How to prevent burning out as a leader before you wave the white flag

Because those open loops, the checking in, the waking up at three in the morning, like, Oh God, where’s the status of this? Or are we going to do this thing right? Or we have that big meeting on Monday, and I just don’t know. These racing thoughts create an inability for you to step away, for you to rest, for you to let go, for you to kind of get back to a lower baseline in your nervous system.

And when you’re always operated in like heightened mode, then you’re teetering on burnout. Welcome to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where you get a masterclass in managing your team with ease in 15 minutes or less. I’m Lia Garvin, your host and team operations consultant. Through this show and my programs with small businesses and corporate teams, I condense a decade of experience driving team operations in some of the most influential companies in tech into strategies to save you time, money, and most of all, stress.

Doesn’t matter if you’re a business owner who realized that running a team isn’t as easy as you thought it would be. Are a new manager learning the ropes? Or a seasoned manager ready to up their game? Everyone is welcome to hang out with Managing Made Simple. From conflicts to feedback to delegating and more, we leave no stone unturned when it comes to what makes us love managing, kind of hate it, and everything in between. Let’s go.

Welcome back to the show. If you are feeling burned out, you are not alone because everybody’s feeling that way right now, especially when you’re dealing with people because people are hard. And that’s why on the show, I’m all about making managing easier. It is hard enough to deal with people every day. But when we’re the manager, the team leader, the business owner, and everybody’s coming to us to solve every single problem, personal and professional sometimes, this is when we kind of reach that boiling point where we burn out.

And that is what we’re talking about today. But before I dive in, I got to ask again, if you love this show, please leave a review. Hop on to Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you listen. Leave a quick review. It takes 20 seconds and it helps bring the show to more people. If you haven’t already, go ahead, pause, scroll down, do what you got to do and come on back because that is how we help making managing easier for everyone.

And what better topic to talk about today than how to not burn out when we’re managing people. And this is something that it’s not only something I’m observing, working with my clients, working with corporate managers or small business owners and everybody in between, but there is more and more data coming out of the Gallup organization, McKinsey and others, that managers are burning out at a high rate. Our employees are demanding more of us. They want us to be answering questions maybe we don’t feel equipped to answer.

We’re wrestling with things like flexibility. We have a multi-generational workforce with more generations than ever. We’re dealing with just different communication styles around feedback, different motivations around pay and incentives. It is complicated. And when you’re a team leader, it can feel like you got to navigate all this stuff by yourself. It can feel like too much, honestly. And a lot of times, I know I’ve been there where I said, I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to manage anymore.

Because especially in the corporate world, a lot of times we are managing and we have all our individual contributor responsibilities we had been doing. Then we get asked to manage people. We don’t get any of the original stuff taken off our plate. So now we’re doing two jobs for the price of one. Who’s familiar with that? Now, if you’re a business owner and you start managing people, hiring, and you don’t have someone yet to be managing folks for you, you’re also doing two jobs.

You’re doing the strategy, you’re doing the vision, and you’re also being the people manager. And everybody I talk to, no matter what world you’re in where you’re managing folks, we’re all feeling the heat. We’re feeling a lot of pressure. And so I wanted to share three things today that can help relieve a little bit of this, start giving you that space. Because we all know it. When you’re feeling burnt out, one vacation day doesn’t do anything.

It doesn’t help. And I got to say, I have been saying this when they started giving these bonus vacation days when I was in the corporate world. Like, cool, thanks. Or having a happy hour, team lunch. What connection does that have with curing burnout? Zero. Zero percent connection. Because what cures burnout is feeling less overwhelmed, feeling less hopeless, feeling less like, I can’t deal with all this. So the kinds of things that help with burnout are actually removing stuff that’s causing all that pressure.

And so there’s three places that I think are particularly helpful for managers, team leaders, business owners, whatever it is, whoever’s overseeing some people to look at that will help relieve some of this. Number one is boundaries. We all have to set boundaries. I’ve talked about it on the show. As a manager, when you are taking on the responsibility of overseeing people’s careers, of sometimes when you’re in a close-knit team, you can become in that we’re all friends.

It’s almost family. You kind of become this parental figure in some cases. And everyone’s coming to you for what’s kind of like work-related, but also there’s a lot of personal like, well, I have this issue with my roommate or I need a place to live. Can you help me figure this out? Or this is going on with my mom, what should I do? Or my boyfriend or my girlfriend or my, you know, I’m struggling with this thing and I’m not motivated.

So can I change my deadlines? Like all of it sort of comes together because we are whole people with whole lives and all this stuff going on. But that’s coming to you. And I’m not saying that people shouldn’t bring their authentic selves into work, but I’m just saying this is what’s going to be showing up for you. You’re going to be a lot. It can be a lot as a manager. And that’s where boundaries come into play.

I’m not saying to say, nope, we only talk about work here, no people stuff because that’s BS and we’re all people. But I’m saying to figure out what is your way in which you set an energetic and an actual physical boundary. So physical boundaries are maybe saying, you know, after six o’clock, I don’t, you know, I’m off email. I don’t respond to text messages or on the weekends. And you start to create some constraints or, you know, whatever it looks like where you, you know, I’m available between these hours.

I’m setting a container for when I can get involved in this. An energetic boundary is you kind of putting a force field around yourself to say, Hey, when my team brings me this, I’m not going to get sucked in. I’m going to be empathetic. I’m going to be understanding, be compassionate. I’m going to care. I’m going to help them solve this maybe, but I’m not going to get sucked in as if it’s happening to me as if, you know, now I am worrying about this thing all night because I have a lot of other things going on.

It doesn’t mean you don’t care. It means you are maintaining you and what you need and your boundary for yourself to move forward. We have to do this with our friends. We have to do this with our family. We sure have to do with our team members that we maintain that when someone is coming with their stuff, we don’t get pulled in energetically and we can still hold the energetic levels that we want to. When we’re setting boundaries, it actually comes in multiple forms.

And I say this because I think some of us can get sucked in this thing where, yeah, we say, okay, no emails after six, we don’t get pinged on the weekends, but a team member brings us some challenge they’re having in their lives. And we feel personally responsible for solving it. And we’re up all night and we’re looking for solutions. Maybe they, yeah, they need, you know, they’re, they got evicted from their apartment and we’re looking on Craigslist all weekend and sending them ideas and feeling like, ah, I need to help them.

I, you know, I need to figure this out with them. And it’s like, maybe, but maybe not. And so I think figuring out what is your threshold where you can still function and do and deliver at your high level that you need to be delivering, understanding that your team member is not your child. And if they’re coming to you for things like they would go to for that parental figure or that best friend, and you’re finding, oh gosh, I’ve gotten in too deep, resetting and saying, hey, I think I’ve gotten a little bit too deep with a lot of this.

I care so much about you and I want to have you solve this, but here’s some of the things that I can get involved in. And here’s where I have to draw a little bit more of a boundary. And I, and I hope you understand that. And that’s okay to say. It’s not easy, but it’s okay to say. Do you want some hands-on support for all of the topics I talk about on this show? Like a team expert who has worked within tech giants like Apple and Google, as well as small businesses on hand to help you delegate and get out of the weeds, handle tough conversations with team members, plan your hiring strategy, and get your teams to help bring in more revenue?

Then it’s time to sign up for my Team Whisperer Consulting Sprint. For 90 days, you have me in your back pocket to help you navigate any and every issue happening on your team. DM me the word sprint on Instagram or email me at hello at leahgarvin.com and let’s build your unstoppable team. Now on this, the second thing that we’ve got to do that’s going to help prevent burnout is to set expectations, right? And we set expectations so that we can delegate and we can hand things off and we, and our team members know what success looks like.

But we also set expectations so we don’t always have to be checking in and worrying that there’s all these open loops and no one’s doing stuff right. Because those open loops, the checking in, the waking up at three in the morning, like, oh God, where’s the status of this? Or are they going to do this thing right? Or we have that big meeting on Monday and I just don’t know. These racing thoughts create an inability for you to step away, for you to rest, for you to let go, for you to kind of get back to a lower baseline in your nervous system.

And when you’re always operated in like heightened mode, then you’re teetering on burnout. So expectation setting isn’t only about job performance, which absolutely it is. It creates way better job performance and way higher performing teams and all the things. It’s also about you being able to take a deep breath that you have let something go. You’ve offloaded something fully. Okay. So our team members, they can’t read our minds. And so if we’re handing something off big or small, we have to explain, well, what are some of the nuances for how we do it or why it has to be this certain way?

Or where are the places that they really have open space to really think about how they solve themselves? We want to ask them, well, where, what questions they have, we want to be really clear. And when we set those expectations, we have to get in the self-management mode of saying, okay, I’ve let it go. It may not be exactly how I would do it. And that’s okay. It may not be, you know, exactly how I would say that thing.

And that’s okay. And we draw the distinction through expectations of when is it a deal breaker that it’s not done the way we would do it? And when is it just a preference? And that’s okay. Expectations give you a little space to let go. Now, the third thing, which ties right directly to this, is holding people accountable. When we’ve set those expectations, we stick to them. We say this thing’s got to be done by Friday, then it’s got to be done by Friday.

We set these, you know, parameters around what success looks like, and that’s what success looks like. That becomes the baseline. So accountability is the follow-up of expectations, and it creates an ownership mindset. So we ask people, hey, how would you solve this? What do you think? I’m trusting you to be the owner. Go for it. Run with it. Solve it. And then we check back in with them. So accountability creates an expectation setting, of course, creates the foundation for us to give feedback.

And when we give feedback and we ask for something to look different, we check back on it, and we make sure that it does look different or they’ve fixed whatever they got to fix. So accountability is the bow around all this stuff, because if people don’t feel personally accountable on your team, you are never going to be able to step away. Because you’re always going to know that, you know, in your business, and Gary Vaynerchuk talks about this all the time, no one’s ever going to care as much as you care, right?

You built this. This is your baby. If you’re a corporate leader, your team members also probably won’t care as much as you will because the stakes are lower for them. But they can care close to that. They can care a lot still. And that’s what we want to get, is by holding them accountable, by treating them as owners, by giving clear feedback, by setting expectations, by asking them how they would solve problems. They feel like owners.

So they start to bring that personal responsibility to the equation. And when something isn’t working quite right, they don’t just throw up their hands. They try to solve it. When they feel stuck, they don’t go to you and go, I don’t know. Here’s the problem. What should I do? They say, hey, I got stuck here. Here’s the challenge. Here’s a couple solutions I’m trying. What do you think? Do you have feedback for me? Right? They come proactively.

This is accountability. And when you start to see this, when you’ve created that flywheel of ownership and accountability and problem solving, oh my gosh, can you take a step back like nobody’s business? And then you can rest or work on strategy or do whatever you want. Because if people aren’t accountable, it doesn’t matter how awesome the vacation that you’re on is. You’re going to be checking that phone every five seconds because you know stuff’s hitting the fan.

When people feel personally accountable, you can take a one hour lunch and it feels like you’re in the most luxury spa in the world because it’s not about distance and space. It’s about not feeling that pressure cooker. Right? So the combination of setting those boundaries, especially when people are coming to you for personal things, it may look like an energetic boundary of saying, okay, how involved am I going to get? And where are we going to draw a line and say, hey, I really care about you.

I want to help you solve this. Here’s what I can offer. And here’s where I have to take a step back. Then it’s about setting those expectations so that we get what we want to see, knowing people can’t read our minds. And then the expectations help people step up as owners, which helps them be personally accountable. The whole thing works together. And when we have this, again, we don’t feel so hopeless. We don’t feel so overwhelmed.

We don’t feel like there’s no way out because everyone has a lot more clarity for how to get things done. People can do things without asking you every second. And that is where we get that relief. This one specifically, if you have any colleagues and friends who are managing teams or business owners and feel so close to burnout that are coming to you like, I don’t know how I can handle this anymore. Please share this episode with them because this is something that so many of us struggle with in silence.

And we’re feeling burned out. And a lot of times the first thing we say is, God, I think I might have to give this up. I think I might have to quit this team or stop being a manager or shut down this whole business because it is too much. And I want to offer people hope that when we do these things, we start to get a little reprieve and we start to see that there is a way forward.

So again, please share this with someone that is working through burnout as a manager, as a team leader, as a business owner, because I really think this is going to help give them a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel. All right. Thank you so much for listening. Put this stuff to work. Let me know how it goes and see you next time. That’s all I have for today. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where my goal is to demystify the job of people management so that together we can make the workplace somewhere everyone can thrive.

With that said, let’s spread the word. If you love this episode, please pass it along to someone who might benefit from it. See you next time.