Strategies to prevent burnout based on the experiences of leaders who seem to be immune

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After the nurse checked Kandi Wiens’ blood pressure for a fourth time on a routine medical check-up in 2011, the doctor asked the management consultant, “What’s going on? How are you feeling?”
“I’m fine,” she replied. But the doctor shook her head, declared “you are not fine,” and ordered Ms. Wiens to go home and stay in bed for three days so her sky-high blood pressure might come down.
Ms. Wiens’ reaction may be familiar to executives and busy professionals. Her first thought: “I can’t call in sick – I have a leadership development program to run next week!” The second thought: “Thank God. I finally have a legitimate excuse to sleep.” Her third thought: “She’s absolutely right. I am not fine.”
As Ms. Wiens faced up to her burnout, she realized it wasn’t just about the pace and workload but more importantly the fact she was constantly chasing other people’s goals rather than her own. “I dissolved into tears when I finally admitted to myself that I felt deeply disconnected from my true purpose – and worse yet, that I had been so busy overachieving and pushing myself and people pleasing that I wasn’t even sure what that was,” she writes in Burnout Immunity.
She decided to study leaders under dangerous levels of stress – seven or higher on a 10-point scale – and to her surprise found many had managed to avoid burnout. “No matter what role or industry they were in, no matter their level of seniority, no matter how they’d been raised or by whom, the one thing those with burnout immunity shared was a high degree of emotional intelligence,” she notes.
That may not be an obvious connection. But EI tends to have four components: self awareness, self management, social awareness and relationship management. Those skills, when highly developed, gave the executives superior coping abilities, which helped them successfully manage stress and immunize them against burnout. “That experience clarified for me a key fact: No one is immune to stress, but everyone can acquire burnout immunity,” she says, because EI is a skill we can develop.
At the University of Pennsylvania, where she later obtained her doctorate in organizational learning, she found a method for regulating her stress response that she now regularly uses: Clinical psychologist Howard Stevenson’s CLCBE Method, which stands for calculate, locate, communicate, breathe and exhale. Here’s how to apply it:
The method is aimed to reduce stress quickly, ideally within 60 seconds. As she increased her awareness skills, Ms. Wiens, now an executive coach, found that for low levels of stress, she could regulate herself and return to thinking clearly with just the deep breathing. But for higher levels, the full five steps were needed to keep calm and maintain a professional demeanour.
Beyond that tactic, you will need deeper emotional intelligence strategies to stay in control. Here are three she distilled from the experiences of the executives she studied:
Burnout is common these days. You need to be aware of the danger and deal with stress effectively or you may, to your surprise and chagrin, find yourself some day ordered to convalescence from burnout.
Cannonballs
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.