I'm just curious to see what you thought of it, given what we've been talking about. It's an interesting paper, and I've got a summary of it. So what do you think? Shall we give it a try?
Yeah, we've talked about burnout before. We've talked about manager burnout. We haven't talked about burnout so much in those you manage, maybe. You know what?
Let's welcome the listeners first, and then we can get into it, because this needs a bit of prep and a bit of explaining where we are before listeners can join us. So welcome, everyone, to Management Cafe. Thank you for joining us here. You can grab a cup of coffee or tea and join us for about, well, between 20 and 30 minutes.
My name is Pilar Orti, and with me, of course, is co-host Tim Verges. And I love having conversations sparked off by articles and books and materials that we can go back to, because it just kind of guides the thinking. I'm always more relaxed when I'm discussing other people's work than when I'm trying to come up with a lot of things. And this is, in all honesty, listeners and Tim, I don't remember where I got this summary of this new piece of research.
But anyway, the title of the research that we're going to be looking at is How Managers Can Help Employees Navigate Tough Decisions Without Burning Out. And it was a paper from Organizational Dynamics from 2023 by Molinski and Novel. And to be honest, Tim, I was reading through it thinking, never mind helping others with their burnout in this context. Actually, I found this very useful from a management point of view.
And some of the examples they give are things that managers would be looking at. Just going back to your comments about, we've spoken about burnout before. This is quite specific. This is really looking at the causes.
So I'm just going to read this bit, if you don't mind, just the first paragraph. Because I think it's quite specific kind of burnout they're talking about. Burnout happens when an employee continuously performs tasks that cause emotional, material, or physical harm to another person. And they call them necessary evils.
We know them. Disciplining others or delivering bad news are examples of necessary evils. It requires an employee to be focused and self-controlled, which at times can cause significant stress and impaired task performance. So this is not the kind of burnout that happens when you're working long hours.
This is actually the causes of how specific things were highlighting that. Yeah, it's an interesting distinction because they're talking very much about specific tasks that you're doing. Burnout, in my mind, is that it's something that happens so often that your ability to cope or replenish is diminished. If you're disciplining others so much that you're burnt out, there's probably some other problems as well.
Well, I don't know. Yes, there is that. But you might have to be firing people because the company needs to shrink, for example. There's burnout where you just have too much, too many tasks to do.
It's sort of like a systemic, ongoing, long-term problem that results in burnout. This is a different scenario, I think. This is where there's an identifiable challenge. It has a beginning and presumably has an end.
And it's trying to help people get through that relatively unscathed, which I think is a great thing to address. And that happens all the time. But as you were saying, I think it's really important to distinguish that from chronic overwork or other common sources of burnout because I don't think these solutions necessarily work in those. That burnout that comes from repeatedly doing these specific things that are necessary evils.
That's what they're looking at. It's things we don't want to do or that are in conflict with our values. And having to do them repeatedly can cause burnout. That's what this is looking at.
And I think that the fact that the title is how managers can help employees navigate tough decisions without burning out. It's also interesting for some of the examples they have. So just going back to the context of some of these, is one of the examples they give later when they talk about how to navigate this, is of an employee who runs a drug recovery program. And for example, they had to chuck someone out because they violated the rules.
And you can imagine if you're in that kind of job, even if you're not managing others, in that kind of job where you have to make tough decisions all the time. And you know that's something, again, going back to their definition, is having other emotional, material, physical harm to the other person. But in a way, it is the right thing to do. But you're having to do that all the time and you're not getting any support.
And I think that's why this is interesting. I wish they had a phrase that was burnout, though. I wish they had a phrase that was like damage or being affected by it. I disagree because I know of a case of someone who, amongst other things, this is not the only kind of thing, they work in an educational institution, so you have students that are paying a lot of money to be there.
And there's been a decision that students now have to pay a little bit extra, these are adults, a little bit extra to access a specific kind of service. And of course, it's not the people who decided that this is the case that have to then implement this. It's this person, who will remain anonymous. And they have to repeatedly have to go to these people that come and, oh, can I do this?
Yes, but it's going to cost you. What do you mean it's going to cost me? I'm already paying so much. I don't have money, blah, blah, blah, tears even.
If this is repeated, that leads to burnout. It's this kind of burnout. It's not just one isolated. And I think that this is what they're trying to say, that we need to support people because if they're going through these kinds of situations repeatedly, not one of, and they're not getting the support and they don't know how to deal with it, they will burn out.
I think sometimes you can not have a lot of work on your plate and have enough sleep and all those kinds of things, but because of the nature of your job or a change or something that's happening, you're having to do necessary evils constantly. That can lead to burnout. And I think that sometimes that is still not seen as in the same bucket, but I think it can be there. So it's almost like if we're saying that you're being asked to perform tasks above your capacity to cope, whatever those tasks are in that capacity to cope is.
Yes, yeah. And this is something else that they do say, I don't know where I saw it, I think it was maybe in the summary, that stress usually comes from having to do something difficult or conflicting with your values. Well, they talk about two different, a challenging task, which is a competence challenge or a character challenge where the task conflicts with the sense of who they are as a person. I think they're pretty common.
There's a third form of stress there, which is capacity. It might be that you can have one of those difficult conversations a day, but you can't have 10. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. This reminds me of a conversation I used to have with someone when we were talking about email and the fact that the stress that came from email and that actually wasn't a number, it was how much you were expecting, for example.
And this reminds me of that, that for some of us, one or two of these occasions could lead to burnout because we can cope, whereas other people, they will need to say more. I think that's a really interesting point. Just diverging a little bit. We had a big issue at Shield with burnout for a while.
One of the ways that we tried to think about it was, if you think about that sort of competence challenge or capacity challenge, those things, where you don't feel like you have the right skills or you feel like it's too much. In those scenarios, it can be the volume that's the problem, not the task itself. Because in actual fact, if you never get challenged at work, it gets boring. In fact, it can be good to go into that challenge zone as long as you know you're going to be able to come out of it and recover.
And sometimes it can be good to go, oh, I think I can do seven of these tasks in a day, but let's see if I can do eight, just tomorrow. I'm just going to say if I can do eight tomorrow. But the question that we used was, could I do another day like tomorrow? Or today, sorry, could I do another day like today, tomorrow?
Our finance team was one that was really undergoing stress. And so we asked them to do this questionnaire. Like we didn't do a whole time emotion thing, but every day we asked them to do a questionnaire. Could you do another day like today, tomorrow?
And if they said yes, okay, then we think it's the same. If they said no, then we sort of dig into it. And actually then when we looked at it, for most of the team, there were spikes in the course of a month, but it wasn't sustained the whole period. And obviously we could try and work to flatten those spikes.
But it also helps them just to understand that it wasn't a constant state. It helps them understand exactly what you're dealing with. Because then you'll be like, okay, well, I know it's only today and tomorrow, and then it's going to calm down. Or I know I'm going to have a few of these conversations, but afterwards it's going to be over.
It's when you, if you don't have that awareness, and you just feel like you're just bouncing from one stressor to the next stressor to the next stressor, I think that's really harms your capacity to recover. I love that question. I think that's such a strong question. Could you do another day tomorrow like you had today?
It's a much better question than sometimes when you, you know, how stressed did you feel today on a scale of one to 10? Because it does all those things. It gives you an idea of how sustainable what people are doing is. It gives the person answering an idea.
And it also makes you reflect as a person on, right, is this something that I want to carry on being like this, or that needs to carry on being like this? I love that. So maybe that should be like the biggest, if we were to label this episode as a how-to episode, that would be probably the biggest takeaway. I think everything else is good, but actually that is really powerful.
Well, the thing that was really good about it was that, you know, if someone says no, then the alarm bells go off. You have to address it, because people have to be able to get up the next day and go to work. But I think it also allowed people to frame it in terms of, is this a challenge or is it unbearable? Or, you know, how does it work?
And it's kind of simple. It's kind of simple, because the alternative solutions are really trying to dig into everything that people do and get them to track every 15 minutes of their task. Actually, that's going to cause more stress than the actual existing work is. Yes.
Yes. I mean, do we need to say anything else about what the study says in a way? Well, the other thing I was going to say about it was I think it's really helpful that they frame it in three phases and that they're talking about managing the psychological experience because what we're talking about here is very much a psychological event. You know, it's burnout and stress.
It's in our heads. I'm not saying it's in your head, doesn't it? It doesn't exist. I'm saying it's in your heads.
And so it's something that has to be addressed with your emotions, with your physiological capacity, but also in terms of how you think about things, how you frame them, what your future state looks like and how you can orient yourself. That's super important. So, yeah, so they've got what to do before the event, what to do during it, and what to do after. And I think after is often missed out.
So one of the ways in which you can help is so they've got five steps. The first one is provide training to help employees prepare. Okay, well, you might want training, but at the same time, it doesn't need to be training. You just can help someone.
If I skip the provide training, it's basically help someone prepare or do the preparation yourself, which some of the preparation can be writing a script for yourself if it's a difficult situation to help you through it, to rationalize why you're doing something, but also practical things like bringing a box of tissues with you if you think there's going to be an emotional response from the person. And I thought, yeah, that really, I mean, how horrible to do that. Can you imagine that you come in and you're going to have a competition and you go into, it's in person, you go to their office and you see that for the first time ever they have a box of tissues in front of them. And as you sit down, they just gently push it across the desk.
Oh, no. Actually, there's something I would add to this preparation phase and that is to actually, I think I've talked to you about this before, something that I used in these, in these scenarios where I knew that I was going into something that was going to be challenging, whether it was a, you know, competence or character or capacity or whatever, I would think about what I thought I was going to experience and I'm talking about emotionally, particularly if it was in a dynamic with another person, what I thought they might experience and what I wanted them to experience, what I didn't want them to experience. You know, in the same way, like when we say you can give people scripts and you can give those sort of things, but these challenging conversations, one of the reasons why they're challenging is because they're emotionally fraught and it talks a little bit in here about how you have to sort of damp down your emotions and maintain your composure and then you have an exposure to emotion afterwards and so on. Part of, I think, what helps us in those scenarios is to go, oh, you know, I'm worried that they're going to experience anxiety or I'm worried that they're going to experience a high emotion.
You know, they're going to cry or they're going to be really sad and when that happens, if it happens, when it happens, I think if you've prepared yourself for that, if you thought, oh, well, if they're sad, do I want them to feel that way or do I not? But you can acknowledge that they're feeling sad. You know, you can say, oh, I can see you're feeling sad. What I was hoping we could get in this scenario is I was hoping you would feel supported or you would feel another set of emotions.
And so even if it goes off the rails, you've already sort of, you've already outlined your fears. So you're not going in there worried about something or going, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, you know, they're starting to get angry here. That's what I was afraid of. I don't know what to do.
You sort of prepare yourself. Okay, that might happen. But you can also orient it towards the outcome that you want, which in my mind is more, is the more sustainable, you know, the more manageable outcome. You know, if that makes sense, I think I've fumbled my way through.
Yes, yes, I see. So if you're thinking, well, they're probably going to feel anxious, but I want them to feel supported, you can come into the conversation in a different way and you can prepare for that. No, it makes complete sense and I think that's really useful as well. Yeah, because it helps you sort of guide the emotional tone of the conversation.
And remember we had the conversation about the Gorbachev example, you know, where he paused and sort of, he was talking to Thatcher, I think, and he redirected it. And part of what he did there about your own emotional state, that's a bad thing to do. I've done that once. But you don't do that during, this is part of the prep.
Yeah. This is part of the preparation. In fact, to be honest, now that you're saying it, I think it's important to do that precisely so that that doesn't happen during it, especially if you have a close relationship because then suddenly you've turned the conversation, the focus on you and that doesn't help the conversation. So that's a way of tackling that.
That's a way of preventing you becoming a focus when you shouldn't be. Something like this. That's a really good point. And then I love what, one of the things that they have, and this is for, this is advice to organizations, have more than one person performing the same task, which of course could be the right coupling because you don't want to stress the situation.
On the example, it says, line managers paired with experienced HR managers to explain details of severance packages, for example, while police officers relied on their partners to help maintain safety. This is a different situation, a different kind of necessary evil that police officers are doing. And I think that that may be, again, this is an acknowledgement that our people might be doing things that are hard and they have to be repeatedly doing them. Okay, we can support them, but actually can we make the process easier by adding resources in some way, whether it's the training we're talking about or actually a resource could be another person to help them with that or to support very practically.
I like the police example more than the line manager paired with HR in that because when they say you're having more than one person performing the same task, in my mind, that's because you want them to feel supported and to not feel alone in performing this difficult thing. And so that they should be there as peers are working together. I mean, I guess that happens with line managers and HR, but in my mind, like that's, HR often there is like a police to make sure it goes okay. Well, let's go to, let's be always as always super positive and hopeful and utopian about this and think that in a place where everything is working and you just have to have these bad conversations as part of day to day business or during other time, you would expect that the HR person because if you have to have this conversation all the time and on top of that, you have that emotional work of getting all the details right and sometimes or not being able to answer questions that the other person might have because they're very technical, for example, of firing someone, then I think that's, yeah, I mean, if it's not utopian, you might as well let the person do it themselves.
Yeah, and that's actually a really great point because it means that if you've got that competence challenge pairing you with somebody can alleviate that. And it's complimentary. Yeah. I think either emotional support or like you say, or competence compliment.
Okay. Then the next one, they schedule time to allow employees to rest and recover before the task. to acknowledge that something's going to be difficult. And instead of saying, just slot it in your calendar to say, okay, make sure, you know, where are they?
Well, they're resting because today's difficult or they're coming in late or whatever, or they're not checking their emails for all morning because they're doing something else. I think that acknowledgement is very important. Oh, absolutely. Like scheduling time before the task and after the task.
What I really like about that is that the company, the organization is taking responsibility for this is going to be difficult. And so part of the work is to look after yourself before and after, you know, as opposed to like, here's a whole lot of people you have to fire. You're going to do it at four o'clock on a Friday afternoon. And then as you're walking out the door, you're going to say, hey, make sure you look after yourself on the weekend.
So you've got to spend your own time recovering from the stress that your workplace has given you. That's such a great point. And even that, once you have that mindset, you will know that these things, maybe let's not have them happen on Fridays or even on Mondays because I never did training if I could avoid it on a Monday because it messed up my Sunday. I was worried about it all the time.
That was a good experience, you know. Maybe it wasn't necessarily evil. I don't know. Yes.
And I like, like, they have examples for the employees recovering, like someone going to the gym in their station after finishing a stressful shift. I mean, these things might happen after work as well. I think it's great, like you say, if they can have it during. But I like the example of, they say, if you are experiencing this, to do something afterwards.
And one of the examples they gave, actually, was someone to cry like a baby after they have to get rid of this person who was in the drug recovery program. Enabling the time, the space, and also sometimes just acknowledging to someone who go and have, you know, if you need to take time off and you need to release whatever, just, you know, we have a room or whatever. I don't know. I think it's very important to acknowledge that it's okay to let all that stress come out in ways that otherwise, that you might think unacceptable at work, actually, but they're not.
If you leave people carrying that stress, I mean, it seems so obvious, but you shouldn't have to say it, but like, if they have to bottle it up, if they're unable to process it and let some of it go, you know, then the capacity is going to be reduced, you know, and on it goes. Part of the process, that process of restoration, it comes back to, you know, to this idea at the beginning of competence, of capacity, of character. You can explore those things. You know, you didn't feel like you had the competence to handle this.
Does it feel different now? How can we build that competence further? If it was a character challenge, if you had to do something that conflicts with a sense of who you are, I remember you've given the example before of someone who had to do math layoffs and he said that when he was doing it, yes, he was thinking about people who were laying off, but he was also thinking about the thousands of jobs that he was protecting by keeping the company going. And so that revisiting it afterwards, that unpacking of it, it's super helpful in order to be able to think about, like, how do you frame it?
Are there ways of thinking about it, processing it, of filing it away in your memory that help you in case you have to do it again? Nice. And then I've got one more thing to say. I don't know if you still have some, but I like the fact that when they talk about emotion regulation, like regulating your emotions during the event, that what they're saying is that that's about decreasing in that moment, but not eliminating.
That it involves minimizing, but not eliminating the emotion. And I think that that recognition that we're still going to be feeling something is just that if we want to get through it consistently, because this is repeatedly, and we're looking at that repeated, having to do this quite often, is what we're trying to do. We're trying to minimize and not eliminate emotions because it's good that they're there. I mean, they're telling us something like we always say.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And actually, I've been in some discussions in leadership groups where a lot of managers say, you know, they talk about performance managing someone or firing somebody. And it's quite common for people to say, you know, like someone goes, oh, like first time I've had someone go, I feel terrible. And people will chime in and go, oh, you know, that's normal.
It's meant to feel bad. You know, it always feels bad. And I remember there was like some naysayer, you know, there's always someone on the internet who does a counter-opinion and he's like, oh, why should it feel bad? And I like how the way they're framed it here.
It comes back to, I think, you know, when we talked about regret, like it's okay for it to feel bad. It's okay for you to be worried about the impact of your actions on other people. And in fact, it's healthy. The day that you start to think, oh, you know, I've just got to go through this task and I'm going to feel totally fine with it.
I think it's a worrying time because if you don't remember the weight of your actions and the impact of it, I think it limits your capacity to perform the work mentally. Very good point. And we shall end with that, I think, because the coffees and teas and hot chocolates are definitely getting cold by now, especially the hot chocolate had cold whipped cream on it. So, I don't know, it'd be nice to hear what listeners what do you think around the table.
You can get in touch with us through managementcafepodcast.com. There's a contact form there and also managementcafepodcast at gmail.com. Anything else you want to say about this? Yeah, nothing other than that.
I do have something to add and it's that I find interesting this piece because it's written to help managers help others but I think it's very helpful for the manager because you might find yourself in these kind of repetitive situations. So, if your people though are looking for resources, if actually you think that you are not the best person to support them through a conversation, send them this article or get them to listen to this episode because I think it's very useful sometimes just to, instead of having that conversation with your manager, you might need to just have it come from another source, not just people but also it might be just easier to go and listen to this while you're on a walk. That might be easier than sitting down or sitting across a video camera with your manager and talk about this. So, do share.
Do share these resources if you think they might be useful. Right, well, coffee's over for us, is it? Now it's over to you. Thank you for joining us for this episode of Management Cafe.
You've been listening to Tim Burgess and Pilar Ortiz. Remember to subscribe to the show on whatever podcast account you use and if you want to get in touch, you can do so over at managementcafepodcast.com. Coffee's over for us. Now it's over to you.
Thank you for listening. Thank you for listening.