Each of these tools is part of the Vital Leadership Program that we offer leaders who are feeling called to step into the most vibrant versions of themselves.  

• Restore Your Trust in Your Sensing. When we are burned out, we lose trust in ourselves and our own perception of reality. Find ways to reconnect to your sensing, especially to what calls you in life. Reconnecting to joy and meaning is what pulls us forward and through the grey landscape of self-doubt, exhaustion, and cultural nihilism. Then you have your purpose fuel.
  
  
• Rhythms of aliveness. Each of us is a RHYTHMIC being across scales of time. It's easy to forget that when most organizations emphasize continuous upward growth.  In this tool, we encourage you to identify the particular things that fill you up. Rather than designing from a place of depletion, we encourage you to imagine a design where you are regularly feeling the most alive you've ever felt in life. This intentional scaffolding of rhythms and devoted practices can put you in a position to accomplish higher quality work in fewer hours while having a more balanced, fulfilling life. To find what these are ask questions like:
  • What gives me rest, renewal, and regeneration?
  • What feeds my spirit?
  • What makes me feel powerful?
  • What habits do I want to stop doing to reclaim my aliveness?
    
    
• Barriers to Aliveness. This is about shifting your perspective. Oftentimes the greatest barriers to choosing aliveness are our own inner narratives or programming. We all have challenging things happen to us. This is a fact of life. Oftentimes though, the magnitude of ongoing difficulty we experience has more to do with the inner narratives we construct than the actual events they are about. This exercise invites you to become more aware of one story you tell yourself that obstructs or disperses your aliveness.
   
• Develop Daily Power Practices. When we identify and implement daily practices to scaffold our day, orient us to our sovereignty, and align with who and how we wish to be in life — we unlock great inner power. Intentionally choosing how we orient ourselves to meet each day determines so much of what unfolds in our lives. Similarly, an intentional ending and closure of our day helps us digest, learn, and integrate all the experiences of each day. 
   
• Operating Rhythms.  By setting intentional operating rhythms (rather than letting your week's calendar just happen based on who sends invites first) we create an intentional energetic flow to our day. Identify the components of your weekly operating rhythm to give you balance between the work you need to do to fulfill day-to-day commitments and the work to grow systems and structures for future systems evolution. Oftentimes, we can neglect the former and get so engrossed with the day-to-day. But designing in regular systems creation time, as well as regular strategizing and retrospecting time, will massively uplevel your weekly work and capacity.

Track the Signals of Burnout

• Use our free resource to track the signals of burnout. While these are general patterns we have seen, everyone adapts to stress differently. 
  
  
• Proactively set up regular ways to check in on the team's wellbeing (including their aliveness).
   

Take a Stand for the Boundaries that Matter Most

• When everything is a priority, nothing is. Have a conversation routinely with your team about the planned and unplanned requests that make up the total workflow. Getting clarity on the things that end up being most disruptive to the day-to-day activities can help accurately gauge the team's collective capacity.
   
• Provide air cover and ground support for your team. If you operate in a complex network or bureaucracy, guidance, directives, and strategy will be coming from many directions. Keeping an eye out for competing priorities, unclear guidance or unreasonable expectations will help shield your team from the nonsense that grinds people's gears. 
  
  
• Make working on weekends the exception, not the rule.
  
  
• When someone has their status set as “Do Not Disturb,” honor that. Private, uninterrupted spaces in what can feel like an “always-on” environment encourages everyone’s individual well-being.
  
  

Lead By Example

• If you ask your team to prioritize their wellbeing and then they see you skipping meals, working late hours, and sending emails on the weekend, they will be hearing a very different message. 
  
  

• Emphasize with them the support you have recruited from senior leadership or other parts of the org to honor the cyclicality of energy. Everyone deserves to have fully restorative nighttime. 
  
  

• If you work across timezones or have a hybrid team design with some in the office and some working remote, set a core set of hours that everyone can expect each other to be available for meetings (e.g., 11-3 PM EST) to protect flexibility. 
  
  

• When team members take a vacation, role model easing things off their plates before they leave and when they return (vs. what's typical, which is dumping before the person heads out). Set and maintain a norm that emails should not be answered during vacation time. 
  
  

Ensure Teammates Aren't Falling Through the Cracks

• Feeling unappreciated and/or ignored is a major contributor to the 'Neglect' burnout type. Pay attention to newer teammates or those with very specific development goals and make sure they are getting connected with the support they need.
  
  

Make Tracking and Preventing the Signs of Burnout a Community Effort

• Talk regularly about 'more intense' and 'less intense' periods that can be planned for. Just like elite athletes do, create the space for BOTH recovery and performance.
  
  
• Ask your team what they feel are the biggest contributors to their feelings of stress. Consider having them take this assessment and discuss as a group what your results were.
  
  
• Encourage the team to talk about the symptoms of burnout and to check in with each other if they notice these in one another.
  
  
• Teams or team members who recently joined your organization are having a tough go at feeling like they are a part of something. With the number of meetings on calendars seeming to only increase, finding time to network and connect with other coworkers is hard, especially with already packed workloads. Give these people extra attention to ensure they feel included.
  
  

Build Belonging

• Try to make in-person meetings land on a specific day of the week, making it easier for those who choose to come into the office to get the benefits of seeing one another and having informal chances to connect.
  
  
• Talk collectively and 1:1 if folks feel like they have the resources they need to do their jobs well, to the degree you can, move obstacles that make no sense out of their way.

Reconsider Role Designs, Career Pathing, and Rebalance Workloads Where Possible

• Recalibrate Expectations. Much has changed after the pandemic. Positions that were open due to layoffs or attrition have left workloads to be picked up by others. Where are their pockets of burnout in the organizations where expectations might be high/unrealistic? 
  
  
• Consider ways your management can take meaningful action to rebalance workloads: Hire more employees, occasionally outsource to contractors, and reassign work to less busy team members.
  
  
• Longer-term, consider adopting more decentralized forms of management including self-management where dynamic roles, org structure, and compensation structures allow people closest to the need to adaptively shift how resources are deployed.
  
  
• Design roles to amplify sovereignty. Jobs designed to enhance autonomy do so by providing clear expectations for outcomes and boundaries. They also empower employees with a level of decision-making power over the types of work they do and the methods they use to achieve their goals and develop professionally. 
  
  
• Empower managers with role-related redesign exercises that allow managers and teammates to collaboratively approach a job redesign (e.g., building a reintegrate plan after being away, problem analysis of work situation, identifying work or processes that are no longer adding value).
  
  

Invest in Development

• Help workers cultivate positive emotion, supportive relationships, connection to meaning, and to build a sense of accomplishment/achievement - all essential tonics to burnout.
  
  
• Help workers connect with a sense of belonging and learn how to make spaces more psychologically safe.
  
  
• Proactively expand wellness programs and employee benefits (e.g., paid time off for mental health, stress management training).
  
  

Manage Performance

• Make the process of setting performance expectations more collaborative. At a minimum, increase transparency around how these goals are set. When goals are set for workers that feel arbitrary, it leaves them feeling disconnected from their own development process.
  
  

Check-in with the Promise Employees are Recruited and Onboarded With

• Check the Integrity of Your Psychological Contract. The “grass is always greener” can be true for any role a new joiner takes on. But when core psychological contracts around levels of support, cultural norms, or values feel “broken” between an employer and employee it can feel more like the reality of the organization was not truthfully represented.
  
  

Set Boundaries at an Organizational Level

• Encourage real weekends and holidays and role model taking this time off at the highest levels of the organization. Amazing example from a 2018 HBR piece where “German auto manufacturer Daimler set a bold example when it launched its “Mail on Holiday” program that autodeletes an employee’s incoming emails while on vacation so they can fully disconnect. The sender is then notified that the email has been deleted and given the option to reach out to a colleague or resend the email when the employee is back in the office.”
  
  

Connect People With the Resources They Need to Do Their Job Well

• Connect your people with the tools they need. Not having the resources to do their job well is one of the number one ways workers receive the message that they are not valued. If there are software, equipment, or supplies that workers feel are essential to do their work, consider degrees of budgetary freedom to allow these teams to get what’s needed.