You Can’t Lead When You’re Burned Out

Trying to lead while you are experiencing burn out is like pouring gas on the flames. You will not only hurt yourself but those you lead and your organization. We are social creatures who pick up on social cues. If you’re tired, your team will pick up on your stress and fatigue. It will affect their morale, performance, and quality. As a leader, you have a duty to lead not only others but yourself. Burnout is a slow process, but its symptoms are visible is you know what to look for.

Symptoms of Burnout

If you are feeling tired, exhausted, and have no desire to show up and treat patients, run through the following symptom checker. These symptoms by themselves are not indicative of burnout, but as they pile on, the constellation of burnout begins to reveal itself.

• You’re just going through the motions. If you haven’t any real enjoyment and just show up, you’re likely just going through the motions of patient care. If you quickly forget your patient’s name, their complaints, problem-lists, and other reasons why they see you, you’re probably just placing one foot in front of the other without thinking. You’ll get somewhere, but it’s not likely where you want to go.
• Engagement and interaction of your team are low. If your staff avoids you or doesn’t engage like they used to, it’s probably not them, but you. It could be a touch of grumpiness, aloofness, or simply apathy they’ve picked up on. You can feel when others begin to behave differently around you. The thing to do is ask “Why?” and then focus on yourself first.
• You are more concerned about protecting your space rather than growing it. A fixed or negative mindset is a key component of burnout. Your mindset is the way you think and feel about a person, place, or event. This is important because your thoughts and feelings determine your actions and behaviors. If you’re more concerned about protecting what you have rather than growing, you’re likely in a fixed mindset. The good news is you can change your mindset.
• You just hope to make it through the day. This is similar to going through the motions, but with a touch of dread, fear, and anxiety. It also more severe because you’ve added some powerful and negative emotions to the mix.
• You’ve lost the vision of your work. When it becomes hard for you to remember why you dedicated your life to medicine, you’ve lost your vision. It can become easy to do when you are in a downward spiral.
• You fake excitement and joy in your work. There are always those patients who suck the joy and excitement out of your day. That is perfectly understandable, but that should also be a brief, momentary event. You should rebound from that if you’re not burned out.
• Your communication response is slow, if at all. Communication becomes harder as we become burned out. We begin to shut down and simply want to be left alone. When you’re burned out, you respond to those emails slower than before, if at all. You answer pages, but not promptly, because you aren’t tired of being bothered. If you notice you’re slow in responding to communication, you might be suffering from burnout. You might also tend to avoid telling the truth, especially when it will involve a long discussion. You just don’t have the energy to work it out.
• You focus on your failure. First, we must accept a reasonable metric of success and failure. Success isn’t always binary. More often, there are degrees of success and failure. However, when we are burned out, we tend to see only two options or outcomes. Furthermore, it becomes easier to magnify our failures when we’re tired and burned out. If we had more energy, would you view the shortcoming any differently? Burnout contributes to the downward spiral of our self-image. We feel tired, no energy, we make a mistake. We magnify that mistake. We feel bad about ourselves. Our self-image declines further and further. We cannot really help our patients or those we lead effectively when in this situation.

Burnout doesn’t happen at once. It’s usually slow and insidious. Ignored the symptoms grow worse, as does the damage it can inflict. How many of the symptoms do you have? If you have more than a few, then we need to talk about getting you help.

Connect with me at www.davidnorrismdmba.com.