So, to answer the question more broadly, I am interested in and impressed by companies that can align organizational structures, processes and norms in such a way that the individuals thrive and vice versa: that the company thrives when their employees thrive. I think this is possible and worthwhile even though there are many points of tension to work through and ongoing wise navigation to get there.
How can leaders in high-pressure industries (like tech, finance, or healthcare) realistically apply these principles without falling behind on deadlines or performance goals?
We’ve known for a long time that a grind mindset prevents real development, which sounds like a paradox. If you only have short-term urgent focus on deadlines and performance goals for this quarter, you’re not thinking about learning and culture in a way that serves you long-term. An important aspect of leadership in these industries and others includes the capacity to manage paradox.
I spend a lot of time with clients and students building the capacity to develop the kind of wisdom and presence to manage paradox of the sort you are asking about. It is the central aspect of leading today that hasn’t quite made its way into our concepts of leadership. So, the demand for wisdom and self-reflection and transforming into a person who can face these kinds of tensions with enthusiasm comes as a surprise if we still think of leadership in conventional ways. Some of the demand of leaders today asks us to let our leadership demands grow us. My podcast is called Learning Through Experience, partly to acknowledge how much work and especially leadership can be a welcome learning experience.
Jennifer Garvey Berger recently released a second edition of Changing on the Job. She has written brilliantly about how the most meaningful transitions happen when people recognize that their old ways of thinking no longer serve them. Managing the complex tension of fighting burnout while pushing performance goals is just the kind of everyday tension that may require personal change to be able to navigate leadership.
What trends or innovations are you seeing in workplace well-being and culture that excite you the most?
I’m excited about the promise of AI to help us be wiser about human well-being. Here is some good news about the impact of having AI on your team:
Positive emotions increase and negative emotions decrease after working with AI compared to teams and individuals who did not have AI access.
“People using AI reported significantly higher levels of positive emotions (excitement, energy, and enthusiasm) compared to those working without AI. They also reported lower levels of negative emotions like anxiety and frustration. Individuals working with AI had emotional experiences comparable to or better than those working in human teams.” From One Useful Thing: The Cybernetic Teammate
In your opinion, how does a burnout-free culture impact a company’s long-term success, its relationships with employees, and even its customers
So much of what it would take to be a burnout free culture is the stuff of being a great company, including being a great place to work and to work with. I tend to think that at some level, “how we do anything is how we do everything”. If you can create and maintain conditions where humans reliably thrive in interaction with your company from many vantage points, these patterns of interaction may spread across internal and external stakeholders. It’s not just a set of strategies and action plans; it runs deeper to who you are and how you show up. It’s worth being the kind of person and company that people believe in.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement to help more companies embrace burnout-free workplace cultures, what would it be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
In my work at Yale and beyond, I ask people to attune to the impact of the way they lead and interact every day. There are ways in which our lack of attention to the everyday interpersonal and group interactions is exacting a cost on individuals, on work groups, on companies and on society. We do not have widely shared norms of paying attention to the way we impact each other’s experience of work. We tend to over index on performance outcomes at the cost of creating a sustainable and enlivening experience of work. This is a neglected zone of leadership that presents a major opportunity for us to improve companies. Our everyday interactions have consequences, and we can improve our level of awareness, responsibility and capability for creating what we want. It could be that your most important leadership move is to listen deeply in your next conversation. We have to get better at everyday leadership that holds space for humans to thrive.
How can our readers further follow you online?
You can listen and subscribe to my podcast, Learning through Experience. And you can explore my work at Yale or find me on LinkedIn.
This was great. Thank you so much for the time you spent sharing with us.
About the Interviewer: Chad Silverstein is a seasoned entrepreneur with 25+ years of experience as a Founder and CEO. While attending Ohio State University, he launched his first company, Choice Recovery, Inc., a nationally recognized healthcare collection agency — twice ranked the #1 workplace in Ohio. In 2013, he founded [re]start, helping thousands of people find meaningful career opportunities. After selling both companies, Chad shifted his focus to his true passion — leadership. Today, he coaches founders and CEOs at Built to Lead, advises Authority Magazine’s Thought Leader Incubator.
Heidi Brooks of Yale School of Management On How the World’s Best Leaders Build Burnout-Free… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.