Burnout at Work Isn’t Just the Workplace: The Behaviors Shaping Your Culture with Cait Donovan

Welcome to Friday, the burnout podcast.

I'm your host, Kate Dunnevin, burnout expert, keynote speaker, and author focused on burnout

as a match issue at work.

Fried looks at burnout as information, not failure.

When people, roles, expectations, leadership behaviors, and systems fall out of alignment,

burnout is often the signal.

Seasons one through ten of fried focus primarily on individual burnout and recovery, and those

episodes are still available.

You can use the fried episode finder to find the conversations that best match what you're

dealing with right now.

Starting in season 11, the focus shifts to the workplace.

The conversation center on how leaders and organizations can improve match and get rid

of burnout in realistic, sustainable ways.

I also work directly with companies and events through burnout and emotional intelligence

keynotes, workshops, and longer-term advisory work.

If burnout has been getting your attention, this podcast will help you understand what

it's pointing to, and how to find a better match.

Ain't gonna burn ourselves out no more, ain't gonna burn ourselves out no more.

Got each other on our side, plus all the folks at fried, the burnout podcast.

Hello, fried fam, and to the leaders teams and organizations who are ready to stop guessing

about burnout and start understanding it, welcome.

This is Fried the burnout podcast, and I'm Kate Dunnevin on this show.

We look at burnout differently, not as a personal failure, but as a signal about how we work

lead and relate to each other.

Today, we are getting into a somewhat sensitive topic.

About two years ago, I released an episode about the top six workplace factors that lead

to burnout.

These workplace factors have been incredibly well researched.

They have been researched since before I was born.

We all know that these are true.

You can go back and listen to that episode if you want.

This is part of what I share in the dismantling burnout keynote.

The second thing that I share in the dismantling burnout keynote is this part.

Let's look at the workplace.

Let's look at what things the workplace can control.

Let's look at what the workplace can do is doing is not doing in order to reduce the

overall risk of burnout in order to increase capacity, reduce friction, etc.

Then we come in and we say, okay, but what about the shit that you're bringing to work

with you?

I think this is something that everybody knows and no one really wants to talk about,

but I think that we have to because each of us is carrying our own bag of troubles around

with us.

My friend, Stacy Uhrig calls this our backpack of troubles that we carry around.

Our stories, our history, our traumas, our not traumas, all the things that happened

to us over the course of our lives, plus our genetics, plus our whatever.

We take them with us everywhere we go.

And nobody knows that anybody else is wearing a backpack, nobody's thinking about the

facts that anybody else is wearing a backpack, and yet we all are.

And we are all showing up with different types of behavior patterns and different ways

of interacting and different interpretations of other people's actions that can, on a

cultural level in a workplace, either support well-being for you as an individual and

for everyone else or not.

And when I was writing this section of the book, one of the sentences that I wrote that

my editor really laughed at was like, nobody is Switzerland.

Like you are not neutral in your workplace, the way that you think act and be in the workplace

affects everyone else's chances of burning out or staying healthy.

But it doesn't mean you're fully responsible for it, that would be absolutely wild.

But how you show up at work actually really matters, and it matters not just for you, but

it matters to everyone else that you work with too.

So today we're going to talk about a few behaviors that sometimes we take with us into the

workplace often for good reason, and often these things are compounded because the workplace

enjoys them, so exploits them a little bit.

And then we're stuck in this space where we are using too much of our energy, using too

much of our energy, really, time, all the things to just stay sane.

So the first behavior that is problematic in the workplace is perfectionism.

Now I know like half of you just rolled your eyes and you're like, okay, well, I'll just

get rid of it.

No, I won't.

Before I go in deeper, here's what I really need you to know.

None of the things that I'm going to talk about today, not one, not any of them, not

a single one, is something that we are going to consider bad or something that we are going

to judge or something that we are going to demonize in any way, shape, or form.

We do not demonize coping mechanisms in this business.

It's not useful.

It's not helpful.

And we have coping mechanisms because they help us cope.

So for those of you who deal with perfectionism and this is gosh, my high achievers and my

leaders, you have a high percentage of this.

The reason that you're holding on to it is because for the majority of your life, it worked.

My perfectionism served me well.

I graduated 12 out of 600 people in my high school class.

Yes, I went to high school.

My class alone was 600 people.

I graduated 12 out of 600 people.

I got a almost full scholarship to Boston University on an academic basis.

I was able to keep jobs through high school and college that allowed me to pay for my

life and keep me going.

I just perfectionism worked, right?

So I did it.

And for the majority of my life, I got the feedback and the scores to tell me that it was working.

I was getting high marks as a gymnast.

I was getting good grades as a student.

I was getting high tips as a waitress.

There was all these sort of little signals that said, the more perfect you act, the more

we are going to appreciate you.

And that's where your value comes from.

Additionally, I created this perfectionism sort of tilt because of things in my childhood,

right?

My mother wasn't addict until I was six.

That's when he got clean.

And when he got out of rehab and came home, I'm like six, six and a half, maybe seven.

And so you have to think like brains are not logical at that time, but we were all children

and we all did these illogical things in our brains.

I said to myself, for some reason, I believed that we were churchgoers at the time, that

all of the mistakes that God had allotted our family, my father had already used up,

and there weren't any left.

So I had to be perfect in order to protect my father from relapsing.

And because my family didn't have any other chances, like there was no mistakes, there

was no room for that.

And my six or seven-year-old brain created that thought.

It seems crazy from today's perspective that doesn't seem like a logical conclusion

to come to, but to my six-year-old brain, that actually worked.

So I created this perfectionism sort of subset of behaviors that I used and used well for

a very, very long time.

When I entered the workplace, there was no more immediate feedback.

So sometimes, when I was, you know, I'm doing acupuncture, I'm working with patients,

and yes, they're getting better, right?

So maybe somebody that had migraines, doesn't have migraines anymore, someone who was looking

to, you know, start a family, was able to get pregnant finally, et cetera, all these

different things.

So I had these signals that things were working, but it wasn't this like constant immediate

feedback that I was used to.

And so I kept giving more and doing more to make it more perfect.

This was a huge part of my burnout story.

No one else was demanding this of me.

No one made me do this, but I had this internal need, this internal drive for perfectionism,

this internal drive to prove my value through perfectionism, and that drove me to burnout.

When you are aiming for perfectionism all the time, your stress response system is constantly

being kicked off because you're always looking for the mistakes.

And then if anyone, God forbid, anyone, criticizes anything that you do ever, it sends you on

a total spiral because you are pretty sure you thought of everything.

Perfectionism is a protection mechanism.

And I have yet to meet a person who was able to successfully just say, oh, well, I just

get rid of it.

I just decided perfectionism was not good for me, so I stopped doing it.

No, no, no, that's a pattern you've had your whole life, you're probably going to have

it longer.

But here's how I want you to think about it at work at home and in the in between times.

Perfectionism is okay to use when you are in control of how it's happening and when

you're using it.

Perfectionism starts to be harmful to you and to the environment that you're in, whether

that be family, work, community or otherwise.

When it requires you to self neglect in order to fulfill its needs.

So if you can fulfill your own needs and then use perfectionism to say, do your taxes

one year, cool, you should be a perfectionist about that, but not self abandon in order

to do it.

Like if you have to stay up late to redo the PowerPoint presentation two more times, even

though it's pretty much done and it's actually good enough and now you've lost two hours

of sleep, your perfectionism just cost you sleep, your lack of sleep has just decreased

everyone else's psychological safety at work.

That's some really interesting research by Christian Holmes over at whoop that did that.

So when your perfectionism interferes with your ability to self care or requires yourself

neglect, it is not only harming you, but it is harming everyone around you.

So my ask is that you start to look at places where that perfectionism is actually super

useful and you need it.

Like you just be really honest about the fact that that in this space, this perfectionism

is actually necessary and useful and you're going to use it here and then start to look

at other places where you might be able to loosen the reins a little bit and say, how

can I care for myself or fuel myself or do something for myself first so that I am

not abandoning myself, not neglecting myself as I engage in this next task.

So we're not going to get rid of your perfectionism for life.

It's just probably never going to happen.

I literally have never met anyone that's done it successfully.

So give yourself the benefit of saying, okay, well, if I'm going to keep it, then I

might as well use it as a tool, use it intentionally and use it when it's not controlling

me, but I'm controlling it.

So perfectionism is one of the behaviors that we bring into the workplace that can wreak

some havoc.

But one of the behaviors that we take into the workplace and I mean, get ready to roll

your eyes again.

It's not a surprise.

Another behavior that we take into the workplace that we created in childhood that is a coping

mechanism that is culturally built into mostly women, but not only is the push for people

pleasing.

Now people pleasing becomes problematic again when we have to self abandon in order to

do it.

When we are neglecting our own comfort, psychological, safety, self trust, self care,

to manage someone else's for their perceived benefit, especially when they haven't asked

you to do anything, that people pleasing has become a weapon, it has become harmful.

Not only is it hurting you, but it is hurting them.

One of the biggest harms that I see people pleasing cause, especially in the workplace,

not only in the workplace, parents with children, this is you too.

The biggest damage, the biggest harm I see people pleasing causing is it stunts the

growth of everyone around you.

When you become the person that solves all the problems and fixes all the things and

notices when everyone's uncomfortable and is the, when you take over for everyone all

the time about everything, you do not provide an atmosphere that allows people to speak

up for themselves, that allows people to grow and learn, that allows people to advance

themselves, that allows for people to have ownership and accountability for themselves

because you're fixing things all the time.

Now does that mean that you should never speak up for someone?

No, that's not what that means.

But before you do, you should be having a conversation with that person in another space

that say, hey, I've been noticing this pattern and I've been noticing that you haven't said

anything about it.

Can I speak up in your space the next time around?

If you don't want me to, I don't have to, right?

In order to break down people pleasing, what we have to do is start talking to people about

the things that we're noticing that need fixing and then asking them straight out whether or

not they want our help fixing it.

The easiest way through people pleasing is just conversation.

Hey, I've been noticing this.

What you'll find is that 20% of the time people just want you to do the thing and they're

like, yeah, please go do that.

20% of the time people have no idea what you're talking about.

So you are over interpreting someone else's discomfort because they are in a situation

that would be uncomfortable for you but is not uncomfortable for them.

20% of the time you're doing it completely opposite.

So you are trying to help somebody that is the person that is harming, right?

I'm at, I'm throwing out numbers here.

I don't even have 100% to share with you.

I'm just saying like there's different ways that this shows up and pops up.

So people pleasing, we have two solutions.

The first one I already mentioned, the first one is you start to talk to people really

clearly about what you see and if they want your help.

You just start having better conversations.

The other thing that we have to do to interrupt to people pleasing pattern, which doesn't

mean you're never going to people please.

It doesn't mean this is going to go away.

It doesn't mean you're going to like toss it aside and pretend it never existed.

What you're going to start doing is acting in ways that you fear might disappoint people

in some small way and start gathering information that everyone is actually still okay when

you don't overstep all the time.

The reason that, so this is what we call this in, well, what I call this in my business

is like, you know, sending out my minor disappointments.

So I want you to go around like disappointing people all day in like little tiny ways.

So for instance, if you are at work and you are consistently giving someone the resource

that they need to fill out a particular spreadsheet that is their job and they have access

to this resource.

They have a hard time finding it.

You haven't taught them how to find it.

They just reach out to you.

You send it to them.

You're a little annoyed about it, but you know, you just keep going.

In this kind of situation, the people pleasing tendency will be to send the resource before

the person asks for it so that you're solving this problem ahead of time.

But the growth action is to teach the person how to find the resource themselves so that

they stop asking you for it.

Right.

So we're now like saying, hey, no, this is actually your task.

I'm not going to take this anymore.

You might have to show them once or twice or three times how to do it, but you're going

to stop actually doing the thing that solves the problem so that other people can step

in and do it for themselves.

Right.

So that might disappoint people and that might bring up some fear.

But the reason that we're aiming for small disappointments is because most of the time

we are people pleasing because we are afraid that people are going to not like us and not

value us.

That will be shunned.

We will be ostracized.

We'll be pushed aside, et cetera.

So we make ourselves useful and noticeable.

Look all these things I do for you.

What would you do without me, sort of?

And when we start disappointing people and we start realizing that we can create relationships

with them in a different way, we start to understand that we don't have to act like

that all the time.

But in order for you to release that behavior, you have to gather evidence for your nervous

system that tells you that when you disappoint people, everything doesn't completely fall

apart.

We're not looking to do like major upheavals of disappointment.

Just like don't fill everybody's water glass immediately at the conference table because

you're the one that notices that everybody's water is empty.

Like why are you paying attention to the water anyway?

Like we're supposed to be working.

So behavior number one that can wreak havoc in the workplace is perfectionism.

Behavior number two that can wreak havoc in the workplace is people pleasing.

Both of these lead to your own burnout and make it more likely that people around you

will burn out as well.

Should we do one more?

We have time for one more.

Yeah, I think we do.

Let's do one more.

Another behavior in the workplace, maybe not behavior, maybe a lack of knowledge.

Another sort of hole in the personal side of burnout in the workplace is not being aware

of what your values are.

Now most people think that they know what their values are.

If you listen to a recent episode with Susie Welch, you will have heard a couple of maybe

really surprising facts.

For instance, only 11% of people have family as their number one value in the United States.

I think it's something like 90% of people claim to have family as their number one value

in the United States, but only 11% actually do.

So a lot of us are living off of values that we inherited from our parents or we have

in spite of our parents, either way, we didn't really choose them.

We either chose the same or chose the opposite.

So the values are still being controlled by people outside of us.

We have not taken the time to figure out what our values might be.

And then we work in places that may or may not be aligned with us, and we force ourselves

through it because we don't understand that having some level, not perfect, but some

level of values alignment with our workplace is actually really beneficial for our overall

well-being and beneficial, again, for the well-being of everyone around us.

So if you are unclear what your values are and you're not sure how to match them up to

your workplace, then your job is to do the work to figure that out.

My suggestion is to go to thevaluesbridge.com, and that Susie Welch's exercise that she

created.

I had one on my website for years and years, and I don't think you should use it because

I think Susie's is better.

And this exercise is a really wonderful way to have 16 core values that she recognizes.

And this test has been done by over 100,000 people.

So it's validated, it's scientific, it's all the things, but allow yourself a moment

takes 15 to 20 minutes, sit with it, answer the questions, and see what comes up for you

on your values list, and see if that aligns with the workplace, first of all, the job,

the second of all, the manager, third of all, and the other individual contributors around

you, fourth of all, that you're working with.

If you're the leader, then you're looking at that as well.

Like, do your values align with a company, do your values align with your team members?

This is something that I honestly believe can change lives.

This is something that when we're really honest about, and we really look into, and we

really pay attention to, is and can be absolutely magical.

Because it, one of the things that it does that I think is so great is that when we know

what our values are, and one of the things that Susie says often is there's no morality

or good or bad attached to the values, they just, you either have a strong, this one or

a strong that one, it doesn't really matter either way.

And when you know what they are, and you've removed morality from it, what happens is,

you are able to then interact with the world from a completely different perspective, because

you say, well, this is my number one value, for instance, is something called scope.

And scope is this desire to experience new and different things all the time, which

means if I was in a monotonous role, I would probably be banging my head against a wall.

That would not work for me.

So I know that it's good for me to work for myself, to sometimes travel and do a keynote,

to some days be writing a podcast episode, to some days be writing a book, to some days

be Netflixing at two o'clock on a Tuesday, whatever, don't judge me.

But I like to have difference in change, and not everyone does, and that's okay.

So when I accept my own values as scope, what happens is my judgment of other people starts

to shift as well, because I start to see, oh, well, their number one value is belonging.

So they are spending more time than I would spend in the, in the break room, talking to

people, because that is the most important aspect of their work for them.

So it changes the way that we talk about, and think about, and judge the people around

us, because we can just start to say, well, they have different values than I do, and that's

okay.

Now, these three things are not the only three things we bring into the workplace that

affect our overall vulnerability to burn out, or, and everyone else's vulnerability to

burn out, but they are the three that I wanted to talk to you about today.

So people pleasing perfectionism and being really clear on what your core values are.

When you think about this, I don't want you to go down a rabbit hole of self blame or self

judgment, or any of that, because that's not useful.

The idea behind this information is just to say, hey, listen, again, we are all either contributing

to the well-being culture of our workplace, or we're not.

And if we're not, then what ways can we make small shifts in order to contribute to it

in a better way?

Simple as that.

I hope that that was useful, gave you something to think about, and starts to provide a little

bit of context to why we don't blame anyone for burnout in the workplace in my business.

We don't blame leadership, we don't blame people, we don't blame anyone, because we are all

just walking around in perfect humans, and when we combine with certain sets of rules

and interactions, sometimes things go sideways.

And if we are able to come at that from this place, like it doesn't have to be, we don't

have to find blame, we just have to figure out which things are mismatched, which things

need better alignment, where we can make small tweaks.

If we look at it from that perspective, then we can actually make change that doesn't inspire

defensiveness in the people around us, so that the change is actually can last and is

not fought against and can actually make a difference.

So I hope that was helpful, can't wait to hear what you think.

If you love this podcast, please share it with someone that you thought of during the

episode.

If you'd like to leave us a review on Apple Podcast, I would be super thrilled about that because

that is one of the best ways for us to gain recognition as a podcast, one of the ways

that we get to reach more people is when Apple sees we get reviews, it starts pushing

our podcast out to new listeners.

So if you wanted to do that, I'd be forever grateful.

All right, this is Kate Dunnevin, your favorite keynote speaker.

Talk to you next time.

Welcome to Friday, the burnout podcast.

I'm your host, Kate Dunnevin, burnout expert, keynote speaker and author focused on burnout

as a match issue at work.

Friday looks at burnout as information, not failure.

When people, roles, expectations, leadership behaviors, and systems fall out of alignment,

burnout is often the signal.

Seasons one through 10 are fried, focused primarily on individual burnout and recovery,

and those episodes are still available.

You can use the fried episode finder to find the conversations that best match what you're

dealing with right now.

Starting in season 11, the focus shifts to the workplace.

The conversation center on how leaders and organizations can improve match and get rid

of burnout in realistic, sustainable ways.

I also work directly with companies and events through burnout and emotional intelligence

keynotes, workshops, and longer-term advisory work.

If burnout has been getting your attention, this podcast will help you understand what

it's pointing to and how to find a better match.