Identifying and Addressing Your Burnout

• A workload mismatch often involves high demands and insufficient resources to meet them successfully—for example, not enough time, staff, information, or equipment.
• A control mismatch happens when you don’t have adequate autonomy to do your job well.
• A reward mismatch means that good work is not leading to the appropriate recognition, compensation, or opportunities.
• A community mismatch is most extreme in a socially toxic workplace, where there’s rampant incivility, bullying, or harassment—rather than mutual trust, respect, and support.
• A fairness mismatch involves discrimination and inequitable practices.
• A values mismatch occurs when your ethical and moral compass points in a different direction than your organisation’s.

Rather than discovering a silver bullet to eliminate burnout, executives need a new way of thinking about leadership at work. Managing in the third decade of the twenty-first century calls for greater responsiveness to the mismatches that employees experience at work, closer attention to their psychological motivations, and greater flexibility in job design and work conditions. They must broaden their capacity for leading collaborative problem solving with employees and managers. Burned out employees signal the need to fix mismatches throughout the organisation, which will have positive implications for all employees, not just a few. A recent Gallup poll found that 80% of workers worldwide are “not engaged” with their job. Although those 80% are certainly not all burned out, they likely experience some elements of exhaustion, cynicism, or inefficacy at work. Improving job-person matches does not simply avoid the most negative outcomes — rather it increases a workplace’s potential to bring out the best in the workers of the future.