Recently, I was coaching a client who shared a telling experience about their leadership team. Every week, during their meetings, leaders—from top executives to mid-level managers—would openly express how overwhelmed they were. The conversation wasn’t just about workloads but about survival strategies. They shared their secret tips to protect their teams from burnout, such as delaying emails to avoid late-night pressure or timing updates for after the weekend. These leaders cared deeply about their teams’ well-being, but the more we unpacked the situation, the more we realized that this “protection” wasn’t enough. While trying to shield their employees, the leadership team hadn’t yet grasped the severity of burnout or its long-term consequences.
This lack of understanding became even more apparent when I discussed my research for my upcoming book on stress and burnout. I’ve been interviewing individuals who have lived through intense periods of overwork, often while managing personal crises, and many of them are still recovering years later. Not months—years. This recovery process is usually long and painful, highlighting the seriousness of what burnout can do to both individuals and teams.
As I talked to my client, it became clear that there was a lot of confusion about burnout, how deeply it can affect people, and what real recovery looks like. Burnout isn’t just about feeling tired or stressed—it’s about a total depletion of emotional, physical, and mental resources. And this was something that many of the leaders in my client’s team didn’t yet fully understand.
The Three-Stage Process of Burnout Recovery
After discussing the realities of burnout, I shared a three-stage approach that I’ve developed to help leaders and their teams not only recover from burnout but also prevent it from recurring. This approach focuses on immediate relief, long-term recovery, and addressing the culture that often perpetuates burnout.
Stage 1: Address the Immediate ‘Pain’
The first step is to relieve the acute symptoms of burnout.
Burnout doesn’t happen overnight—it’s the result of prolonged, unmanaged stress. By the time someone realizes they’re burned out, they’re often dealing with a range of symptoms like exhaustion, anxiety, irritability, and cognitive difficulties.
To tackle these symptoms, it’s essential to make immediate changes that alleviate the most intense stressors. These changes might involve:
Reducing workload: Temporarily cutting down on non-essential tasks to give the person some breathing room.
Delegating responsibilities: Leaders should lean on their teams more, sharing the load rather than trying to carry everything themselves.
Setting boundaries: Leaders and employees alike need to set clear boundaries around work hours and expectations for availability, especially in remote or hybrid work environments where the line between work and life is often blurred.
The goal of this first stage is to give the person some relief from the constant pressure. It’s like putting out a fire before you can start rebuilding.
Stage 2: Rest and Recovery
Once the immediate symptoms have been addressed, the next step is to build rest and recovery into the person’s schedule.
Although those are important this isn’t just about taking a break or going on vacation, it’s about creating sustainable habits that allow for regular recovery over the long term.
In this stage, I emphasized the stress/rest cycle, an important concept in avoiding burnout. Resilience—essentially a person’s capacity to manage stress—is like battery life. When someone is dealing with sustained periods of stress without sufficient recovery, their battery drains. The only way to recharge is through intentional, regular rest periods after stress cycles: hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly. In other words, resilience isn’t just a trait you have; it’s something you actively maintain, like a phone that constantly needs recharging.
This recovery process might involve:
Scheduled downtime: Ensuring that time is deliberately set aside for rest, both during the workday (through regular breaks) and outside of it (with evenings and weekends truly off).
Fostering personal well-being: Encouraging self-care practices like exercise, meditation, and hobbies that allow for emotional and mental recovery.
Creating a rhythm of work and rest: Teaching people how to work in focused blocks of time and then rest fully, rather than staying “on” all the time.
In my interviews for the book, many people told me how difficult it was to bounce back after they had burned out. Their recovery wasn’t just a matter of weeks but stretched into years. Many wished they had recognized the need for consistent rest before reaching the breaking point. Rest and recovery are not luxuries—they are necessary for sustaining long-term productivity and mental health. And the only way to keep your resilience battery fully charged is to be deliberate about your recovery during and after periods of stress.
Stage 3: Addressing Team Burnout Culture
Perhaps the most crucial—and challenging—step is addressing the broader team burnout culture.
No matter how much progress an individual makes, if they’re surrounded by a team or a workplace that glorifies overwork and constant hustle, sustaining that change is nearly impossible. One of the most striking realizations in my coaching session was how deeply burnout culture had taken root in the leadership team itself. Even though they wanted to protect their employees, they were still caught in the same cycle of overwork and stress.
A toxic burnout culture can create a sense of stigma and guilt when one person makes positive changes to their work-life balance. If a leader or employee starts setting boundaries, taking breaks, or pushing back on unreasonable demands, they may feel judged by others who are still trapped in the “hustle” mentality. This makes it very difficult to create lasting, meaningful change.
Here’s how to address team burnout culture:
Model healthy behaviours: Leaders need to set the example by openly taking breaks, enforcing boundaries, and showing that rest is a part of their success—not a hindrance. If employees see their leaders constantly working late or responding to emails at all hours, they’ll feel pressured to do the same.
Create a culture of openness: It’s important to create an environment where talking about burnout, stress, and mental health is normalized. Leaders should encourage employees to be open about their struggles and make it clear that asking for help is not a sign of weakness.
Set realistic expectations: Leadership teams must evaluate whether the demands they’re placing on employees—and on themselves—are realistic. Unrealistic expectations are one of the biggest contributors to burnout. By setting achievable goals and recognizing that rest is a key part of sustained productivity, leaders can help prevent burnout from taking hold in the first place.
Breaking the Cycle
As I shared with my client, breaking the cycle of burnout requires a fundamental shift in how we think about work, productivity, and well-being.
It’s not just about protecting employees from burnout through clever tactics like delayed emails or hidden workload management. It’s about creating a culture where well-being is prioritized, where rest is normalized, and where the relentless drive for productivity is balanced with long-term sustainability.
Burnout is not just a personal issue—it’s a systemic one. And it’s a problem that can’t be solved by one person quietly changing their habits while everyone else keeps pushing forward. It requires collective action, from leadership teams down to individual employees, to create an environment where mental health is valued as much as output.
The Path to Sustainable Leadership
Burnout culture, especially in leadership, is insidious. It’s easy to get caught up in the pressure to constantly perform and to assume that leaders must always keep going, no matter how they feel.
But as I’ve learned from my work and from speaking with countless individuals for my book, the long-term consequences of burnout are serious—and recovery is slow.
The three-stage process I shared with my client—relieving immediate symptoms, implementing rest and recovery, and addressing team culture—offers a roadmap not just for surviving burnout, but for creating lasting change. By addressing both the personal and systemic factors that contribute to burnout, leaders can protect themselves and their teams from the long-term damage that burnout culture inflicts. It’s time to stop managing burnout and start preventing it, together.
Resilience is a battery that only recharges through recovery after stress. Without changes to rest habits on an hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis, the battery drains, leaving individuals at risk of long-term burnout. Let’s ensure that we’re not just surviving the stress, but actively building the resilience that sustains us for the future.
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