Hey everyone, and welcome to today's episode of Developer Team.
My name is Jonathan Cottrell and my goal on this show is to help driven developers like you find clarity, perspective and purpose in their careers.
And in today's episode I want to talk about something that will challenge all three of those things.
We're gonna talk about burnout today.
And I specifically I wanna talk about a dimension of burnout that you may have more control over.
Then you realize and especially if you're a manager, one way that you can help your reports with their burnout without having to have a major, huge dip in productivity or some major threat to the work that you actually are doing.
So first I want to mention that burnout is actually a classification.
It shows up in the ICD-11, right, ICD-11.
I don't know what the actual way to describe that, you know, the ICD is.
But that's the international classification of diseases.
Now, they do not say that it is a disease, to be clear.
They instead call it a syndrome.
And I'll read directly from the ICD-11 as it states this.
It says burnout is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.
It's characterized by three dimensions.
One, feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion, right?
Feeling tired.
Two increased mental distance from one's job or feelings of negativity cynicism, related to one's job.
And then number three is reduced professional efficacy, right?
Being good at your job, okay?
Burnout refers specifically to phenomena in the occupational context and should not be applied to describe experiences in other areas of life.
So this is what the ICD-11 says.
And you'll notice a couple of things.
One, the amount of time that you work is not mentioned.
All right.
So this leads us to be able to conclude that the amount of time that you work is not a direct input to burnout.
It doesn't talk about the people that you work with.
It doesn't talk about your boss.
It doesn't talk about what kind of work you're doing.
It just talks about these three aspects or these three signs of burnout.
All right.
So those three things if you have, especially if you have all three of them, then burnout may be part of the reason why.
So I want to talk about a couple of different aspects and specifically, I want to give you a tool set that you can practically apply to be able to improve burnout.
This may not fix it.
It may not be the only thing that you can do.
Certainly, it isn't the only thing you can do.
But I do want to give you something that is more practical than the advice that you may hear.
So first, let's talk about the typical advice for someone who's experiencing burnout.
Take more vacation.
Find a new job.
Find something different that's not as demanding on you.
Another one is work less.
These all seem like they are solving the same problem, which is essentially do less right.
Try to reduce the amount of work that you're doing in order to deal with burnout.
And the reason why this is the most common go-to, It's because people are trying to affect the very first thing that we mentioned in that definition, which is successfully managing the chronic workplace stress.
So we are proxying the successful management of stress to less work.
So, in other words, if you have fewer opportunities to be stressed, then hopefully that will reduce the amount of stress that you have to deal with and therefore you'll be able to recover.
So this views it as kind of a kind of a tank filling or tank emptying philosophy, where the more work you do, the more stress accumulates.
And then in order to accumulate less stress, do less work.
Right.
This this makes sense from a pure kind of input output perspective.
And it may also work for most people, but it may not be effective practical, i imagine.
If somebody came to you and said just work less and you are driven in your career, that sounds like something that's hard to actually affect, right?
If you went to your boss and said I want to work less.
I want to reduce my stress by working less.
That it's most likely.
Most of you feel like that's not the best career move for you, even though staying burnt out is possibly a lot worse.
Right.
So so it leaves us in the kind of a difficult position where we have to choose between, you know, working less and regaining some of our sense of efficacy, for example, regaining some energy, reducing the negativity that we have about our job.
Or the alternative is to continue being burnout and try to find a different way around it, or maybe work through it somehow.
Or adapt, right?
Maybe we haven't felt the stress before and so we're hoping that somehow we just adapt to it.
But there is...
Other options exist, right?
If you look at the equation that this definition lays out for us, if we can find ways of successfully managing stress right or improving our recovery, if we can find ways of reducing the stress that we incur without necessarily reducing the work that we're doing, then we can improve our burnout metrics right.
We can improve our exhaustion.
We can improve our sense of negativity about our job.
We can improve our sense of efficacy.
So I want to talk about one specific.
There are plenty of ways that you may go about doing this, but one specific way that is shown in research to improve your stress level.
Right.
And and it will also improve your ability to clear that stress, to deal with the stress.
Specifically, I want to talk about agency or autonomy, the ability to make decisions.
And the easy way to remember is this.
If you're a manager, if you're an IC, wherever you are in the organization.
The easy way to remember this is in order to control stress, provide control.
In order to control stress, provide control.
This is agency and autonomy that we're talking about.
The ability to make decisions, the resources to actually carry out those decisions right, the trust that your decisions are actually worthwhile, that they can be acted on, and the kind of permission or freedom agency to go and actually act on them.
So it's very likely that, if you're experiencing burnout, Your burnout would be improved if the demand that was placed on you which, by the way, is kind of the primary driver of stress is demands.
If you had more resources to be able to deal with the demands.
The ratio of demand to resource or demand to agency.
The ratio of demand to ability to meet that demand is directly correlated to your stress.
This isn't a theory.
This is just a fact that your ability to handle things is going to have a direct connection to your stress level as a result of the things that people are handing you to handle.
Does that make sense?
So if you're thinking about how do I reduce my stress level?
If you were more capable, right?
And we'll talk about what I mean by capable here.
If you were more capable of handling the things that are being asked of you, then your stress level comes down.
And we can kind of prove this if you had a less capable machine.
Let's say that your work-provided laptop is hindered in some way.
Maybe every, you know, every two hours you have to restart your machine entirely and you have to.
I don't know.
This is a made up scenario, right?
It doesn't necessarily say anything about your personal capability.
It doesn't say anything about your skill.
It doesn't say anything about your energy levels.
It's entirely the environment that you're having to deal with Because you're getting slowed down.
Your sense of efficacy is reduced.
Your sense of flow is going to be reduced.
All of the autonomy and agency that you have is going to be hampered, hindered by the fact that you have this interruption in your work.
And this is one that is very kind of mechanical in nature, but there are a lot of interruptions that would fit in the same category in terms of hindering your agency, hindering your autonomy, slowing you down.
The resources are reduced.
And so the demands, the ratio of the demand to the resources, necessarily demand start going up on that ratio.
Right.
So what you want is demand.
Sufficient resources or even more resources available in order to meet the demand.
And resources here, I'm very broadly lumping in agency autonomy, the decision-making resources.
The more control you have, the more resources you have.
So, to meet the demands that you have, if you have more control, more resources, if you have what is necessary in order to do those things, then you're going to be less stressed by those demands.
So this can also extend into things that are actually skill-based.
So training.
If you are trained to be able to handle those particular demands and you have more efficacy at a baseline, then those demands are going to be less stressful to you.
If somebody asks you to do something that you're not very skilled at doing, they don't give you training, your tools are subpar then that's going to be more stressful, naturally.
So imagine two work weeks, exactly the same amount of time in those work weeks, 40, 45 hours.
And in one of those work weeks, you are given a bunch of tasks that you have no idea how to do.
You don't have good connections with your teammates.
You are getting, you know, Slack messages that are considered off hours, but you're still seeing them come through.
So your ability to recover after the stressful day is reduced.
All right.
So now let's let's imagine adding agency on autonomy.
OK.
Oh, yeah.
And in that first example, you're required to be on specific set hours.
OK.
Specific hours for work.
And, you know, it's highly tightly controlled which hours you're working.
Now let's imagine in the second scenario you're working the same number of hours, but you have more autonomy over when you're working, you have better tooling, you have better connections with your, with your teammates, with people who know the work that you're doing.
The things that you don't have the capability of doing.
You're able to either delegate or get training in order to accomplish.
You have more resources to accomplish what you need to accomplish.
You have more decision-making power.
You have autonomy over your time.
These two scenarios are drastically different with the same number of work hours.
The amount of stress that you're going to experience in the first one is much higher.
Right.
Regardless of the amount of time that you're working.
So the goal here is to create an environment where you have higher agency and higher autonomy, where you have more control over how you do your job.
More control over the decisions that you're making, more resources in order to make more decisions.
When you talk to your manager.
Next time you talk to them, bring up this idea that, especially if you're feeling burnout, try to pinpoint right.
This is a good exercise to take away from this.
Try to pinpoint what resources could you have, Whether that's something that you can go buy, if it's training, if it is a connection to a mentor in the company maybe it's another person working on the team with you.
There's a variety of things that you may fit into this bucket, but what could you have that would improve the efficacy of your time, that would improve your autonomy and agency, given the problem that you have to solve?
Talk to your manager and bring those things to them.
The goal of a good manager.
One of the goals of a good manager is to ensure that your ability to do your job is not hampered, that you aren't hindered by a very solvable problem.
Training is very often accessible.
Getting someone inside of the company connecting you to that person, or even outside of the company connecting you to the right resources.
The right mentoring is usually accessible.
So it's very important to recognize that.
Burnout is a dangerous state to be in, right?
The syndrome of burnout.
If you're seeing those signs, pay attention to it and try to understand.
Is this a problem that I could solve in another way aside from reducing my sheer volume of work?
Perhaps it's trading some work so that the work I'm getting is more interesting and keeps me engaged longer and therefore I can spend more of my mental energy against it right, because it's not going to stress me out as much or it's going to moderate my kind of ceiling for stress.
What I'm able to handle.
That stress ceiling is going to be a little bit higher for things that I'm interested in.
There are a lot of different ways to kind of affect this.
But remember, if you want to control burnout, add control.
Add control.
This is agency autonomy resources.
These are the things that are going to control burnout in a more sustainable manner.
It's very unlikely that you can go on unlimited PTO in reality.
How many weeks before you are just no longer on the team?
Right.
How many weeks are you willing to to give your reports as a manager before you realize that there's actually a different problem that you need to solve?
Right.
Now, of course, just to be clear, I'm all for taking PTO.
I'm all for having a. manageable workload in your life.
But if our only lever in our work life is reducing the work that we're doing to an absolute minimum, If we can't find ways of becoming more effective and becoming – and when I say effective here I mean feeling that efficacy and feeling the control over our decisions.
If we can't find those ways, then we are headed for burnout anyway.
Because the demands will continue increasing and us meeting those demands is what we actually want to be able to do being able to be efficacious, right.
Making decisions and affecting the world around us.
That's actually our ultimate goal.
We want to improve our efficacy.
And in order to do that, We need to find tooling and resources and ways of unblocking that control improvement.
That's my recommendation for you.
The tooling is very simple here.
The recommendation is very simple.
It's really about connecting the dots between the resource deficiency and where you are in your career today.
Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea.
But I also believe that this direction will lead you to a more sustainable path, regardless of the sheer volume of hours that you're working.
Thank you so much for listening.
And until next time, enjoy your tea.
