Are you struggling to get your employees engaged and productive? Tired of having to deal with burnout-related decreased performance, workplace conflicts, quiet quitting, and high turnovers?
You've come to the right place! Harvard Business Review has identified burnout as a massive organizational issue, and it's time for leaders to take action. To help you out, this blog post reveals the secret no one talks about that’s blocking managers from stopping team burnout.
Read on to learn how to build trust with your team through emotional intelligence, setting clear expectations, managing conflict, and more so you can finally address burnout and get your team motivated and purpose-driven. Don't miss out - start reading now!
The Problem Corporate Leaders Can't Ignore Anymore
Harvard Business Review has officially said it! Burnout is a massive organizational issue — that employees can’t fix alone.
There’s a great deal of truth in the messages from Harvard Business Review and Jennifer Moss, author of “The Burnout Epidemic,”. They offer great suggestions to help leaders address burnout in a practical way by identifying the causes for their team.
Experts believe there are six leading causes of burnout:
- Unsustainable workload
- Perceived lack of control
- Insufficient rewards for effort
- Lack of a supportive community
- Lack of fairness
- Mismatched values and skills
Harvard and Moss even offer a great Team Burnout email sequence (subscribe on their website). The articles is well-researched and actionable. But it’s not going to work for most managers today.
It’s true - you can watch for obvious burnout symptoms in your team. And in an ideal situation, you can provide immediate support to your employees. That support helps employee engagement and productivity that drives results.
Sadly, too many experts ignore the pink elephant in the room. The secret is that few employees trust their leaders today.
The Real Reason Behind the Burnout Epidemic: Lack of Trust
The reasons why employee trust is gone are simple - employees feel their organization lacks respect, support, and fairness. It’s an open secret. All the major business media and major surveys have mentioned it. This lack of trust in managers and employers has gotten worse since the start of the pandemic.
Here’s the challenge: leaders must use emotional intelligence to manage organizational change, yet few have the tools. According to a recent Gartner poll of HR leaders, 73% say their organization’s leaders and managers aren’t equipped to lead change.
Companies are made up of people. Supporting and guiding the employees who make organizational change possible is essential for success.
The Secret to Build Trust in the Workplace: Emotional Intelligence
Many managers struggle with team burnout because they lack the most important ingredient for transformation - employee trust. And few know how to build trust confidently. Now is the time for leaders to implement strategies for building emotional intelligence that makes managers more effective.
If employees don’t trust that their manager or company cares about them, they will think your questions on burnout symptoms are an attempt to weed out “bad apples” or “weak links” for the next round of restructuring layoffs, demotions, or pay freezes.
So, please do the right things before surveying your team members about their stress levels. Stop and think if you have built a psychologically safe workplace for your employees.
The Modern Leadership Skills for Modern Challenges
Leaders with a psychologically safe workplace do these things well:
- Set clear expectations
- Learned to communicate with emotional intelligence
- Help your team members stay motivated and purpose-driven
- Learned to manage conflict and not avoid it
- Lead with care, empathy, and inclusivity that your employees model
Start building trust with small actions done regularly. Practice active listening, stop canceling 1-on-1s, and make meetings collaborations for new solutions, not updates. Updates are emails, not meetings.
The Solution to the Burnout Crisis: Emotional Intelligence in Leadership
Many corporate leaders don’t know where to start building up employee trust and support. Gartner’s survey points out that “employees have placed increased importance on manager support while managers juggle 51% more responsibilities than they can handle. The job is no longer manageable.”
Based on this critical data, it’s clear that today’s manager needs more than traditional manager development programs. It’s time to redefine the manager role - update expectations, reevaluate your talent pipeline, rewire manager habits, and remove process hurdles.
When leaders consistently listen with empathy and support people, they gain their trust, and then they can help address burnout. We are at a point in history where leaders have to restructure how their teams work and interact.
Burnout Epidemic: Here's How to Turn Around the Trend
It’s time to move away from the “command and control” leadership style and 19th-century factory work schedules. It is time to start adapting to 21st-century leadership models. Where leaders define complex problems and align their business processes to increase resilience amid continuous uncertainty and disruption. In this model, trust and accountability are built into managers' habits and employee expectations so teams of experts to produce innovative solutions and delight customers consistently.
I created the “Turnaround Toxic Teams” program so leaders can get a new framework for managing themselves and their teams. A place where business leaders can learn and practice the emotional intelligence skills needed to build trust with employees. The goal is to have managers take away the tools and confidence to quickly take simple steps to increase productivity and employee engagement.
The Harvard Business Review has confirmed it. Burnout is a major business issue, and employees can't solve it alone. The secret that no one talks about is that employees don't trust their leaders - they feel unsupported, disrespected, and treated unfairly. To address burnout, companies must invest in emotional intelligence training to equip leaders and managers with the tools they need to build trust.
With Turnaround Toxic Teams, business leaders can learn the skills they need to take steps toward increasing employee engagement and productivity. Take action now to create a psychologically safe workplace, and give your employees the trust they need to succeed.
The Solution to the Employee Engagement Crisis: Emotional Intelligence in Leadership
Are you ready to redefine the manager role and create a psychologically safe workplace for your employees? Let me show you how with my Turnaround Toxic Teams corporate seminar. Click here to book a Speaker Discovery Call and learn how to get the tools and confidence your team needs to increase productivity and employee engagement: https://victoriahepburn.com/contact/