Feeling burned out as a manager? Three moves to get your footing back

I wanted to cancel my one-on-ones. I wanted to go heads down. I wanted to take time off. I, I didn’t really know how to move forward. And that’s why I’m sharing these strategies today is ideally, you do these things before you get to that point. When you start to feel the squeeze, when you start to feel it coming from both ends, your managers, and from your team. That’s the moment when we want to deploy the three strategies that I’m gonna talk about today.

Welcome to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where I bring a decade of experience working in some of the most influential companies in tech to help you navigate the ins and outs of being a people manager. From conflicts to feedback to delegating and more, we will leave no stone unturned when it comes to what makes us love managing, kind of hate it and everything in between. Doesn’t matter if you’re a new manager looking for some tips or a seasoned manager looking up their game.

Everyone is welcome to hang out with Managing Made Simple. Let’s go. Let’s go, let’s go. Let’s go. Welcome back to the show. And it’s Sunday, so you guessed it. It is Sunday Scaries. Today we’re talking about something. I think probably we’re all wrestling. Feeling burned out. We have to manage a team. We have to lead, we have to motivate, we have to show up for our team, but we’re kind of struggling through the whole process. And if this is how you are feeling, you are not alone.

So many of us are feeling this way. And whether we are a business owner and feel like, ah, everything’s on our shoulders, or we are managing a team and have our own management chain to deal with, this is something that comes up for everyone. And this was a question that came directly to me from another manager. Diving right in. Managers burned out, feeling overwhelmed, feeling like I don’t know how to show up for my team right now.

Again, there’s nothing wrong with you. This doesn’t mean you’re a bad leader. This doesn’t mean you can’t handle managing. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be managing. It means that you are responding to all of the stuff that’s happening in our lives, in the environment, in the world, all the uncertainty, all that stuff. Here are three ways that we can deal with this burnout to get a little bit of space and a little bit more ease into our week and face Monday, feeling like, all right, I got this.

Before I dive into solutions, I wanna talk about why it is so important to deal. When we’re feeling burnout as a manager, we might think we can hide it. We might feel like we’re doing a really good job making do, but our team starts to notice. I remember a few years ago I was managing a team while also managing a few extra folks while someone’s on maternity leave. I was hiring for a new team members. I was working with the team member who was struggling to kind of figure out how to really make an.

And when my manager asked me to take something on, I felt like I can’t do any of this. Oh my God, I’m failing at everything. I wanted to cancel my one-on-ones. I wanted to go heads down. I wanted to take time off. I, I didn’t really know how to move forward, and that’s why I’m sharing these strategies today is ideally you do these things before you get to that point. When you start to feel the squeeze, when you start to feel it coming from both ends, your managers, and from your team.

That’s the moment when we want to deploy. The three strategies that I’m gonna talk about today, number. Adjusting expectations. This is something that can be really, really hard for us, especially if we pride ourselves on always being able to handle everything. Always be able to get everything done. Hey, send a problem my way. I’ve got it. I can tackle it. I’m good. I’m, I’m running with it. When we feel burned out and we feel like, oh gosh, I don’t even know how to move forward.

It’s an important moment to adjust, expect. This is about setting boundaries, but because I know always setting boundaries is like the main advice for dealing with burnout, I wanted to shift this a little bit and say shifting expectations. This might mean saying, Hey, this can’t get done tomorrow. It’s gotta be done Thursday. It might mean saying to our client, you know what? We need a little bit more time with this project. We’re gonna have to have another week to to finish this.

This might mean telling your own manager what’s doable, what’s not. This might mean telling your own team members, Hey, I’m not available to meet this week. I have my head down focusing on a couple things. Adjusting expectations is completely understandable and necessary. The problem is when we believe that adjusting expectations means we’ve failed or aren’t good enough, or let people down or carry any of the baggage that often comes up with doing this, that’s where we start feeling burned out because we feel like we can’t say no to anything.

That’s why this is our first tip for dealing with burnout, adjusting expectations, getting realistic, reminding ourselves that it’s okay. It’s expected. Adjusting something by two days a week. None of this stuff really lets everybody down and letting it be. Next thing managing up. A lot of times when we’re feeling burned out, it’s because we have so much pressure coming from our own management chain, and a lot of times in that situation, our management chain is not aware of all the other things we have going on.

And when we’re managing teams, there are nuances to the things we’re working on. Maybe we are hiring for a new team member and it’s taking a lot more time than we anticipated. Maybe we are coaching a team member who’s struggling and we’re having to meet with them a lot more often than we had to in the. Maybe we are picking up some slack for a team member that’s on a leave of absence or something like that.

All of these things take up time and it can be overwhelming when our own management chain asked us to do one more thing. This is why managing up is a key part of mitigating burnout, because we need to be clear about what is going on. Hey, here is what I’m working through. I need a little bit more time with this because I’m working on this thing with this person. Sharing that explicitly, so our management chain knows to kind of ease up a little.

If you’re running your own business and there’s no one really to manage up to, it can be really helpful to catalog all of the things that you have going on, the things that you are working through so that you see the full picture of, I have a lot going on. Where can I adjust a little bit? Where can I shift things? This goes back to the first tool of adjusting expectations, but it’s all possible because we stopped and took inventory of everything that’s going on so that we can adjust number three and like it or hate it.

This one is asking for. It is very hard for a lot of us to ask for help when we are a business owner and we’re used to doing everything ourselves, or we were the best at something, and that’s why we’re managing a team or leading a project. It can be really, really difficult to say, Hey, I can’t do all of this alone. I can’t figure all of this out. But the truth is, asking our team members for help is a great way to build trust, to show humility, to demonstrate.

I see a lot of leadership potential in you. That’s why I’m asking you to step in. When we ask for help in the right ways, we can really, really empower other people to step up and take work off our own plates. When I say asking for help the right way, what I mean is to not let it get too late where it’s a sort of last minute fire drill that everybody has to work all night on the weekends to figure out.

It also means to explain to someone why you’ve asked them that, Hey, I see some value in you taking this on. You get this experience, or you get this exposure. If it’s something really tactical, being honest about it and saying, Hey, I really need support with this tactical thing. I realize it’s not in your job description, but it would be awesome if you can help. And then setting a clear limit on that. Like maybe they take it on once or they do something for a day or a week, but it’s not forever.

When we ask for help, it’s really important to set some constraints on it and give some context. That’s how we ask for help in the right way. And I’ll talk a lot more about this in my episode about delegating coming up when we do these three things. Adjust expectations, manage up and ask for help. We can be proactive around dealing with the burnout, not letting it consume us, and just become a spiral where we feel like we’re not finishing everything but we’re stressed, but we have all this going on.

We can actually take action to move the ball forward while easing the foot off the gas on the stuff that we have to tackle. And again, modeling these boundaries, modeling, asking for help, modeling that, Hey, when I’m feeling stuck, I take action. This is really powerful for your team to. It shows them that you trust them to step up as leaders. It shows that humility, it builds that psychological safety showing that, Hey, I don’t have it all figured out.

Sometimes even I ask for help. And it will start to build a lot more trust in your team. So this is not a sign of weakness, it is a sign of strength. Go out there and manage that burnout. Ask for help, adjust expectations. Manage up and you will see you not only feel more at ease, but your team member will step up and rise to the occasion. See you next time. That’s all I have for today.

Thank you so much for tuning in to the Managing Made Simple Podcast where my goal is to demystify the job of people management so that together we can make the workplace somewhere everyone can thrive. I always love to hear from you, so please reach out at liagarvin.com or message me on LinkedIn. See you next time.