Burnout in Tech - Part 3: The external causes of burnout

"When it's not you, it's them" - How toxic cultures, bad leadership and other external stressors lead to burnout

While burnout is often portrayed as something exclusively internal (like a pot of boiling water, its temperature slowly getting hotter and hotter until it boils over… and eventually, boils away!), society needs to stop thinking of it that way.

Setting better professional boundaries and practicing self-care is no longer enough to prevent burnout. We're dealing with a workplace phenomenon, and it’s time organizations and leaders start acknowledging their role in this equation and take responsibility for it.

This is Part 3 of a 4-part series on “Burnout in Tech”. I highly recommend first reading Part 1: Declaring War and Part 2: Internal Causes. Part 4: Anti-Burnout Strategies will follow.

Part 3 will help you:

• Understand the link between psychological unsafety and burnout

• Dissect psychological unsafety and how distrust, lack of accountability and chronic instability exacerbate it

• See how psychological unsafety manifests in our day-to-day rhetoric

• Recognize how bad management is a HUGE contributor to burnout

• Understand what other external stressors may lead to burnout   

Though the focus of this article is on engineering organizations, parallels can be drawn to non-tech groups.