Let's talk about burnout — and what it really is

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As it always does, December seemed to arrive faster than anyone expected, and with it the telltale signs of the weirdest month on our work calendars: There’s often less energy, fewer new ideas, and more absences.

Nothing is ever one-size-fits-all, but it certainly can look and feel as if people are checked out and waiting for the calendar to flip.

This is how misdiagnoses happen. Leaders often reach for familiar explanations and fixes, like pep talks and group emails designed to re-energize the troops. I had an old editor who liked to tell his reporters to “run to the finish,” even though news events rarely honor the holiday schedule.

This misdiagnosis frames end-of-year burnout as seasonal laziness, or a motivation gap. But if it was simply a motivation problem, it wouldn’t repeat like clockwork every holiday season. Explaining this as a motivation deficit is easy, because the answer is simply for everyone to get motivated again. It gives our organizational systems a pass.

But if the actual problem is burnout, then leadership decisions must be factored in and held to account as well. It’s tempting to choose the explanation requiring the least structural change.

“While it's easy to say that burnout is a failure of resilience, that's rarely the case,” said Amy Leneker, a leadership consultant. “Burnout is a signal that the way work has been designed isn't working, and it often results in too much to do and too little time to do it. The holidays exacerbate this by adding more to already full plates. That end-of-the-year time crunch reveals what’s already true the rest of the year: Most of us are operating in systems that set us up to fail.”

As is also observed in many romantic partnerships, women often bear the brunt of burnout from invisible labor.

“Leaders misdiagnose burnout as a motivation problem because they're not looking for how they are contributing to it,” said Jamie Martin, an executive coach. “It's easier to point to the employee. But burnout happens when the invisible work becomes bigger than the visible work, when employees have to reverse-engineer what success looks like to their boss and are constantly wondering if they're going the right direction. This compounds for women during the holidays. They are taking on more invisible work outside of the office and often covering the gaps inside the office.”

The fix isn’t complicated, Martin said.

“Sit down with your team, find out what they are doing that's not visible to you, and get explicit agreement about what success looks like from top level in their job to the project level,” she said. “Not once a year in a performance review. Every month. Every quarter. Every one-on-one.

“Without this, you're not building trust,” she added. “You're building exhaustion.”

Exit interviews across industries tend to reveal variations of the same themes, said Yakov Filippenko, founder and CEO of the professional networking app Intch. 

“Each reflects a deeper shift in how the employee relates to their work,” he said. “Burnout often comes first. Not as dramatic collapse, but as slow erosion. People push through workload spikes until their energy disappears, then motivation, then their sense of purpose.”

Filippenko cited McKinsey research showing that burnout rarely stems from individual weakness, but is often the result of systemic imbalance in workload, resources, and support. 

“When those conditions persist, even high performers begin drifting long before they consciously consider leaving,” he said. “The employee may not recognize the change, but it shows up in micro-signals: deprioritizing once-important tasks, opting out of discussions because there’s too much going on, or quietly concluding that nothing will improve.

“Heading into the new year, a manager’s task is not to defend or convince,” he added. “It is to listen without ego and treat dissatisfaction as a data point about the system, not a personal critique. Organizations that train managers in these ‘edge conversations,’ those, yes, uncomfortable conversations held when someone is nearly gone, consistently report lower avoidable turnover."

Sarah O’Brien, a psychotherapist and wellness expert, said burnout is a certainty when we design workplaces to prioritize profits over people and productivity over humanity.

“There needs to be an understanding that productivity and focus ebb and flow,” O’Brien said. ”It's not the exact same every day, day in and day out. People are not robots.”

She encourages leaders to ask their teams thoughtful questions, and lean into curiosity over judgment about whatever the answers are.

“The leader needs to take accountability for lack of clarity, too much work, or unreasonable expectations. Say so to the employee, and work to make adjustments for that employee's workload,” O’Brien said. “The leader also needs to be honest about their own stressors, deadlines, expectations of them from their leadership with their team. This is not shirking responsibility, it's demonstrating authentic disclosure about their own reflection and reaction to the workplace and workplace demands.”

The new year provides a unique opportunity to leave behind what isn’t working and try something new, Leneker said.

“That means clarifying what success actually looks like, cleaning up role confusion, and honoring boundaries around time and capacity,” she said. “Leaders, managers, and employees all have a role to play in preventing and overcoming burnout, and it's only when they work together that burnout is addressed.”