Your team says everything’s fine, but are they really? In this episode, Gwen Bortner and Tonya Kubo dive deep into the often overlooked issue of team burnout, exploring misconceptions about capacity, subtle warning signs, and proactive steps CEOs can take to prevent it. They discuss the importance of setting boundaries, recognizing limitations as a business owner, and understanding the difference between “getting things done” and genuine productivity. Gwen and Tonya also share practical tips for measuring team capacity, addressing signs of burnout, and creating a supportive work environment. Tune in to gain valuable insights on how to build a sustainable and thriving business by taking care of your most valuable asset: your team.
—
Watch the episode here
Listen to the podcast here
The Warning Signs Of Team Burnout: Catch It Before It’s Too Late
In this episode, we’re going to put you a bit in the driver’s seat, Gwen, because this is a conversation I feel like you have to set up for us. While I have way too much experience on the topic, mine comes from the perspective of being a burned-out staffer, the one who goes through great personal and sometimes professional sacrifice to get the job done on time, under budget, no matter what, and no exceptions. You, on the other hand, have significant experience with the CEO’s perspective on the topic. Since the whole point of this show is to support women entrepreneurs in building sustainable success in their businesses, you get to take the lead here. Why don’t you kick us off?
Recognizing Team Burnout
There’s an interesting problem as a CEO starts to transition out of solopreneurship and particularly as they’re adding a number of people, either as subcontractors or employees. It’s not as big of a deal when it’s early stage and maybe they’re doing 1 or 2 hours a week. That’s usually not the issue. It’s when we’re getting to putting in significant hours in a week because of everybody’s capacity for what they believe they can do and how much time it takes. Very few people can line those two things up accurately. It’s like, “It’ll only take me five minutes to answer this email.” You look up and it’s been 45 minutes. You thought about this thing and then go, “I better research this.”
Also, on the opposite side like, “This is going to take me three hours to do.” When you sit down to do it, that takes 30 minutes. It’s not one way. It’s both ways. Being able to align those two things is hard. The only time that you get good at it, and when I say good, I don’t mean precise but relatively accurate, is when you’re constantly looking at it on an ongoing basis and paying attention to not only how long it takes but beforehand thinking, “How long do I think this is going to take?” It’s not just like, “I see this took me two hours.” It’s beforehand saying, “This should take me about two hours.” Pay attention to that over time.
The problem with the solopreneur is first they don’t ever track their time. All of the jobs and time is theirs. They don’t have a great instinct for how long things take. The other problem is often the nature of being an entrepreneur is they’re good at a number of things, at a level that is so far beyond what should be expected from most people but because it also is so intuitive, natural, and gifted kinds of skills, they also don’t realize how far off the mark they are.
It’s like grading on the curve. I don’t think they ever do that anymore. I’m so old. Maybe everyone’s like, “I have no idea what you’re even talking about.” Back in the day, sometimes colleges, particularly universities, would grade on the curve. If everybody did badly, there was still a percentage that got A’s, a percentage that got B’s, and a percentage that got C’s. It meant that everybody got some amount of grades. That was good if everyone was doing bad. It was not good if everyone was doing well.
If everyone was doing 90% or better on all of their tests and scores on the curve, the person who had 89% probably failed the class because someone also had to fail. This is that whole grading on the curve concept. When you’re the person that’s clear up to the top end where everybody else is in the middle but you think you’re in the middle, it looks like everybody else is failing, you expect them to be able to do better, or all of these things.
When you’re doing it on your own, it’s hard to see that. It’s intuitive. It makes sense. There’s no reason this should take that long because it’s never taken that long for you. You can’t even imagine. That’s the place where this starts. As you start bringing on people, you expect that they can perform at your same rate. When I’m talking rate, in this case, I’m talking about speed. “It takes me 1 hour so it should take you 1 hour.”
The other side of it is sometimes it’s like, “I’m going to give you an hour for this.” Ten minutes in, they’re like, “Why do I need an hour? I only need ten minutes.” It’s your other half of the thing that takes you long to do. When we start doing that, the problem is we expect so much on that front end of the natural and easy things for us. Most of the people we hire are not prepared to, for lack of a better term, talk back to us and say, “Are you crazy? There is no way I could get this done in this amount of time.” That’s rude and not appropriate in those cases.
Disbalance starts happening. The other half of it that becomes the bigger problem is the entrepreneur is used to making things fit wherever they want them to fit. “My husband has gone for the weekend. Therefore, I’m going to work late on Friday.” You know that in your head. You’ve compensated for all your work by saying, “I’m working late on Friday.” That’s fine when it’s you. Maybe it affects the dog, possibly if you’ve got children. It’s all yours.
The problem is when you started setting up those behaviors, what you’re doing when you’re having to give anything to anybody else is it’s like, “I need that done on Monday,” but you don’t get them the information they need until 8:00 on Friday. For you, it was fine because it’s only 30 minutes but there aren’t any official minutes between now and Monday morning.
You’re requiring them to work in traditional terms would be overtime hours, which they don’t get paid for most likely, depending on what their relationship is. This is where the burnout starts to happen. You don’t even think about it because it was like, “It’s not that big of a deal. It’s only 30 minutes.” It may only be 30 minutes but it’s about when you are asking for that 30 minutes. Is it during the 30 minutes that they had allocated for you? No. The fact was they had already allocated ten hours for you this week. They have already worked ten hours. You want to put 30 more minutes in there.
Burnout From The CEO’s Perspective
Let me back up from this. This is interesting. As always, you gave us ten key points in a fraction of the time. Jump in to correct me if I’m misrepresenting anything. Let’s start by assuming everybody has good intentions. That’s important.
There are people who are ridiculous but most people have good intentions.
The point is there is bound to be a listener or 50 who has worked for people who were true ogres. We all have at least one bad boss in our history. I want to start us from that shared understanding. The CEO has the best of intentions. The staff members all have the best of intentions. They want to do good work. The CEO wants to be a good boss or vendor, depending on how the arrangement is. Everybody can still want to do a plus-plus work for everyone involved. That still doesn’t mean that the CEO isn’t doing things likely unintentionally that are going to burn out their team without even realizing it.
What you pointed out, and this is very valuable, which is why I want to bring it up is a lot of it has to do with the CEO doing their job. When they are a solopreneur and they’re doing all the things and wearing all the hats there, they may be switching tasks 8 times in 1 hour, going back and forth, not even realizing it. They’re handling some personal and professional stuff and weaving it all in. They don’t even know the lines are blurred because initially, it’s all one job. This is what it takes to run a business.
They get so big that they can no longer solely run the business and they have to portion pieces off. While they might be able to portion off tasks, they aren’t naturally thinking of all the steps in advance of the task and how much time those steps take, not to mention how many years it took them to do the thing in the amount of time that they do it.
With that, they don’t realize maybe how much they’re handing off and what is reasonable to expect. Meanwhile, they have hired contractors who in many cases also have bad bosses in their history. Those of us come from corporate environments where you didn’t get to say no to the boss. Even when we’re in contractor arrangements, we don’t realize we can say no to the CEO. What I heard you talk about is the CEO is handing stuff off, not recognizing the impact of what they’re handing off. The staff member is taking things, not realizing that it’s on them to say, “I’m at my limit.” Is that fair?
That is fair. I appreciate you setting that baseline. Everybody has good intentions. The additional piece of it, particularly early on in the relationship as employee contractors, is we want to make a good first impression, which compounds the issue because we typically will say things to ourselves as the person receiving the work, “It’s going to take me longer. I’m not going to charge for it. I’m not going to own it. I know that this is me,” and all of those things. What that’s doing is it’s setting that up as the standard.
At the point that the person wants to push back, often it’s so far. It’s like, “It’s always only taking you two hours.” “No. It’s always taking me four hours but I’ve never charged you for it. I’ve done everything in my business plan based on it taking you two hours. Now, it’s taking you four, which is costing me twice as much. I can’t make any money on this thing that you tell me I haven’t been able to make any money on from the beginning but there was no way for me to know that. From the CEO’s perspective, you’re screwing my business.” It was because back to good intentions. We’re trying to do the right thing and owning it.
Early on, there always is a little bit of a learning curve. We can accept that but what often is the case using this example is the business owner said it should take 2 hours because it takes them 2 hours. Contractor employees person could be doing it for 5 more years and it’s always going to take them 4 hours because they are not the owner or CEO who has some natural gifts or whatever they are. Not that the person is inadequate for the job because that’s not what I’m saying. The other is so outstanding that they don’t understand that normal or good is 4 hours and 2 hours is freaking ridiculous. It’s the unicorn pace.
A practical example there would even be when you talked about email. I am somebody who can write a 2,000-word article with sources in probably 1 hour or 1.5 hours. It may not be perfect.
That would take me ten hours.
I could do it in an hour and a half. It would have to be proofed. It would be a rough draft. You would take ten hours. Meanwhile, for me to write an email that is compassionate and direct to the point for a specific purpose, not just to get to know you, I’ll spend an hour on that. I will spend an hour on an email with a vendor to talk about some hiccups in our processes. I don’t want to be offensive and I want to do this. I’m overthinking all the things but I also recognize that the written word doesn’t have tone. I’m super careful. On the other hand, I have written emails that are twice as effective in communicating the message in less than ten minutes.
It’s the same activity from a technical standpoint but a completely different skill. It’s part of the way our brain works.
What CEOs Get Wrong About Team Capacity
With that in mind, I want to get to what the heart of the matter is, which is what CEOs get wrong when they’re thinking about team capacity.
Here’s the first problem. They assume that if it’s getting done, it must be okay. If it’s getting done, the team must not be burning out, which is a giant assumptive leap that shouldn’t be there. Just because it’s getting done doesn’t mean that there’s not lots of gnashing of teeth, stress, or other things happening in the background. The other is entrepreneurs. We’ve talked about this before in previous episodes. Dan Sullivan, who owns Strategic Coach, has been coaching coaches for many years. He has this great saying, “Entrepreneurs love putting out fires and they’re good at it. Therefore, they are also often arsons arsonists.”
Entrepreneurs love putting out fires and they're really good at it. Therefore, they are also often arsonists. Share on XI probably butchered the saying but it’s close to the actual quote. The piece that the CEO doesn’t pay attention to is that they get a big dopamine hit for swooping in and saving the day, whatever that looks like, whether it’s getting that email out at the last minute, solving this problem, or working extra hours because that’s their version of addiction. I much rather work for twelve hours. There are all sorts of things that it manifests.
The problem is that when they start offloading the work, they have to offload that behavior onto that person as well. Generally, good contractors and employees don’t get a dopamine hit from that. That’s not positive for them. It creates burnout when they’re pushed against a deadline. One of our clients said, “I realized that I’m always asked to do things at the very last minute.” She’s a newer employee working with the CEO. She says, “I can always get it done but I don’t feel like I do my best work.”
She’s not thinking she’s heading toward burnout. Part of it is because she’s young and she hasn’t been having to do this for a long time yet. That screams burnout to me. Although she’s getting the work done and it’s an adequate job, no one’s complaining about the work. She’s feeling like she’s not doing a good job because instead of having 3 days to do a project, she’s only getting 1 day, which means she can’t do it in a day, let it sit for a day, proof it, and make sure there are no mistakes.
That’s one of the things. She’s like, “I know occasionally things go out with mistakes and that bothers me.” Those types of things are the subtle things that cause burnout. We always assume burnout is about working too many hours but it’s not about working too many hours. It’s about not enjoying our work and not getting satisfaction out of our work.
I would not define it that way. I’m glad you did.
The other will play into that but that’s also part of why you’re not getting satisfaction out of the work.
If the work is satisfying, then chances are you feel good about it. If you feel good about it, then it’s not depleting and it falls along that path, which makes sense. I thought you were going to bring up something else so I’ll bring it up. One of the things I see oftentimes in terms of capacity is I see that a lot of business owners assume that bodies equal capacity. That’s not always true.
I have met a lot of business owners who like to throw people at their problems. What I mean by that is with overwork and stress, they hire another person. In their mind is, “We were doing all of this with two people a year ago. Now, we’re doing all of this with six people. We’ve got to be doing fine. People can’t be burned out because we have six people.”
That goes back to the definition I gave. It isn’t about time capacity. It’s about satisfaction with work capacity. Another reason people get burned out is when there is someone on a team who is pulling the team down emotionally. They’re grumpy all the time and not helpful, all of those things. That has nothing to do with time. That’s to do with energy. You could add ten more people to the team but everyone would still be getting burned out.
Warning Signs Of Burnout
It’s because that person is such an energy drain. We’ve talked about a couple of misconceptions about team capacity. You didn’t say this explicitly so I’ll say it. The big one is your capacity and my capacity does not look the same. What you can do and enjoy doing in ten hours is going to be different from me, even if our roles are the same. People don’t necessarily have equal capacity. Sometimes capacity isn’t about what you can get done but about how good you feel about the finished product.
All of this when mistakenly appropriated, if I can use more jargon on this, possibly I’m sure I could, leads to burnout. Let’s back up from that. Let’s assume that I am a good person, Gwen. I love my people. I don’t want my people to be burned out. If you were to tell me my people were burned out, I would be grossly offended because if they were burnt out, they should have told me. I have a personal example of this but what I want to get to are the warning signs of burnout.
I left a company burnt to a crisp. During my exit interview, the CEO said, “What’s going on? You were doing this and that. We gave you a raise. We did this and that. What happened?” I was so burned out that I was quite direct. It was along the lines of, “What could we have done to keep you? Is there anything we could have done?” I said, “I ran through every scenario on how to keep me like double my salary, this and that. The fact is I was working so many hours to fulfill all the promises you were making that if you had even tripled my salary, I would have had no time to spend the money.”
Their follow-up statement, which was a request, was, “I hope we can work together again but can you make me this promise that if we ever work together again, you’ll give me a heads up before you get this burned out?” I was like, “Sure.” At the time, I was like, “I’m never working with you again.” I remember leaving that call thinking, “How interesting that you think I saw this train coming and chose not to say anything.”
That’s the biggest issue with burnout. There are some people who are super self-aware but 85% to 90% of us, and notice I used us because I’m in the same capacity, don’t see the burnout until we’re way into it. We don’t see the early signs of it. Where I think the piece that I use to manage it, and I’ll say this is me and I’m not sure if it’s true for everyone but we talked about this quite a bit, is having a clear understanding of what your boundaries are, why they’re there, how you’re using them, and holding them consistently makes a huge difference.
We don't see the burnout till we're way, way into it. Share on XIf you know what your boundaries are, you set your boundaries, and you’re clear about your boundaries, then it’s easy to identify when someone has crossed that boundary. It’s pretty easy to talk about at that moment in time. Using the very early example of, “I’m working late on Friday. This is only going to take you 30 minutes but I want it first thing Monday morning.” If you’re clear that you don’t work on the weekends, then the first email I get from you on Monday morning is, “I just saw this because as you know, I don’t work on the weekends.”
“Although I know that you need this first thing, I already have four hours of work booked. I will be able to get it to you by 2:00 but I will not be able to get this to you first thing in the morning. If that’s going to be a problem, you will need to do this and I would like to talk to you about this so this doesn’t happen again in the future.” That feels like a hard conversation but most people don’t know that they’ve done all the things that I said in that statement unless you say it to them.
That’s such a great example. I love the fact that you gave us a script even for establishing our boundaries to prevent burnout ourselves. How would you advise a CEO to recognize burnout in their people, realizing that a lot of people don’t come from a background where they feel like they can say those sorts of things to a CEO? It’s on the CEO’s shoulders to look at their team and see when they’re heading toward a bad path.
It’s listening for the tiny clues.
Give them to me.
A tiny clue would be, “I could have done a better job if. I wish I had more time.” When you’re a person who does a good job of apologizing, that means that they don’t think they’ve done the quality of work that the job deserves. “I’m sorry that.” Any of those things are some of the first things. If you start getting curious about those, dig into them and say, “Why don’t you think is a good job? I only have 1 day and I like to have 3 days.” That’s like, “I’m not giving them enough time. That’s creating burnout.”
You can’t ask them if they’re getting burned out because most of them won’t even know that they are. You have to ask, “Why is that a problem?” Work your way back and say, “This is a behavior that works for me but doesn’t work for my people.” Start making your adjustments to that and understand it. As soon as anyone is saying all of the apology things like, “I wish I could have done a better job. I’m sorry that,” especially when you feel like the work was good, that means there’s something on their side that’s making the work not feel satisfying.
Sometimes it may be simply a conversation about expectations to be able to say, “This is a ++ work to me. Spending three days on it may not have made sense.” You can have that conversation. I like that you’re offering some signs because most of us don’t know how to recognize these things in other people. While self-awareness is a big thing, it’s extra hard to be aware of other people’s cues. One of the things I look for when I’m working with a team to assess burnout is if somebody starts complaining about something that they’ve never complained about before.
While self-awareness is a big thing, it's extra hard to be aware of other people's cues. Share on XThat’s a great one. I love that.
Measuring Team Capacity
That tells me they had a long fuse. It’s about burning up. The thing that they’re complaining about is the thing that burned it up most likely and then figuring that out or somehow related. We’ve got some signs to recognize impending burnout and some great modeling of how to assert boundaries to people you work with. I know you’re not going to give me a formula, Gwen. You never do. I always want one but you never give me one. Do you have a way of maybe how, as a CEO, you could measure team capacity? Is there a way to know on the front end before they’re overextended?
It’s being aware. It’s hard to measure capacity. Part of it is helping them become aware of what their capacity is, which we talked about at the beginning. Ask questions like, “How long should this take?” Afterward, say, “How long did it take?” A lot of times, burnout is happening on the other side because in their mind this should take 2 hours and the problem is it always takes 2.5 hours. As long as no one’s saying, “How long do you think it should take and how long did it take,” and making them pay attention to it, they’re going to continue to allocate two hours to do this thing. In an 8-hour day, they can do 4 of them, which takes 10 hours.
They’re mad at you because they’re working way more than they’re supposed to be allocated for. That’s not true. You’re doing that because you said it’s going to take two so I said, “Great, you can get four done. I’m going to assign you four.” The reality is you can get three done. As long as you keep telling me it’s going to take 2 hours, I’m going to keep assuming it takes 2 hours. Help them be aware. Very few people are highly conscious about time. It goes both ways. It’s the other side of, “I can only get four done in a day.” It’s not even lunchtime yet and you’ve got all four done. That’s not right. It’s both sides of the equation more that we pay attention to how long we think it takes and how long it does take.
The other thing that allows us to know is, “This is out of normal.” You can start saying, “Why is this out of normal?” “Maybe it’s out of normal because I’ve had a lot going on in my life. I’m stressed out. That’s why it’s out of normal.” Maybe it’s out of normal because there’s something unique about this and maybe we need to pay attention to that. Maybe this is the new normal. It’s about helping people be very conscientious about how they’re using their time. I’m not saying to make them keep track of every little single solitary thing all the time. We did a task study and there were a couple of insights that each one of us had from that task study that without looking at the details, we would have never seen.
Setting Sustainable Workload Standards
Back to the topic of every CEO wants to be a good boss. Nobody wants to be a tyrant. Do you have any advice for creating sustainable workload standards? Maybe not necessarily on the front end because you can’t know what you don’t know but how do you let them know that these are the standards and also the sustainable standards?
It’s about having all of these conversations on an ongoing basis and being aware of it so that it becomes part of the culture of conversation within the organization. If anyone is starting to feel like something’s off, it’s not like, “I don’t dare say something because they’ll think I’m a slacker.” It’s like, “No, part of what I’m supposed to do is to say, ‘Something weird’s happening here. This is taking way longer than I thought. It’s taking way more energy. Someone’s not delivering in the timeframe that they’re supposed to, which pushes my timeframe back and stresses me out.’” There are all sorts of pieces there.
As the CEO, the piece that you have to be most aware of is how often you are coming in and putting out the fire. If you’re coming in and putting out the fire very often, whether you know it or not, you are stressing out your employees. If you’re having to come in and put out the fire, that means things are not being able to be done in a consistent, manageable, and ongoing way. We may have to put out a fire. If that’s happening pretty regularly like twice a week or every day, that’s a sign that you’re working your people beyond capacity.
As the CEO, you have to be most aware of how often you are coming in and putting out the fire. If you do that very often, you are stressing your employees out. Share on XHow would you address that?
This is where you’ve got to realize that you are being a freaking arsonist. Stop it. Sometimes it’s about realizing that the things that are so intuitive to you, you’re not paying any attention to. Sometimes it’s realizing that, “I put these things this way so I know that it will blow up. I can put out the fire,” not necessarily setting the fire. I was using this with a client. What you’re doing is you’re like, “I see smoke. Look at that smoke over there. It hasn’t broken into flame yet. Is it a fire? No, that was just a leak. It’s burning down the entire forest. I’m excited.”
“I got my dopamine hit.”
As soon as you saw smoke, you should have addressed it. I’m watching a lot of entrepreneurial clients that I have seen smoke and don’t want to address it because it’s only smoke. It’s not a thing. It may not become fire. It’s because solving the fire is way more exciting.
We’re going to have to stop there. I could seriously dig in for 40 more minutes, hands down. This is a big topic. It’s going to be one that we’re going to have to revisit again. To wrap a bow around it all, what we’re talking about is that as a CEO, it is your job to proactively manage the capacity of your business. Whether you’re a solopreneur, you need to proactively manage your capacity. If you’ve got a team, you have to proactively manage their capacity.
As a CEO, it is your job to proactively manage the capacity of your business. Share on XYes, it is on them to let you know when they’re feeling stretched thin. You have to also recognize that not everybody recognizes that for themselves, nor are they comfortable coming to the table. As a CEO, you have to put your CEO pants on and observe it, ask the questions, and have the hard conversations early, often as frequently as necessary so that you aren’t becoming an arsonist and fully responsible for all the fires that you’re setting. Gwen, thank you so much for all of this. I feel like you have dropped so many nuggets with us that this is going to be a good juicy episode.
I want to remind everybody. We’re talking about building sustainable team workloads because that’s how you build the business you want. Nobody wants a business that burns anybody out. With that in mind, if you want a weekly nudge toward building the business you want, we have a cool new thing that is available. It is called Insight to Impact, which is a premium newsletter. I like to think that I’m the brains behind the operation but I am not. It is all Gwen.
Gwen poses one thoughtfully crafted question each Friday. The best part is if you take the time to respond, we personally will reply to you with focused insights to help you implement positive changes in your business. You can get the details at EverydayEffectiveness.com/Impact. Gwen, thank you so much for being here. Readers, thanks for paying attention to the end. We will see you next time.
Mentioned in the Episode
- Want a weekly nudge toward true accountability? Check out Insight to Impact, our premium email subscription.
About Your Hosts
Gwen Bortner has spent four decades advising executives and entrepreneurs in 45+ industries. She helps women succeed in business without sacrificing happiness by identifying their true desires and aligning their business functions. She spots overlooked bottlenecks and crafts efficient plans toward sustainable success that center your values and priorities. Known for her unique approach to problem-solving and accountability through the G.E.A.R.S. framework, Gwen empowers clients to achieve their definition of success without sacrificing what matters most.
Tonya Kubo is a marketing strategist and community builder who helps entrepreneurs build thriving online communities. As co-host of The Business You Really Want and Chief Marketing and Operations Officer (CMOO) at Everyday Effectiveness, she keeps conversations on track and ensures complex business concepts are accessible to everyone. A master facilitator with 18+ years of experience in online community building, Tonya takes a people-first approach to marketing and centers the human experience in all she does.
