Burnout and Women Leaders: The Source and Solution

As we celebrate Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day, we recognize the enormous contributions and achievements of women and the important roles they play in every facet of our lives. The traits they bring to our workplaces – empathy, authenticity, and vulnerability, among others – are the fundamental qualities currently redefining how we work.    

And yet, in order to fully embrace these qualities, it’s critical that our workplaces are able to keep and increase the presence of women leaders. But in addition to addressing systemic barriers holding them back, we need to also address one of today’s biggest challenges: burnout. For women, burnout is multi-dimensional. 

Managing personal, team and organizational burnout 

Burnout is a universal challenge for today’s workforce. But for women, the expectations are high. Burnout isn’t simply happening professionally – our women leaders are balancing burnout for themselves, their teams and their organizations. It’s simultaneity: too many things happening at one time, limiting our ability to prioritize one over another.

On a cellular level, a lot of women are just tired. This is particularly true for women who have faced higher levels of adversity, including women of color, and those serving as primary caregivers responsible for multi-tasking the needs of children, aging parents, and sometimes siblings. 

As humans, we’re in an ambiguous place politically, and uncertainties around public health and climate change have real impacts on how we work and certainly on our attention. While women continue to struggle to break barriers to top leadership roles, they’re expected to take on more as middle and senior-level managers, balancing the needs of the team as their own work piles up.

While managing their own professional burnout, women leaders also have to manage their team’s burnout. According to the 2022 Women in the Workplace study conducted by LeanIn.org, 78% of companies say managers have been expected to do more to support employee well-being. If teams are struggling, managers are expected to rally their team to get work done. They want to help their team, but in the face of their own burnout and increased workloads, it’s increasingly difficult to find the time and resources to address the needs of others.

Finding sustainable solutions to burnout in women leaders

Leaders can’t lose perspective on their teams and organizations, but they do need to hold that they’re people first. Because women are taking on many different levels of burnout, the traditional fixes only  offer short-term relief. Many of the “self-care” solutions proposed today are just not effective, long-term solutions.  

So, what are the real solutions to burnout? Before we get there, here are two common myths:

Myth #1: Take a day off for yourself 

People often first go to the personal – or fluffy – solutions: take a day off for yourself, order dinner. Not that we shouldn’t do those things for our own personal well-being, but individual attempts at self-care address one area and not the whole picture.

Myth #2: Get outside support

Next, women commonly get advice that they should hire help to manage household responsibilities, get an executive coach, or work on delegating better at work. Again, it is true that we need to time-block and start to say “no” more, but while getting support can absolutely offer relief, it puts the onus back on the woman. Delegating may address the symptoms of burnout, but not the cause. 

And that cause isn’t going away.

The real solution is…

The real solution is the one that will go deep enough to change how we work and pace ourselves at both the organizational and systemic level, not just as individuals. That means changing how our organizations function. You can give yourself more grace and attempt to stem your own burnout, but the root cause – chaotic, unsustainable working environments – is still there.

Changing entire organizational cultures and work styles may seem like a daunting task. We understand. But we’ve done the work, and we know this work is necessary for women leaders to thrive and their organizations to succeed. If you’re ready to offer you – and your colleagues – the true relief you need, we can help.

Struggling to eliminate burnout for yourself and your team? Ready to inject some sustainability and humanity back in your workplace, saving you and your team both time and money? MatchPace provides wholistic and customized organizational effectiveness solutions to help you get back to your mission-critical work. Learn more.