How leaders can cut down on burnout in staff

Physicians Practice: How can leadership practices both support resilience in teams and also reduce the structural contributors to burnout?

Kem Tolliver: One thing I advise the organizations I work with is to listen to the unspoken messages. Hear that—what are people not saying? Who was previously engaged but is no longer engaged?

As leaders, we are executors. We are strategic thinkers looking at teams globally. But what we also need to do is hear what’s not being said. Burnout doesn’t typically manifest with someone telling you, “Hey, I’m burned out.” The way burnout shows up is through errors, turnover, dissatisfaction, and disengagement.

My recommendation is to listen for those unspoken messages in your team. In order to help our teams with burnout, we need to recognize that they are burned out. That means identifying the context clues so we can provide them with the resources they need.

Another way we can help our teams is by not creating processes that contribute to burnout. I don’t want to oversimplify this, but I’ve seen teams—and I have teams—that need to log into seven different platforms a day. Is that necessary?

We need to ask ourselves: What can we do to improve workflows? Can we create interoperability, interface technologies, or automate repetitive processes? From a leadership perspective, the key is listening for the unspoken messages while also identifying the ways we may be contributing to burnout through processes that could be modified.