Unknown Speaker  0:00  

When someone asks you, how are you doing? What do you say if I’m fine? Came out of your mouth before you even had a chance to think about it. This episode is for you. Here’s what I’ve noticed in the women I work with, the ones who are closest to burnout, or almost never, the ones who say they’re struggling, they’re the ones who are still delivering, still showing up, still being the person everyone leans on. They’re the ones who’ve been exhausted for so long that they’ve stopped registering it as a warning sign, because exhaustion just feels like Tuesday. This is the silent spiral, and it’s one of the most common, our most under discussed patterns in high performing women in tech leadership today, we’re going to talk about burnout proof leadership, not in the tech more bath say no, occasionally sense, but in the real structural, strategic sense. I’m breaking down why burnout hits us as women in tech differently, what the patterns actually look like, what it genuinely means to build leadership that doesn’t require you to run on empty and where to get started practically today, if you’re already in this and I have something for you at the end of this episode, a little freebie that is going to be so good for you. So stay with me. Now. I just want to start with something up front. This episode is not about telling you to slow down, step back or stop being ambitious. Quite the contrary, it’s not a lecture about self care. The women I coach are not burning out because they lack discipline or because they need to meditate more. They’re burning out because they’ve been operating in systems that were never designed to sustain them, and no one taught them a different way to lead. What I want to offer you today is that different way to lead, burnout proof. Leadership is a strategy, not a personality trait. It is learnable, and it starts with understanding what’s actually happening, which is, where are we going to go right now.

Unknown Speaker  1:55  

Welcome to the leading women in tech podcast, the show that celebrates women in technology leadership. I’m your host, Tony Collis, and this podcast is the result of my passion for building better tech by diversifying the leadership of the technology sector. Join me on this journey as I discuss all things leadership, what it takes to be innovative, breaking through the glass ceiling be a great leader, and how to navigate the unique experiences we face as women in tech. So sit back, grab your headphones and get ready to be inspired to become a better leader.

Unknown Speaker  2:31  

I want to be clear, burnout is not exclusive to women, but the way it manifests, the reasons it takes hold and the barriers to addressing it often are different, though, of course, not always, but they can be very different for women, particularly in tech. The first thing to understand is that high performing women in tech are often carrying a kind of invisible load that simply doesn’t get counted. It’s not just the meetings, the deliverables, the team management, the politics, it’s the emotional labor, the gap filling, the mentoring, mediating, the holding it all together. When everything else is falling apart, it’s being the person that everyone whether it’s the team, the peers, sometimes the executives above you, turns to when things get hard. There’s a reason that women in leadership are statistically more likely to support team well being to mentor others and to take on culture work than their male counterparts. And there’s a reason that work is rarely measured, rarely rewarded and rarely even acknowledged. It’s just expected of us becomes part of the invisible job description, and that lack of reward, that additional burden, becomes a stress, and chronic, high level, unresolved stress leads to burnout. The second thing, and this is where it gets particularly insidious for women in high performance leadership roles, is our identity and how that entangles us when you’ve built your career on being the reliable one, the capable one, the person who delivers no matter what your sense of self worth becomes wrapped up in your output, which means that slowing down doesn’t feel right. It feels threatening, like if you stop performing at this level, you’re going to lose the thing that makes you credible, that makes you you maybe more than that. And then the final piece of this is the normalization trap.

Unknown Speaker  4:24  

When our exhaustion has been our baseline for so long, we genuinely can’t tell the difference between tired and critically depleted, we’ve recalibrated our normal the normalization trap. You’re functioning. You’re still getting things done because you’re damn incredible, but you’re running on fumes, and you stop noticing, and this is why we so rarely look like we’re collapsing it. Instead, it’s numbness, like going through the motions, losing the spark you used to have for work that genuinely mattered to you. You might be saying, I just need.

Unknown Speaker  5:00  

The right company, or I just need to work for a mission driven organization. But actually, what’s going on is a resentment that arrives out of nowhere. It looks like counting down to the weekend on a Monday morning, sitting in Sunday scaries or Sunday stress instead of enjoying the end of the weekend. It means snapping at the people around you, whether it’s colleagues or loved ones, and wondering why your relationships aren’t going as well as they used to. It’s a constant feeling of exhaustion at never getting enough sleep. But you just keep going. The cost of this constant hustle, and by the way, I’ve been here done it, got all the T shirts myself, but that cost of the constant hustle of always being the one who absorbs more and more and more, gives more, holds more, compounds over time. And the particularly painful thing is that the women who are most at risk are often the ones who look the most fine from the outside. Over the years of coaching women in tech leadership, I’ve noticed that burnout tends to show up in one of three patterns, and I’m going to walk you through each one, and I want you to take a moment and see which one resonates. Might be the more than one resonate, by the way they certainly. I think every single one of these I’ve experienced myself. So the first pattern is the silent spiral. This is the woman who is still delivering. She hasn’t missed a deadline. Her team thinks she’s fine. Her manager thinks she’s fine. She might even think she’s fine, but the light’s gone out. If you’re going through the motions of meetings where you used to lead with energy, if you stop volunteering ideas at the table because you just don’t have the bandwidth to fight for them, if you’re snapping at people you really like maybe even loved ones, and then feeling ashamed about it, maybe you’re fantasizing about handing in your notice, not because you want to leave, but because you’re trying to imagine what relief would feel like. Sometimes we catch ourselves fantasizing about a medical incident that forces us to take some time off work. Believe me, I’ve had that conversation. The defining feature of the silent spiral is that a woman has normalized exhaustion to the point that she doesn’t recognize it as a warning sign anymore. We’re telling ourselves that we just need to get through this quarter, this launch, this review cycle, and then I’ll take a break. The number of times I’ve reached out to somebody, they’ve told me they’re stressed about this, that on the other I like, why don’t we have a conversation? They’ll say to me, can we do at the end of the quarter? Can we do at the end of the holidays? Can we do it after this thing that’s happening? And I’m like, You need me right now.

Unknown Speaker  7:32  

The break is never going to arrive, because there’s always another quarter. There’s always another deadline. If you find that you’re noddling on to that you’re not alone. The fact that you’re still functioning doesn’t mean you’re okay, though. It means you have been remarkably resilient in an unsustainable situation, and that’s different, and it’s something that needs to be tackled.

Unknown Speaker  7:54  

The second pattern is the conflict avoidant over giver again. This has me all over it. Sometimes people pleasers end up here, and I’m a recovering people pleaser. These women absorb everything, every gap her team can’t fill, every project no one else has stepped up for, every emotional crisis her people brought to her desk she said yes to things that weren’t hers to carry, not because she was naive, but because she cared, and because, say, you know, felt like it might cost her something, a relationship, a reputation, your likability.

Unknown Speaker  8:30  

If you’ve become the emotional anchor for your team with you’re the person everyone comes to when things fall apart. And if you’re at some level, a little bit proud of that, was definitely me, by the way,

Unknown Speaker  8:43  

you this may well be you, but on another level, some part of you is drowning. The thing that makes this particular pattern of operations sticky is we’re receiving enormous positive reinforcement for it. You may well have been praised for being supportive, a team player, calm under pressure. That very praise has built a box around our personalities, because to change now feels like portraying who we are like we’d be letting people down. We’d be seen as difficult. But I want to say something to you, if this one’s got you nodding along, if this is landing, if this is what it feels like this is a level of generosity that has become a cage. Those boundaries have been drawn to protect other people, not you. They’re protecting a dynamic that is costing you your well being and quietly costing your career progression, potentially even your actual career right now, if you’re going to burn out, okay. The third and final pattern, I see women who is a high performer in denial.

Unknown Speaker  9:48  

This is often the hardest one to spot, because when I meet a woman like this, she doesn’t look burnt out by external measures, she’s still getting excellent reviews, she’s still seen as high potential. She might be getting promoted.

Unknown Speaker  10:00  

It, but she’s running on adrenaline and sheer force of will, and at 11pm on a Tuesday, she’s searching size of breannnow on her phone, then closing the tab, because she can’t afford to let that be true right now,

Unknown Speaker  10:14  

if you’re telling yourself, you just need to get to the other side of this thing, this phase, this pattern, this quarter, this operation, that things will then Calm down, that you’ll then be able to breathe. And maybe some of that is true, but the pattern, the way you’re leading, the way you measure your value, the way you make yourself indispensable, is going to create the same conditions in the next role, the next company, in the next season, the next deadline, because the issue isn’t the workload, it’s the structure you’ve built around yourself that makes your workload worse. I know stick with me here. We’re going to talk all the way through all of these patterns and what to do with them. I want to say something here about all three of these patterns, though, none of this is your fault. You’ve been operating in systems that rewarded this behavior. You’ve been taught explicitly and implicitly that this is what it looks like to be a good leader, and recognizing that pattern is not a sign that you failed. It’s the first sign to building something better. We can do this. Let me just take a moment to be clear about what I’m not saying. I’m not saying you should care less, definitely not. You shouldn’t work less or lower your standards in some way. I’m not saying you should opt out of the ambitious goals or stop showing up fully for your team, but burnout proof leadership is not about doing less. It’s about doing different. It doesn’t mean that we’re bulletproof. It means we’ve built structures, habits and self awareness that stops the spiral before it starts. Think of it less like a shield and more like an architecture, the way of leading that is sustainable by design, not just by willpower. And there are three things this requires. I want to walk through each of them, one at a time. First up, structural protection. This is about how you design your time, your energy, your boundaries, not as an afterthought, but as a deliberate leadership practice, most of us have never actually audited what we’re carrying versus what is actually ours to carry. When I do this with clients, it’s almost always a huge revelation. There’s a meaningful gap between the job description and the actual job, the gap that is filled with things that someone’s absorbed often without asking or being asked to do something, without anyone noticing we’re doing it. Now, I’m all for doing work beyond a job description, if it’s helping you, if you’re constantly picking up the pieces in your organization and it’s not leading you anywhere, that’s a huge problem that we got to tackle. Structural protection means getting honest about the gap between what you’re doing and what you should be doing, and making intentional decisions about what stays and what doesn’t it means treating your energy as a resource to be allocated strategically, not a reserve to be drawn down indefinitely, and it means understanding that boundaries and leadership are not a defensive move, they’re an enabling move, enabling you to be stronger, do more of the right things, and recover faster when you’re not absorbing everything you have the capacity to actually lead to think strategically, to be present in the conversations that matter. Boundaries give you freedom. They don’t constrain it. The second area you need to focus on is perceptual shift. This one’s harder to talk about because it’s more internal, but it might be the most important. Most of us as high performers or have built this sense of professional worth, on output, on delivery, on being indispensable, and that makes so much sense. That’s how the system taught you to earn your place. But it means that often our relationship with our own value is very contingent on what we produce, and that’s exhausting to maintain, which feels like the idea of scaling back feels genuinely threatening, like you’d be giving up the proof that you belong. I see this happen a lot when we get promoted and we hold on to the work that we did before and take on that next level. And because you’re indispensable, when you do that and you’re still delivering the same old things, it’s not good for you. It’s not good for your team, believe me, for the burnout side of this, it requires you to move from measuring your value through output to measuring your value through impact and leadership. Because ultimately, if you’re a leader, because you’re listening to this, you must be a leader. What matters is what you and your team impact in your organization, not how many lines of code you’ve written, not how many documents you’ve produced. They’re not the same thing. Impact is more important. You can have an enormous impact while doing very few things. In fact, the leaders who have the most sustainable long term influence are almost always the ones who’ve learned to lead through others, through clarity and direction, rather than through personal volume of work. The most successful companies, by the way, focus on impact, not output.

Unknown Speaker  14:58  

The companies that say we just, we just deliver.

Unknown Speaker  15:00  

All the time, won’t be as functional, won’t be as profitable, won’t be as good. In the market, the ones that focus on impact quite often are far more profitable. And I want you to do that for yourself as well. Now this shift doesn’t happen overnight. You’ve got to start with getting honest with yourself about the stories you’re telling yourself and what it means to be valuable, and whether that story is actually serving you.

Unknown Speaker  15:25  

The third piece, leadership identity recalibration. Leadership identity recalibrated. This is about stepping out of the role you’re you’ve been performing in the fixer, the go to person, the reliable one, and into the shoes of the strategic leader you actually need to be that, I hope you actually are. For many of us, especially those of us who’ve been in the same organization or team for a long time, there’s a version of you that people have come to expect, and that version was probably forged in a period when you needed to prove yourself, when you were establishing credibility, when, if you’re like me, you had somebody tell you worst piece of advice I’ve ever been given, you can’t afford to say no at this point in your career. I was told that.

Unknown Speaker  16:12  

And so it isn’t about taking strategic moves. It was about taking all the moves that version of you is likely no longer serving the level you’re operating at, or the level you’re trying to reach. The skills that got you here, absorbing, delivering, being the person who never drops the ball can actually become the thing or things that hold you back, because you keep you anchored in execution mode when What’s needed is strategic leadership. Leadership identity recalibration means consciously updating the role you play, not with big, dramatic statements, not becoming a different person, but gradually and deliberately shifting from the one who does to the one who leads others to do, from reactive to proactive and intentional, from carrying the weight to distributing it around. If you can work on those three things, structural protection, perceptual shift, leadership, identity, recalibration, that’s the foundation of what I mean by burnout, proof, leadership. Work on those three things, you will shift. They’re not one time fixes. This is an ongoing practice for the rest of your career, but when you build them into the way you lead, everything about your experience on a day to day basis is going to change. Now I want to take a moment to address something that I see coming up almost every time I talk about burnout. It’s the most common reason smart, self aware, amazing women stay stuck in burnout cycles even when we’re trying not to. And I again, count myself in this.

Unknown Speaker  17:47  

The mistake is treating burnout as a rest problem. Sleep more take a holiday. Do a digital detox. Have a weekend away from the kids. Practice more care. Sleep, sleep, sleep. These things are not worry. They’re genuinely important, but they treat burnout as a recovery challenge when the real issue is the structural way we’re showing up. Structure doesn’t change. You come back from your holiday, your digital detox, your two weeks off, and within three weeks, you’re right back where you were. I’ve had clients who are right back where they were on eight o’clock in the morning and the day they’re back from holiday because the conditions that created the burnout are still there. This is why so many of us describe this demoralizing cycle of exhaustion, rest, brief recovery, then back to exhaustion, the cycle of roads a little more faith that everything is actually going to change. It genuinely breaks my heart when I have conversations where I meet a woman who’s taken three, 612, months off to recover from burnout, she’s like, I needed that to change things. And then they come to me to be like that, I want to jump back in. Can you help me that? I’m like, sure, sure. But their plan is to just jump straight back in. They feel their only alternative is to leave the tech industry. And I’m like, No,

Unknown Speaker  19:10  

if you love tech, but you’re you’re like, I’ve just burned out, and I don’t know how to do it any other way. You need to realize you can change how you work so you don’t end up at burnout in the first place. You can stay in tech, be ambitious about your future and keep going because you’re energized by your work, not by burning out. I’ve actually got a lady who’s working me right now. I’ve actually known her for years and years, and you’re well before I became a coach, and she’s just taken a year off, lots of reasons, partly burnout,

Unknown Speaker  19:40  

and she came to me saying, I want to move industries. Can you help me figure out what I want to do? And I normally work with techies, but when I want to help somebody, I just want to help somebody. So it was like, yes, let’s sit down. Let’s figure out what you love doing. We looked at what we she loved doing, and yes, she really wants to work in a mission driven organization. And we talked about nonprofits on that. And then I got.

Unknown Speaker  20:00  

Her to go and look at some job descriptions. And because people were reaching out to her on LinkedIn, because she’s a techie about techie work, she suddenly started reading those job descriptions. And she’s like, actually, I really love that work. I just don’t want to go back to that burnout. I was like, you don’t have to what you have to do is do it differently. The next time around.

Unknown Speaker  20:20  

This can happen all the time, that we are overdoing,

Unknown Speaker  20:26  

leaning in, in the wrong way, and we feel like our identity the way we’re performing, the way we’re measured in our value, we we feel like we can’t do anything about it, but you can deliberately redesign those things. That’s the work, and it’s the work that actually moves the needle and allows us to be burnout proof leaders. I’d really recommend actually at this point, going back and listening to Episode 216, understanding and overcoming burnout. The link is in the show notes. I had a really great conversation with three coaching clients, Lindsay, Jen and Alison, about the exact dynamics around burnout that they’ve experienced the point at which they each realized that rest wasn’t going to solve it and what they did differently. It’s one of the most real conversations I’ve had on this show about what burnout really looks like at senior levels, and it’s a great companion to what we’re covering today. So go to your notes and click on that once you’ve listened to today’s episode. But let’s talk about what did you know? Right? If you’re listening to this and thinking, Okay, I believe you, Tony, what the hell do I do now? I’m so depleted I don’t know where to begin. I hear you. So let’s break this down. These are not a program. They’re not a transformation. They’re the first moves. Step one, do an energy audit. Spend 15 minutes. That’s all. I’m just asking for. 15 minutes. If you can’t find 15 minutes with 15 minutes, we’ve got a bigger problem. So in 15 minutes of this week, mapping your calendar and your task against one question, is this energizing me or draining me?

Unknown Speaker  21:53  

Go through your calendar. Is it energizing you or draining you? Go through your to do list, energizing draining, not whether it’s important, not whether you’re good at it, just does this give me energy or take it away? What you’re looking for is a pattern, not so you can eliminate everything draining. That’s not realistic, but so you can see clearly what you’re carrying and what it’s costing you. Most women who do this are genuinely surprised by what they find. So do an NGO audit step two, the not my job inventory, make a list of everything you’re currently responsible for, formally and informally, then go through it and honestly ask, is this in my job description? Was I asked to take this on, or did I absorb it? Is this serving my team or just filling a gap that someone else should be accountable for. All too often,

Unknown Speaker  22:45  

I find that we are responding to everybody else’s priorities. At work, a colleague asks for this, and you spend half a day delivering it, and realize you’ve not worked on the thing that you’re actually going to get promoted for, that you’re actually paid to do. You’re always focused on what other people are paid to do, because that’s what we do, right? Everybody needs to ask each other for things, but if you always prioritize everybody else, you’re damaging yourself. Now this isn’t about abdicating responsibility. It’s about getting clear on what actually matters to you, your responsibility, what you’ve been carrying that perhaps doesn’t belong to you. The third step is changing a one sentence. This one matters. I mean, they all matter.

Unknown Speaker  23:27  

But the next time you hear yourself say, I should be able to handle this, I want you to actively slow down, pause, think and replace it with what can I sustainably lead here? Right? What version of me does this sustainably shifting from the frame of I should be able to handle this, which is shame based. And shame is one of the most destructive and stressful emotions to hold. It holds you in this comparisonitis, some imaginary version of yourself who doesn’t have limits. But if you instead move to what would sustainable leadership look like here you’re being strategic. It invites you to problem solve rather than self critique, and it starts to build a different relationship with your own capacity. The fourth and final step here of this, like intro to changing the dynamic with yourself, is to give yourself permission to take this seriously. This sounds so simple, but it isn’t for a lot of high performing women that I talk to, the hardest part of addressing burnout is allowing ourselves to name it, because naming it means acknowledging that something isn’t working and that can feel like weakness or failure or a portrayal of the identity we’ve built ourselves around. So I want to say this to you as directly as I can. Taking your burnout seriously is not a weakness, it’s a leadership decision. The most effective leaders invest in their own sustainability, not because it’s self indulgent, but because it’s what allows us to show up with clarity, judgment and genuine presence to change the world for our teams, our organizations and the people whose careers we’re shaping.

Unknown Speaker  25:00  

Yeah, it is a good thing to do. You will do more. You will change the world. You will leave the world in a better place than you found it if you step back and give yourself permission to take this conversation we’re having today seriously. Now I did promise you at the beginning of this episode and have something special for you. I do have something super special for you. I have created a resource called the burnout to balance Toolkit, which is not going to be free forever, but for right now, for two weeks, I’m making it completely free. This is a self paced training paired with a workbook, an optional four week Reset Plan. You work at your own pace. It’s designed specifically for you, for women in tech leadership, who are in the middle of this, who are exhausted, who aren’t ready for a full program, but who needs something to hold on to and make a change, it walks you through how to name what’s actually happening without shame, how to identify the leadership patterns that are fueling this cycle of burnout, and how to start building the structural changes that we’ve talked about today in a way that’s manageable, sustainable, even when running on empty. This will be a paid resource in the future, but for two weeks or the first 200 people to download it, whichever comes first, it’s completely free. You can go to Tony collis.com, for slash, burner, dash two, dash balance, or go to the show notes and grab the link there. And if today’s episode landed for you, that is your next step to do. Don’t overthink it. Don’t put it in the I’ll look at this later folder. Go and get it, and then block 15 minutes and you’re kind of right now, while it’s free to get the momentum you need from this conversation and take action, I want to leave you with this, though you did not build the career you have by accident. You have worked hard, you have shown up consistently. You have carried an enormous amount, even without anyone fully understanding how much that is real and it matters, but sustainable leadership, leadership you can still be proud of in 10 years, leadership that doesn’t cost you health, your joy or sense of self requires something different from what got you here. It requires you to stop measuring your value and volume, to stop absorbing what isn’t yours, and to start leading in a way that is built to last. That is the work you don’t have to do it alone. I’ll see you next time. Bye for now you.