Not long ago, I came across a post that stuck with me—it perfectly captured a widespread misunderstanding on workplace burnout. It said, "Burnout doesn't prove your dedication; it highlights your inefficiencies. Upgrade your strategy."
While I agree that burnout doesn't prove your dedication, I would have also agreed to the second part, if this was speaking to the organizational or societal level, but it wasn't. It was aimed at the individual. That is problematic as it oversimplifies a complex psychological and physiological phenomenon affecting millions of workers worldwide.
Yes, our individual beliefs and behaviors must be acknowledged as contributors to burnout. However, the follow-up statements mischaracterize the nature of burnout and unfairly place the burden of addressing it solely on individuals.
Burnout isn’t just a personal problem—it’s a broken system problem.
The World Health Organization recognizes burnout as an occupational phenomenon characterized by three dimensions: exhaustion, cynicism, and reduced professional efficacy. To suggest that burnout merely reflects personal inefficiency ignores the complex interplay of individual, organizational, and societal factors.
For example, in healthcare, workers often feel helpless when systemic barriers prevent them from providing the care their patients deserve. Teachers in underfunded schools watch their students suffer the consequences of inadequate resources. Leaders are forced to navigate decisions that challenge their moral compass, while researchers face pressure to compromise safety standards for the sake of speed or profit.
Each are at a heighten risk of burnout not because of their poor strategy, but because of fundamental misalignment between diminished control, lack of support, professional ethics, organizational demands and systemic issues. Suggesting that healthcare workers who experienced significantly high levels of burnout during the pandemic simply needed to "upgrade their strategy" demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of their reality. No amount of personal efficiency can resolve these structural conflicts.
There is real danger when we over-focus on the individual because it:
Takes the onus off of organizations to create healthy work environments
Stigmatizes those experiencing burnout, adding shame to their already heavy burden
Prevents necessary systemic changes by misdirecting all effort and resources to make people better at work instead of making work better for people.
Over the last fifteen years I have been working at the intersection of organizational culture, emotional intelligence, and personal energy management. What I have learned is that to truly address burnout, we need a more nuanced approach aimed at three levels:
Individual Level
While personal strategies play a role in preventing burnout, they are just one piece of the puzzle. In full transparency, my book, Dear Work, Something Has to Change! focuses primarily on the individual level—our relationship with work and how it contributes to burnout.
However, at its core, the book emphasizes that workplaces aren’t independent entities that change on their own—they are made up of people. Change doesn’t happen simply because it should; it happens when the people within organizations shift their mindsets, behaviors, approaches and priorities. Only then can we collectively reshape how work actually works.
In other words, systemic change isn’t automatic—it requires people recognizing the challenges, taking action, and pushing for solutions together. While self-care and addressing personal beliefs, habits, and values can help and are where we have the most control, they are not a cure-all.
Organizational Level
Burnout doesn’t just happen because people work too hard or rest too little—it happens when cultures make it impossible to work in a sustainable, fulfilling way. Employers and leaders play a critical role in shaping the conditions that either fuel burnout or prevent it. Here are some approaches that should be considered:
1. Make Workloads Realistic and Sustainable
Leaders must assess whether expectations align with available time and resources, rather than assuming their teams will just “make it happen.”
The approach of "more with less" can't mean demanding more work in less time—it means prioritizing tasks that matter and eliminating unnecessary ones.
Leaders need to model sustainable work habits themselves. This can be by sharing non-work hobbies in team meetings, taking breaks that are visible, and not rewarding overwork.
2. Clarify Roles, Responsibilities, and Boundaries
Unclear job expectations and blurred boundaries between roles lead to stress, frustration, and burnout.
Organizations should regularly evaluate whether employees’ roles are well-defined and feasible or if “scope creep” has added unsustainable expectations.
Leaders need to reinforce the importance of boundaries, such as respecting non-working hours and ensuring time off is truly time off.
3. Ensure Fair and Transparent Decision-Making
Burnout isn’t just about workload—it’s also about how much control employees have over their work. When decisions feel arbitrary, inconsistent, or unfair, engagement and energy plummet.
Organizations and their leaders need to foster psychological safety, where their people feel they can voice concerns, ask for clarity, and be part of decision-making processes that affect them.
Transparency in promotions, workload distribution, and performance evaluations helps prevent burnout stemming from uncertainty, frustration, and perceived inequity.
4. Train Leaders to Support, Not Just Manage
Leadership that focuses on brining the best out of people is very different then leadership focused on squeezing the most out of people.
Organizations need to equip leaders with skills in emotional intelligence, personal well-being management, and the ability to recognize signals of fatigue transitioning to burnout in others and themselves before it escalates.
Leaders, need to keep space in calendars to check in with employees regularly—not just on deliverables, but on well-being, workload, and what how fulfilling their work-life balance is.
5. Move Beyond “Perks” to Real Cultural Change
Free snacks and wellness apps won’t fix burnout if employees are drowning in unsustainable expectations.
Organizations should assess whether their culture truly supports well-being or simply rewards burnout behaviors (praising employees for late nights, excessive responsiveness, or “going above and beyond” at the cost of their well-being and personal quality of life).
Societal Level
Acknowledge that some forms of burnout reflect broader social issues requiring policy-level interventions.
For example:
Healthcare burnout is exacerbated by understaffed hospitals, inadequate mental health resources, and systemic issues like insurance constraints and patient overload. Addressing it requires healthcare policy reforms, better staffing ratios, and mental health support for medical professionals.
Teacher burnout isn’t just about long hours; it stems from chronic underfunding, oversized classrooms, and unrealistic expectations placed on educators. Policy changes around education funding, equitable resource distribution, and workload expectations are necessary to create sustainable teaching environments.
Gig economy and low-wage worker burnout is driven by job insecurity, lack of benefits, and the expectation to always be “on.” Solutions require legislative efforts, such as minimum wage adjustments, labor protections, and access to paid leave.
Parental burnout is amplified by the lack of affordable childcare, parental leave policies, and workplace flexibility. Countries with strong parental leave and childcare support see lower levels of burnout among working parents.
If we only focus on individual fixes, we ignore the or organizational and structural forces fueling burnout at scale.
Lastly, solving burnout isn’t just about preventing harm; it’s about creating the conditions for people to thrive. That’s where my work on LeadFULL Way comes in.
The LeadFULL Way - A Whole-System, Whole-Person Approach
LeadFULL is vitality-powering approach to leading ourselves and others in the creation of human-centered excellence. The FULL in LeadFULL represents a fundamental truth about what makes people—and organizations—thrive with vitality. It requires honoring the full, multifaceted spectrum of what it means to be human, both at work and in life. It embraces the full range of emotions we feel, the diverse needs we have, and the realities we navigate.
Most importantly, it honors the full picture of what is truly needed for people to thrive—not just in terms of productivity, but in creating the energy, meaning, and sustainability necessary for fulfilling work and a fulfilling life.
The next time someone suggests burnout is merely a matter of personal inefficiency and can be solved with a little more self-care, challenge that narrative and interject the necessary nuance—not just for yourself, but for those around you. We don’t solve burnout by individually working smarter; we solve it collectively by working differently—together.