How people leaders can combat their own burnout before helping employees do the same

People are burned out. What’s worse, the people leading the people are burned out, too.

Nearly all HR pros (95%) feel proud of the work they do, but almost half (47%) admit that work negatively affects their well-being and mental health, according to a Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM) survey published earlier this year.

Daisy Auger-Domínguez, knows this feeling all too well. After more than 15 years in HR, she quit her job as the CPO at Vice to focus on her mental health. During this time, she realized how prolific burnout was within the people profession and wrote Burnt Out to Lit Up: How to Reignite the Joy of Leading People to let her colleagues know they’re not alone.

Auger-Domínguez discussed her book with HR Brew.

What personal experiences do you bring to this book?

What I write about in the book is what I believe is this collective exhaustion that we have all faced the last four years…I fundamentally believe that to lead well, we have to live well. And those of us who lead are most prone to burnout because…we have drank the Kool-Aid [and,] for some reason we feel that we need to push through, and have more grit and resilience than everybody else, and we have to push ourselves longer and harder to achieve results, and that makes us more susceptible to burnout.

I wanted to write a book that I call a “no-nonsense love letter to managers,” or anyone who’s leading people. And, I wrote it in a tone that it would be like you and I having coffee…[It’s] me sharing my stories, and sharing the stories of those that I have witnessed and experienced over the last couple of years. And, then also sharing research and practices that come from academics, that come from mental health practitioners, [and] that come from wellness experts. So, I pull all of these resources to hopefully help the reader…find practices and tools and perhaps some cheeky humor that makes them laugh and say, “Yeah, that’s me.”

What’s HR’s role in mitigating employee burnout?

As HR practitioners, we have this tremendous responsibility and, frankly, honor, to create the conditions for employees, and the people who lead and manage them to do so in a healthy and productive way…I know it’s challenging when you’ve got demands, and deadlines, and milestones, and KPIs that have to be met…This is where HR comes in, where we can have the conversations, where we can pull the tools and the resources.

How can people leaders relieve their own exhaustion before helping others?

We have to create that separation. I talk about boundaries in my book, and I think that declaring boundaries is a way of declaring to the world that you matter. When we declare that we matter, we declare that others matter, too. And we tend to think of these actions as selfish, and they’re actually quite generous. They are leaning on our humanity in a way that we’ve been, for some reason, conditioned to believe that we can’t talk or engage in conversations about what makes us whole and what makes us better in workplaces, because that feels “too woo” [or] light and silly.

I need to be right within, so that I can give my best to the teams that I’m supporting, and I can be at my best to identify the red flags, and the signals, and the practices and the behaviors that can lead to those of us who, especially those of us who are considered high achievers, or carry the weight of being immigrants, and people of color, and underrepresented employees, who feel like we need to do more to just be halfway…That burns us out and makes us less effective.