When should a boss step in? What my own burnout taught me about managing others

Joanne Chia began dreaming about Excel sheets. Numbers, unfinished financial reports and problems from the hair care business she founded followed her into sleep, even after seven or eight hours in bed.

The experience made her ask whether she was burned out. A few years earlier, when she first became a manager, she had asked herself the same question. At the time, heightened stress and exhaustion felt like burnout. Looking back, she believes she had instead been depleted by a steep learning curve and by tasks she had not yet learned to do well.

The two experiences convinced her that people use “burnout” to describe very different forms of exhaustion. Now that she is an employer, the distinction has become more difficult and more important. When an employee says they feel overwhelmed, she has to ask whether the workload is excessive or whether the person is experiencing the discomfort of learning something hard.

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Was I too harsh?

She also has to examine her own role. The difficult question, she writes, is how to tell the difference between an employee struggling with a problem and an employer contributing to that struggle.

As a new manager, Chia found herself worrying not only about difficult conversations but also about employees’ reactions afterward. She could spend three days replaying a 15-minute feedback discussion and wondering whether she had been too harsh or damaged someone’s confidence. Her earlier view of work had been more straightforward: work hard, solve problems and figure things out when necessary. Managing other people showed her how much more complicated that approach could become.

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Did she understand what I meant? Is she upset with me now?