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Feeling emotionally drained at work? Is your patience exhausted? Your energy low? If so, you’re showing clinical markers of burnout.
And you’re not alone. In a January 2024 mental health survey conducted by NAMI, more than half of all managers (54%) indicated that they had felt burned out during the past year because of their job. Among employees of all levels, 36% said their mental health had suffered due to work demands. Even folks in the C-suite are heading for the exits.
No one ever said leadership was easy. But in recent years, as with so many jobs, being a leader has, in fact, become harder. Leaders rush from meeting to meeting feeling like lunchroom attendants for an unruly junior high. With exponentially escalating business complexity; diminished civility; and intrusive, pervasive technological interruptions, you may feel like it’s barely possible to keep order, let alone lead employees on an inspiring journey.
It’s Not Your Imagination: Where Leadership Is Tougher
Four specific areas that most leaders care about have genuinely become more difficult in the past few years: hyping up their teams, getting to the truth, focusing on strategy, and staying sane themselves. But understanding how and why each of these leadership loads has become more difficult to carry can set you on the path to doing better.
1. Leader as Cheerleader: Hyping Up Your Team
Sometime in 2011, my boss brought me a chocolate muffin. I mention this not only because it was my introduction to the idea of servant leadership (thank you, Dave!) but also because it remains an excellent example of the simplicity of morale-building. You don’t have to hire a brass band and shoot off fireworks; you do have to say thank you, send a nice email, and offer a bit of chocolate at around 3:00 p.m. Consistently appreciate the humans around you. Be a mensch.
The basics of keeping your team energized haven’t changed. But the environment in which you’re doing so certainly has. Work in 2024 has been noisy. For instance, the average worker receives 121 emails a day — and that’s not counting instant messaging pings, texts, or, God forbid, phone calls. Let’s say that you, as their manager, send 10% of those emails. That’s still more than 100 messages a day that you didn’t send. Those messages could be morale-destroying, truly exciting, or anywhere in between — and don’t even get employees started on dealing with the oversharers and negativity-dispensers in group chat (and private group chats). You’re bringing a chocolate muffin into an environment akin to Times Square at high noon. It’s hard to be loud enough to get people’s attention, and the pressure to be authentic has never been higher.
What to do: First of all, don’t get knocked off your game. It’s tempting, in the face of so much cross-talk, to retreat behind a robotic facade and a series of irritatingly bland and distinctly corporate-flavored communications. Don’t do that. Continue your “ground game” for keeping the team’s spirits up, in a way that’s authentic to you. But adapt your approach to fight the clutter and the conflicting messages around you. Relentlessly join in the conversation wherever it occurs — and be punchy. A quick, funny GIF, a one-line email, or a two-minute conversation at someone’s desk can all be effective, if that’s where folks are listening. In general, think shorter, more frequent communication, varied across more channels. You can’t be everywhere, but you can make your personal warmth felt in bursts.
2. Leader as Detective: Getting to the Truth
Data-driven leadership was supposed to save the world — or at least bring us closer to a shared view of what was actually going on inside any given organization. No more turmoil: We had dashboards! The truth was going to be right at our fingertips, and every decision was going to be smarter as a result.
Instead, a proliferation of data of questionable quality, housed within a host of competing systems, now just confuses many people further. You could compare the current state of play to Akira Kurosawa’s classic 1950 film Rashomon — in which a terrible crime is described by four different narrators, none of whose accounts match.
Worse, though, the right comparison might not exist in the world of thrillers but rather in science fiction. Many organizations have enough data telling different stories that they qualify as a full-on metaverse — with different leaders living in different realities, with their own streams of data attached. That’s painful: Instead of starting every conversation from a shared understanding, you’re more at cross purposes than ever.
What to do: Think like a data scientist — not in the sense of learning to code or performing advanced analytics, but in the sense of asking better questions of information, in a structured and methodical way. Don’t be afraid to ask where data came from, what the gaps in a data set might be, or what kinds of analytics were performed to get to the numbers you’re seeing. Come in with a hypothesis and see if it proves out rather than just taking the numbers at face value. It’s slightly counterintuitive, but being a tougher data analyst makes you a better truth sleuth.
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Carolyn Geason-Beissel/MIT SMR | Getty Images
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