Why Leaders Stay Stuck and Burn Out

Too often, overwork is indicated as the cause of workplace burnout. But it’s not being overworked that’s necessarily always the culprit, but rather being under-purposed that leads to burnout.

When work becomes meaningless and without purpose. When the only reason to show up is to just keep going through the motions, honouring allegiance to continuing to do what’s always been done. Even if it’s out of sync with reality. And even if it’s detrimental to keep doing so.

Purposeless work is the unacknowledged blind spot that’s too often the real source of what gets labelled as “burnout”.

Peter Bernstein was an economist, historian, investment thinker, and is widely known as one of the wisest and most philosophical people on Wall Street. He’s renowned for two of his many financial investment books, “Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk” and “The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession”. About five years before he died at age 90 in 2009, he was interviewed in the Wall Street Journal.

Some of his investment wisdom in that interview mirrors a major underlying cause I see afflicting leaders in today’s workplace burnout.

The riskiest moment is when you're right. That's when you're in the most trouble, because you tend to overstay the good decisions. Once you've been right for long enough, you don't even consider reducing your winning positions. They feel so good, you can't even face that. As incredible as it sounds, that makes you comfortable with not being diversified. So, in many ways, it's better not to be so right… There is a tendency... for people to expect the status quo either to last indefinitely or to provide advance signals for shifting strategies. The world does not work like that. Surprise and shock are endemic to the system, and people should always arrange their affairs so that they will survive such events…You don't know what'll happen next, and there will be no signal to tell you what to do. You must prepare for a wider variety of outcomes.

Organizations are set up to reward and incentivize keeping the “winning” going on for as long as possible, ideally indefinitely
Organizations, whether intended or not, depend on being structured and basing their identity on the status quo not changing. Which is why organizations find it so hard to recognize and accept anything becoming different.

And to keep the status quo going at all costs, its leaders are obliged to be blind and numb to change. As Upton Sinclair so succinctly put it, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something [like change] when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

And so begins the downward spiral of purposelessness. Having to do, and be, things that push aside what is meaningful.

And over time, day-by-day, the inconsequential consuming all that matters, and the human soul withers. And burn out becomes the accepted normal operating environment.

Part of this also comes from organizational life only ever being about the constant battle with resource constraints
But the assumptions of scarcity, of there never being enough, don’t carry over into matters of the self.

This excerpt from David Heinemeier Hansson’s December 13, 2021 article “I won't let you pay me for my open source” (he’s the co-founder of Basecamp, and the creator of Ruby on Rails) explains what I mean.

This is the snowball effect of finding meaning at work. You don’t just have a fixed pie of productivity to divide amongst your pursuits…The pie expands and shrinks depending on your motivation and your mood. When one area of your life is contracting, it often shrinks all the other areas along with it. And when one part of your life is expanding, others often follow too…by either changing your circumstances or your outlook, you can create or even invent meaning, which in turn then becomes self-sustaining because it feeds on itself. Doing meaningful work provides for a meaningful life which inspires more meaningful work.

You don’t have to let staying stuck with meaningless purposeless work bring you to the brink of burnout.
Start turning things around by being willing to first allow yourself to consider acknowledging how meaningless and purposeless your work has become.

And then let yourself feel how uncomfortable it might be to recognize that.

Only then can meaningful new ways for how you choose to spend your time begin to emerge and become evident for you to enjoy.