Inspiring and innovative leadership is most successful when it is sustainable. Sustaining qualifying leadership depends on the wellbeing of the leader–managers are people too, after all! Slipping into a pattern of working too hard is easy when you feel like you have to provide stability and encouragement for others, but creating a personal infrastructure of clarity, courage, and confidence allows you to support and lead while also maintaining personal wellbeing, transforming the grind into more rewarding daily productivity.
Burnout and fatigue from the covid pandemic have been so prevalent. One of the great things about this saturation of information on burnout and fatigue in the last few years is that it is bringing to light a real and pervasive issue in workplace culture and challenging us to come up with solid solutions for helping team members and leaders alike to practice self-care and advocate for positive culture shifts at work.
So how do you stop yourself from succumbing to burnout? Take the time to acknowledge when you are feeling overworked or burned out–when the spark that keeps you going throughout the day just isn’t there. Then access your courage and your confidence and start allowing yourself to take care of your own wellbeing at work.
We hear the term “bandwidth” thrown around a lot, and have probably even used it as part of our positive boundary setting– “I just don’t have the bandwidth for that right now.” Taking the time to audit where you are actually putting that bandwidth is a way to reverse engineer your workplace wellbeing.
Treat yourself to an energy audit. So as you sit with your first (let’s be honest–you’re having more than one) cup of coffee in the morning and trying to summon the will to start your workday, take a moment to think about where you put your energy on a daily basis. You might even want to write some things down, or, if you are truly a procrastinator like some of us (ahem), you might want to make a full on beautiful spreadsheet or hand-drawn chart that gives you a visual representation of your time. What gives you energy? What takes it away? Are you spending a lot of your energy putting out fires? Answering emails? In repetitive zoom calls? Doing admin? What about that great work you were born to do? Do you spend a lot of time on small details that could be delegated to someone else, or collaborated on so that you aren’t shouldering the whole thing?
When you have divvied up your energy spending, take a long look at where you want your energy to go. Maybe there’s a new project or initiative you’d like to implement, but just can’t seem to find the time or energy to get it organised. Or maybe you’d like to spend less time in meetings. Creating an actual energy budget will help you to manage your time and your bandwidth so that you don’t find yourself running in a million different directions. Easy to say, hard to do I know. If something comes up that is not in your budget, try to resist spending your energy on it. Delegate it, or reevaluate whether it needs to be addressed at all. Of course, this takes trust. It means trusting that some of those details can be handled by someone else or perhaps can actually be deprioritized right now. Just remember that the reason you have these team members or employees is that they are talented and driven, and they have an energy budget waiting to be used as well.
When everyone is pursuing their wellbeing at work, everyone can move from simply being productive to feeling fulfilled as well. Start spending your energy wisely–being mindful of where you put your focus–and you’ll find that everyone is able to stop grinding and start innovating.