Refill Your Tank: How to Avoid Burnout and Create Safe Spaces for Healthy Teams
How far do you push yourself?
Do you know where your “low fuel” mark is, and do you honor it?
Or do you think, “I can get a few miles farther”?
I reflect on my earlier career, when as an individual contributor (IC), I had no issue with a one-hour commute, 4 AM onsite system changes, eight more hours of work, another hour home, short time with the family before they slept, gaming or hacking until the wee hours, and right back at it the next day. I thought I was holding it all together. I thought I was ok.
It took me years to understand that fueling myself with caffeine, carbs, and alcohol to compensate was also feeding depression, anger, physical illness, and neglect. When you run your car out of fuel, bad things happen.
It’s no different when you do this in your life.
It wasn’t until I moved into management that I learned about the importance of self-care, and it wasn’t through my own experience; it was in witnessing one of the staff crash and burn hard.
We will call him Peter. Peter was an excellent network engineer. Before I was a manager, I had worked alongside him, so I got to know his capabilities firsthand. When an opening on my team was available, I immediately contacted him, asking him to consider joining us, which he accepted. The work we needed to accomplish involved a heavy-lift replacement of a healthcare organization's geographically distributed network. With a 24x7 operation and literal lives on the line, every move had to be carefully planned for weeks, and the work had to be done at the lowest possible impact point, just after midnight.
While we made excellent progress on the upgrade, I wasn’t paying attention to the hours the team was putting in, especially Peter.
I didn’t know he was putting in 18-hour days, six days a week.
I discovered how hard Peter was driving himself only when all the bad habits he was using to push himself (much like those I adopted as an IC) caused him to crash out physically and emotionally, resulting in him needing two weeks off to recover.
When Peter returned to the office, we discussed how I could better assist in leading him to a better work/life balance.
From that day forward, I made oversight of the health and welfare of my team a critical pillar in my management toolset, and I applied what I was learning to myself. I ensured that if I asked a lot of my team, I was there to work alongside them to better gauge when to call time out.
I also kept a mental tally of “above and beyond” hours, so if an employee had worked more than 8 hours in a day toward 40 hours, I could cut them from work before they overextended.
Following that job, whenever I meet a new team, I declare early on that the health of the staff is of the utmost importance to me.
I welcome people to step forward and tell me when they feel burnout coming on, and I strongly encourage each person to use their paid time off time so they can reset.
Many still see empathy as a practice of the weak, but it is a core strength for a leader.
Empathy builds trust, and trust builds high-functioning teams.
A few years after the incident with Peter, while with a new organization, I had an employee burst into my office, yelling and swearing at me. Others in the office were in shock, but I was relatively unfazed. Since I had built trust with this team, this particular person had felt safe enough to share their challenge with mental health. I suspected this event was related, as it was entirely out of character for this person.
I encouraged the individual to leave their equipment and go home, to take a break for the rest of the week, and to call me on Monday.
I clarified that they were not in trouble or being punished and that their job was safe.
I was guessing that a break from work would help, but only when they called to thank me the following week was I sure I’d made the right call.
These are but two of many instances I’ve encountered where encouragement to step away, to detach from work, helped people to rest, relax, and reset. Likewise, I’ve learned to keep stepping back, pause, and trust things can run without me.
As I write this, I am on my first week off since starting a new job eight months ago. Earlier in my management days, I’d be secretly checking emails and dropping texts to my teams, but I learned that I need to model what I want the team to follow, so the work phone and laptop are off. I’ve designated a “Number One” to run the ship, and I enjoy doing nothing and feeling no pressure.
To summarize my thoughts on creating a safe space for a healthy team:
Be clear in your support of the work/life balance.
Know your team and what drives them, and learn when they push themselves too hard.
Encourage paid time off and have a “no contact” policy. When you are out, you are out!
Display empathy when someone is struggling. You can’t see everything a person is dealing with in life, but you can help them deal with one less thing: job stress.
Practice what you preach – take care today to be there tomorrow.
