[00:00:00] Hi everyone, my name's Dex Randall, and this is the Burnout to Leadership podcast, where I teach professional men to recover from burnout and get back to passion and reward at work.

[00:00:22] Hello my friends, this is Dex, and welcome to this week's episode, as promised. on how to prevent team burnout. And for me, the dynamics of burnout are the same as pre burnout, so controversially I treat them much the same. What works to prevent burnout is also the cure for burnout. It's about transforming who you are being at work.

[00:00:48] It's relating to yourself and your world differently, more in your favor, in order to restore your agency, satisfaction, resilience, and well being. On the basis that we don't see the world as it is, but as we are. And it's therefore my experience that no matter how tough or unsupportive your industry, or your organization, or your boss is, burnout recovery can be attained.

[00:01:16] I guarantee recovery to my physician clients, despite the demonstrated difficulties in that industry. And if it works for them, it can work for you, and it can work for your team. And if you're in burnout yourself, and if you're a team leader, I salute you for having the bandwidth to even think and care about your team's well being.

[00:01:37] You're a champion, clearly, even though you suffer. But, my advice to you is, by all means, listen in today for tips on supporting your team. In fact, for supporting anyone, up and down the chain. But to support your team, the best thing you can do right now is to fix your own burnout. It's very hard to support a team from the disempowered space that you're in, and your slim resources are better directed to first saving yourself before you try and rescue your team.

[00:02:09] So if you're in or near burnout yourself right now, I recommend you go back and listen to the first five episodes of this podcast to orient yourself to understanding your own situation and how you can simply recover from burnout. And please, for the love of all things, come and see me and let me support you on that journey to quickly and efficiently emerge from burnout, because then you're going to be back at the helm standing in your own power, your own up leveled work experience,

[00:02:40] and many new skills, and abundant energy. And from there, absolutely, you can help your team. So if that's you, visit DexRandall. com, book a call, and I'll help you make a plan to fix your own burnout first, so you can go on to support others. And most of my clients, by the way, do go on post burnout to support the people in their networks to better work experiences.

[00:03:05] And I think this is one of the deep joys of burnout recovery. Being able to help other people who suffer as well. But typically, we humans are not able to fix our own burnout without help, lacking the specific skills and objective insight to alleviate our own suffering. Because if you knew how to do that, you'd already be doing it, right?

[00:03:31] And by the same token, professionals in burnout are very smart and respond extremely well to learning and applying the necessary tools to recover through coaching. And that's why I'd like to help you. So if you're in burnout as a leader, come talk to me. Alrighty, if that's not you, assuming you're not in burnout, or you're no longer in burnout, we're now talking about how to help members of your own team as a leader to prevent burnout, to move forward towards effective performance and thriving at work.

[00:04:02] So how do you lead a team away from burnout? It's a complex topic. I could probably talk for hours on it, but there are several areas that I would encourage you to focus on, and I'm just going to introduce each of them here. So number one, as a leader, set clear vision and direction for your people. Make sure they're all tracking to a common goal and they understand that goal and the metrics of that goal.

[00:04:28] If we look at Jim Collins book, Good to Great, he talks about level 5 leadership. And you might want to read that book about it. And he describes level 5 leadership as personal humility coupled with professional drive. And also taking the blame on oneself, giving credit to others, and having radical, honest communication.

[00:04:54] So if that sparks a little flame in you, go and read Good to Great because the book is cover to cover excellent. So that's the first thing, having clear vision and direction for your team so they know where they're going and so you're leading them all towards that goal. Number two, trust and value your team.

[00:05:13] So this is also about encouraging diversity, other perspectives than yours. It's not having a homogeneous team who are all like you, little imprints of you. So if you're a hiring manager for your team, don't hire people who are all the same as you. But when you have a team, whether you inherit it or build it or hire for it, look at the team as a group of equals.

[00:05:36] And assume everybody's best intentions in working within that team. And when you're working with the team, try if you can to resist the urge to be the authority and have all the answers. If we come from a place of, I can do it better and quicker. You probably can, and that's probably why you're a leader, but it doesn't help your team to give them the answers more quickly than they can work them out for themselves.

[00:06:02] It doesn't help them grow as people and contributors, in the team, and it doesn't promote good teamwork. So really when we're working with the team it's much more powerful to the team members to treat them as equals and ask more questions rather than offering your own answers. And the other thing is, if people make mistakes, which inevitably they will, or have experiments that don't work, conduct autopsies so you understand what's happened and conduct them within the group.

[00:06:32] So let everybody share their ideas about that, but conduct those autopsies without blame. Again, this comes from Good to Great by Jim Collins. It's really, as a leader, you're investing in your team's development, not your own. We already know you're an expert, so now it's about bringing on the next generation of leaders.

[00:06:51] Teaching them how to be good players, good team members, and , in their own time, leaders as well. So clearly the biggest killer of that is micromanagement. Micromanagement, if it's coming from a place of fear and doubt and uncertainty in you and desperation in you, then do your own personal work around that.

[00:07:11] Just be authentic and real with people as well in that. If you're struggling, if you have a failure, if you're not meeting your targets, let the team know. Be the whole you, because when you are the whole you and you're honest with your team, you encourage the same by return. You help them to develop trust in you by how you respond to failure more than anything.

[00:07:34] Your failure and theirs.

[00:07:36] So the third point really is hire for attitude because you can teach skill. So really employ team players. If you have a fantastic individual who's not a good team player, maybe they're not a good fit for you. Employ people with an A player attitude. So get the right people on the bus, as Jim Collins would say.

[00:07:58] The strongest performing team would be the team with the musketeers kind of theme running through it. All for one and one for all. So hire people who are smarter than you by all means and capable of developing further. But hire for habits and talents and values over specific expertise.

[00:08:22] Hire smart, passionate people. Highly self motivated people who are capable of discipline. So you don't need to micromanage them, they will manage themselves. Everyone in a team needs to rise to the occasion of being open and honest, and curious and respectful and being responsible for finding and fixing problems because that way you're not developing a culture where problems are hidden for you out of shame and embarrassment and therefore you cannot fix those problems.

[00:08:55] Everybody needs to bring problems to the table so that they can be identified and fixed as a team. So three, higher for attitude. Four, clearly cultivate psychological safety and for many people you won't really know in depth what this means, even if you have psychological safety trainings going on at work, maybe you still won't be very clear about what psychological safety is and how exactly to come by that.

[00:09:20] So if you're a leader, you're responsible for the psychological safety of your team, even though you yourself might not be psychologically safe with your higher ups. We don't have to change the whole organization here, we just have to change the team that you're leading. So you have a responsibility to them to help them feel safe in their work with and for you and each other.

[00:09:44] Because really when they're psychologically safe, what this does is encourage innovation, creativity, their ability to speak up about difficulties and to challenge the status quo to improve things. To make experiments, to take risks, and to fail safely. And without those attributes, you can't fix anything that's broken.

[00:10:07] It'll just stay broken. If nobody wants to mention it and nobody wants to risk failing again, they're never going to bring problems or breakages to your attention. They're never going to improve the quality of performance of the team. Because in a fear based culture, creativity is not possible.

[00:10:23] People will not be that brave. If you can get to know your people, and what makes them tick, outside work, what interests them, what do they value? Really helps build the glue of a team and it helps you understand when you know what motivates an individual outside work, you know how to help promote their efforts inside your team.

[00:10:43] You know what's going to fire them up. You know how to deploy the tasks amongst the teams and you know their special skills and their personal attributes that will help them achieve better.

[00:10:54] And of course, when I talked about people being brave enough to point out problems and dare to take risk and fix things that are failing or broken. Really this is about another part of Good to Great Jim Collins is confronting brutal fact. You must be able to face the truth because the truth hidden is a problem that's going to explode in your face.

[00:11:18] So don't let any problem remain hidden. Really incent people to speak up and make it safe for them to do so. And really you can encourage it as an obligation to be candid with one another. Another terrific book is Creativity Inc. It's how Pixar developed trust and really strong teamwork in their animating teams where people were very sensitive and very creative and they elevated the performance of their teams

[00:11:52] to a repeatable level that was above any other animation company at that time. That book is by Ed Catmull, by the way. And I'm going to put in the show notes, as ever, the book on psychological safety by Timothy R. Clark. It tells you exactly how to fix the psychological safety errors that are occurring in your team at the moment.

[00:12:14] It's a very practical book for people who are not previously trained in building psychological safety. So that's four, psychological safety. Five is, Empower your team to solve their own problems. And Jim Collins talks about the Stockdale Paradox, which is a stoic acceptance of business realities coupled with an unwavering faith in eventual triumph.

[00:12:40] What a powerful concept to use to lead your team. So whatever the difficulties are in your team, in the performance of your team, in the business as a whole. A stoic acceptance of those realities and a confronting of the brutal facts coupled with an unwavering faith in eventual triumph. So you're investing belief in your team members as a cohesive group once you've built them into that cohesive unit.

[00:13:07] And I think one of the ways is to trust them, is to understand their special gifts and talents, is to push back on them, to help them learn to rise up rather than you just telling them the answer to things. So if people come to you for an answer to a problem, deferring if you like to their superior, to avoid risk, then really just say, okay you make your own suggestion first.

[00:13:31] And then we'll workshop that together. The other good book on this is 10X is Easier than 2X by Dan Sullivan. Very good about self managing teams. How you can build your organization or your teams to be as performant as those individual humans are capable of.

[00:13:48] So that's five. Empower your team to solve their own problems. Six. Model good communication skills and team behavior. All of the above books that I've mentioned talk about this. Be a great listener. Listen more than you talk. Take it on yourself if your team has a failure.

[00:14:06] You haven't supported them in a way that would work for them yet. You're working on it, but you're not there yet. And also give credit to your team members who produce results. Don't take the credit onto yourself. Very important for inspiring trust. And good communication.

[00:14:22] Be open and honest and direct with them. So this is about Radical Candor, Kim Scott. Be honest and candid with your people. Don't mask the truth. Don't hide the truth from them. Tell it like it is. Face reality and join together in working with that reality as it is.

[00:14:41] Being candid sometimes means owning up to your own mistakes. Or that you're struggling, or not meeting your targets. Be real with them. The more authentic you are with them, the more you will inspire trust in them, and the more they will be able to be authentic with you, and not have to meet some perfectionized ideal that they may think is expected of them at work.

[00:15:05] Take them as they are and you be as you are because they can learn from your mistakes as well as their own. And of course, no back channeling. If you're going to talk about something, talk about it as a team. Don't encourage sub meetings, chit chat to happen outside of meetings.

[00:15:22] Require your team to bring things into a meeting of the team to discuss or bring it into open communication to discuss. To avoid sharing their opinions in private, which lowers team morale every time. So six, model good communication and team behavior. Number seven, champion your team. Support your team in the environment outside of the team.

[00:15:48] So to superiors, to peers, to other teams, in public, have your own team's back. And if you need to, manage up . It's important for us as leaders to take responsibility for being a broker between teams. If 70 percent of human problems are due to miscommunication, then you be the conflict broker.

[00:16:11] You help teams understand one another and have a confluence ideas. So that they're not pulling in different directions and they don't encourage distrust or bad vibes between teams. You as a leader can broker those relationships between teams and also up the ladder. So number seven, champion your team.

[00:16:32] Number eight, don't assume always-on working is best. Greg McKeown, read the Essentialism book. Don't reward over work, plain and simple. Help your team to give the maximum value on their own contribution within work hours. If you feel that it's appropriate for you to answer messages 24x7, this is going to be a little bit tricky.

[00:16:56] And if you require outside hours responses from your team, you might want to rethink that strategy because it's not displaying trust and it's also requiring of them an always on mentality which will lead to burnout. So if you want to prevent burnout, rethink how you can help your team members contribute to their maximum potential within their work hours and not have them answering emails and messages, or having an eye out for those, during their downtime.

[00:17:28] So eight, don't assume always on work is best. Nine, reward team performance over individual success. And for this one, I rely on Sean Achor, who is a Harvard happiness researcher. He wrote a book called Big Potential, and it's really about extracting the best potential from your team and from teamwork. And he stresses very much that a team will always outperform an individual, no matter how great the individual is.

[00:17:55] If you want team performance , cohesion, bonding and mutual support, solving one another's problems instead of individual success, then you have to set up your team metrics to reward team performance over individual performance. However you structure that is up to you, but it has to be more important to them to support the team than to achieve an individual result.

[00:18:20] If you don't put that into your metrics, it's going to be very difficult to stimulate , particularly for high performing people who in the past have been rewarded for their individual contribution. So nine, reward team performance. Ten, support your team to work less but better. Essentialism by Greg McKeown.

[00:18:41] Supporting your team to work less but better must include the possibility of them failing, making mistakes and correcting them. So support them in that process to speedily expose errors. Allow them to experiment and then cut the experiment if it's not working.

[00:18:56] Allow them to fail. But teach them how to correct well as a team and promptly. To outperform they really do need time for experimentation and failure, and it has to be okay for them to do that. The other thing is don't get bogged down in how things are done around here, because typically there will be over restrictive elements of how things are done because how things are done tends to build up over months, years and decades and boss after boss after boss.

[00:19:29] It just adds more and more rules about the way we do things around here. And things always become more complex. So at some point, in order to solve problems in an innovative and creative way, they need to become more simple. So be a little bit careful about how things are done around here and how much you need to stick to those rules.

[00:19:50] Sometimes you have to, it's imperative. Sometimes it's expedient because it doesn't put anyone else's nose out of joint and sometimes it's just frankly cumbersome. So maybe you can support that process of detaching a little from the way things used to be done where it is supportive to performance.

[00:20:08] The other thing about supporting your team to work less but better is not imposing too many priorities on them. You may have requirements pushed on you as a leader that actually don't give any benefit to anyone else. Maybe it's just, again, the way things have always been done around here.

[00:20:24] We always do this report every month is a good one. Just question which of the imperatives your boss hands down to you actually is a priority and which is not. That's where you can clarify up the chain. What needs to be done and why? That's what I would be asking my boss. 

[00:20:44] What are the priorities and why? What need are they trying to fulfill at their level that they're asking this of you and you're asking this of your team? So be careful about managing priorities.

[00:20:55] So what I've covered there is some of the key points that will alleviate stress on your people and help them relax and perform better. And if you can do this, if you can support them to bond with you as a leader and to bond amongst themselves as a team and perform as a team,

[00:21:13] you will take such a significant amount of pressure off them that it's unlikely that they will ever fall into burnout. Maybe read some of the books that I've suggested. I'll put them all in the show notes. And if your team is approaching or in burnout, that too is fixable.

[00:21:30] I would welcome you to come and have a chat with me, let's make a plan for you and or your team to recover quickly and sustainably. And get back to the best performance, leadership, success, and enjoyment inside work and by the way, outside work. So if you'd like to come and talk to me, book an appointment at DexRandall. com. If you enjoyed this podcast episode, please share the podcast with other people you know who are in burnout. Or help me by rating and reviewing the podcast. Thank you so much for being here. If you have any questions or topics that you'd like me to cover on the podcast, leave me a note via the link in the show notes, and I will answer in a following episode.