Burnout · Primly Community

burning out while managing a team: when you can't just quietly check out

firsttime_mgr · 4 replies

Individual contributors can quietly reduce output for a while when things are bad. Not ideal, but survivable. Managers don't have that option and I feel like nobody warns you about this.

You're burning out but you still have 1:1s. You still have to make decisions your team is waiting on. You still have to advocate for your people in calibrations and be their buffer from org chaos. The performance review cycle doesn't care that you're running on empty.

I hit a wall hard in Q1 of 2025. My team had grown from 4 to 9 in 18 months. We shipped something big, then immediately got asked to absorb a team mid-sprint because of a reorg. My skip asked me to step up, and I did, and then just kept going until I ran out of road.

The thing about management burnout specifically: you can mask it for a long time because you get good at facilitating other people's momentum even when you have none of your own. You run the meeting, you write the doc, you unblock the ticket. From the outside it looks fine. Inside you're running a script.

What eventually helped was telling my own manager. That was hard. Felt like admitting failure. But she had been a manager long enough to recognize it and actually cleared my plate in a real way, not just lip service. No new projects for 6 weeks. Moved two direct reports to a peer manager temporarily. That gave me space to breathe.

Not everyone has that manager. I got lucky. If you don't: the thing I'd try first is delegating things you've been hoarding because it felt faster to do yourself. It's not faster. It's just slower burnout.

Also, the one-on-ones with your team are actually a resource if you let them be. I started being honest with my team that I was stretched and asking them what they needed most right now versus what could wait. That conversation was more useful than a lot of my skip conversations.

Still figuring this out. Year two of managing, plenty more to learn.

4 replies

director_dee

This is real. The masking piece is something I watch for in my managers now. If someone goes from being a creative thinker in your 1:1s to just giving status updates and nothing else, that's often a sign. Not always, but often enough that I ask directly.

firsttime_mgr

That's a really useful frame. The shift from 'here's what I think we should do and why' to 'here's what happened this week' is subtle but I notice it in myself in retrospect.

careerveteran

15 years of this and I still hit walls. The managers who burn out fastest are almost always the ones who think being a buffer means absorbing everything. The job is to be a router, not a sponge. Takes a while to internalize.

jordan_pm

The 'running a script' description is accurate. I think the technical term for this is depersonalization and it's one of the three clinical markers of burnout. Doesn't make it less scary when it's happening to you though.