Ep. 136: David Shar - Managing Burnout

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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Mitch (00:05):

Welcome back to Count Me In, IMA's podcast about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. I'm your host Mitch Roshong and this is episode 136 of our series. Many would describe the global business environment over the last year and a half as rather turbulent. From accelerated growth due to technology, followed by the effects of COVID-19, burnout has become a very common theme in the workplace. David Shar, business psychology expert, and founder of Illuminate PMC joins us to talk about what businesses and people can do to avoid burnout and find real meaning in their work. Keep listening as we head over to the conversation now.

Adam (00:49):

So David, thanks so much for coming on. Burnout is a word that I've been hearing a lot lately, especially with people coming on the other side of the pandemic and coming out of their homes a little bit more, but so many people have been stuck in front of computer screens in their homes for so long. Can you just kind of talk about what is burnout?

David (01:07):

Yeah. First of all, thank you so much for having me Adam. So burnout is definitely becoming a little bit more of a popular topic. Fortunate for me, unfortunate for everyone, I guess. And it is, becoming more and more universal, especially with what everyone has gone through and were not done, like you said, as we are now leaving our homes and going back to work and, many of us will be teleworking and be on fully virtual teams, but whatever that means going on to that, and I know it's a horrible term because it's used so much, but to that new normal, we're not out of the weeds yet. This is when, we're all going to have to start to really cope with what we've gone through and burnout by definition is typically defined as having three pieces to it. The first one is this emotional exhaustion and emotional exhaustion is often misunderstood. It's not physical exhaustion, it's not mental exhaustion, but it does lead to those things and even lead to physical ailment, but it starts as emotional exhaustion. The second piece is a general cynicism of work and, that's where we start really putting up barriers between ourselves and our coworkers and our clients and if we have employees between ourselves and our employees, we have this general sense of cynicism and we separate ourselves from our work as much as possible, mentally. And then the final piece of, burnout would be a reduced sense of personal accomplishment. And what that is, is that we feel like we're turning our wheels twice as fast and getting half as much done, or we feel like we're putting in the effort, but not getting the reward and maybe that means the compensation, dollars and cents compensation, or maybe it just means the recognition or the positive feelings or whatever it is we're putting X in and we expect to get Y out and there's an imbalance there, which is either real or just perceived, but either way it will take you to the brink of burnout.

Adam (03:48):

So as you described all of those three things, I know that I've been there, I'm sure you've been there, I'm sure many of our listeners have been there. What can business leaders do to prevent that burnout?

David (04:01):

Yeah. Another great question. So, right. We've all sort of been there, especially over the past year and a half. You know, who hasn't felt extremely cynical, who hasn't felt emotionally exhausted as they're trying to learn to do their job, in a new reality and, you know, within accounting, a lot of your work could be done virtually and a lot of you may have been already working primarily virtually, but even those individuals didn't necessarily have their children at home trying to homeschool their kids, you know, at the same time, that's incredibly difficult. There are, there were incredible barriers that we made work harder. And, so there's a lot that can be done from a leadership perspective, as well as the individual's perspective. But the biggest thing that I would say from the very beginning is we need to reconnect with what it is that we do, right? Like, we need to reconnect with our proverbial why, like what is our firm all about, what is our business all about? We need to be able to reconnect with that because that's what we've gotten away from. We get so lost in the weeds and so overwhelmed and distracted that we lose sight of maybe it's the client interactions, maybe it's the mission of the organization, maybe it's a difference that we're making and suddenly instead of all of those things, it's just spreadsheets on the computer and it becomes very easy to lose sight of those other things and so we need to take away the noise and create the sense of why again, and we need to be able to do it in a way that, brings people, brings people back mentally and also gives them a sense of control in their lives again. Work during the pandemic, could have been part of the problem, or it could have been an escape from the problem, depending on how much control employees felt when they went to work or virtually signed into work. If they felt in control of their work, then when their entire lives felt out of control work was the haven where they were still in control. But if that wasn't the case, then work was just part of the problem.

Adam (06:37):

So let's dig into that, finding your why a little bit more, you know, sometimes people have very mundane jobs, when you're first starting out in accounting, you know, sometimes you just, you know, kind of crunching numbers. How are people supposed to find meaning in that work and connect with that why, if they're so far down?

David (06:55):

Yeah, it's really interesting. So my first job, my first real job was, I was a kennel worker. I wanted to be a veterinarian and, turned out that, to be a bio major pre-veterinary you needed chemistry and physics. So I'm like, nope. And ironically, I switched to the business college and the very first class I took, I'm like yes, I'm getting away from all the math and the very first class I took was accounting I. So you gotta be kidding me, but suddenly when you took moles off the end of a number and you put a dollar sign in front of it made a lot more sense to me. But yeah, so my very first job was working in these kennels and I was pre-veterinary, I wanted to be a vet and I remember one day as a young man, I was literally pooper scooping, like picking up poop from the floor of a kennel. And I was doing this, I was working on alongside a coworker and I remember looking over and seeing her face and realizing that the two of us were doing completely different jobs, the same exact tasks, but completely different things. She was picking up poop. I was, I was creating a cleaner and safer environment for these sick animals. You know, I was caring for animals while she was cleaning up poop, you know, and it was just in the mindset. It was in how we saw our jobs and when you're in accounting or any profession, you have a choice in how you see the actual why of what you do, how much you connect with that. And we typically find careers where we have some sort of role model that we look to somebody that we see that we're like, yeah that's what I want from my career. And there's usually not that much of a separation between our career and life outside of our career. We look for significance in our lives, we look for significance in our career, and that might mean something different to each of us. Maybe want to make a difference with the organizational mission. Maybe you want to be able to, you know, afford to travel around the world and work from wherever, whatever it is, you're lookin...