Preventing Burnout: Proactive Tips for Project Professionals

Today’s project professionals are feeling the pressure. And when they don’t manage it well, it could steamroll into full-fledged burnout. What’s the difference between burnout and regular stress? How can burnout effect project outcomes? What early warning signs might show that you or your teams on are the verge of burnout? And what can project leaders do to reset and recharge? We discuss this with Michele Badie, PMP, CPMAI, a program manager in Charlotte, North Carolina, USA, and Valerie Carmel, a mental health therapist based in Orlando, Florida, USA.  

Key themes 

00:57 What’s the difference between stress and burnout? 

03:19 Facing burnout in yourself—and your team—as a project professional 

06:04 How mental health professionals can help project managers amid burnout 

09:14 How burnout can affect project outcomes 

12:01 Warning signs for burnout: Lack of boundaries, sleep disturbance and irritability  

14:27 Tips to keep burnout at bay on project teams 

18:21 Recognizing burnout—and when it’s time to rest and recharge 

Transcript

Transcript 

VALERIE CARMEL 

Being a lot more in tune with how you show up at work—at a place where you spend 40-plus hours a week, every week—is really important.  

STEVE HENDERSHOT 

This is Projectified®. I’m Steve Hendershot.  

Every professional is at risk of burnout, and it’s way too common in the modern workforce. Today we’re going to discuss what burnout looks like for project professionals and what they can do to fend it off. 

I am joined by two women who co-host another podcast, Calm In The Chaos, that focuses on mental wellness for project professionals. Welcome Michele Badie, a program manager based in Charlotte, North Carolina in the United States, and Valerie Carmel, a mental health therapist based in Orlando, Florida, also in the U.S. Michele, Val, thanks for joining us. 

VALERIE CARMEL 

Thank you so much.   

MICHELE BADIE  

Thank you.  

STEVE HENDERSHOT 

Let’s start by talking about the difference between stress and burnout. Stress is what we just felt trying to get our microphones and cameras in order. Burnout is something somewhat different. Give me a definition around these two things.  

VALERIE CARMEL 

Stress is simply the body’s response to any demand. So that could be a workout causes stress on our muscles. It could be preparing for a promotion or a move—that could be an exciting form of stress. And then there are the different types of stress that we incur when we’re at work. So stress is simply the body’s reaction to a new demand.  

Burnout is different in that, according to the World Health Organization, it is specific to professional stress. So unmanaged stress that is happening at work that incorporates three specific domains. The first one being emotional exhaustion, the second being depersonalization, where you feel a sense of detachment from the work that you’re doing, as well as the last one being a lowered sense of personal accomplishment. So there is a sense that the work that you are doing is not as good as it used to be or as good as you know that it can be. 

Burnout can occur over a very long period of time, and it could also be very temporary. You could be burned out from taking on a new role and from the mere adjustments to the increased learning curve, the shifting of someone’s responsibilities. And those things are temporary. But burnout does create a little bit more of a cascade in the way that it impacts the way that that professional is showing up on the day to day at work.  

MICHELE BADIE  

In my experience, I feel brain fog takes over sometimes because you have so many tasks running in your mind, and you don’t want to fall short. You start to forget. Not intentionally. It’s just, “Oh, I meant to do that. Oh my goodness. I’ve got to go back and do that.” And then that’s running into your nighttime. Or you get up early morning before your day, and you’re playing catch up because you are on fumes.  

STEVE HENDERSHOT 

As the project leader, besides just trying to instill calm amidst chaos—which is not just a mental health thing, but period, part of project leadership—but you also want to be the one who’s looking out for the team’s mental health. And in some ways that feels like it could be even more dangerous, when you sense yourself burning out and it is literally your job to be the one who is the bulwark against that for everybody else. It maybe is extra impactful.  

MICHELE BADIE  

EQ (emotional quotient) and psychological safety is essential to understand it. With your point that we are the one spearheading that, leading that, we also have to be very intentional. Is it just sending someone a message in Slack or Teams? How are you doing today? Starting off a meeting with, “What do you need help with? Is anything triggering you? Do you need help with communicating with stakeholders? How are you with the deadlines? Do we need to identify additional resources? Do we need to step back and assess our scope?”  

Helping others realize their own capacity and making sure that we are staying on course for accomplishing the project at hand, it’s a dance. It also requires you to be in tune with yourself, and it also is helping people to embrace being vulnerable, which is rooted in being able to ask for help and also embracing the pause. I think sometimes, just in general, everything’s so fast paced. We forget to allow ourselves to pause, and that’s critical. 

STEVE HENDERSHOT 

When you embrace all of the strategies and responsibilities that you just mentioned, but you also feel yourself cracking a little bit, does that add to the mix? Knowing that, “Oh. I’m susceptible to some of these symptoms too, but also it’s my job to do something else.” So what’s the added burden for a team leader when they themselves feel a little bit of burnout creeping in? 

MICHELE BADIE  

Guilt. Guilt steps in because we as program and project managers often feel like a superhero. We’re here to save the day. We’re here to ensure that everyone looks good and shows up well. We want to discuss the challenges in a way that it shows growth and active listening and engagement and progress. And sometimes, if we’re not able to do that, we can feel guilty. We can feel like we’ve fallen short of the expectation, and not allowing us to operate from a place of being human-centered, which is something that a lot of people need. And we also need to be able to extend grace. But then that’s where we have to be willing to ask for help, and be okay with that. Lean on our teams as we ask our teams to lean on us, within perspective, within reason. 

STEVE HENDERSHOT 

So Val, you’re the person that someone comes to for help. How do you help them not only lead well in the way that Michele just described, but also care for themselves well?  

VALERIE CARMEL 

The very first thing that I do with any of my patients is that we start off with self-awareness and really encouraging that metacognition, the ability to think about what you’re thinking about. And, oftentimes, I find that people really struggle with really knowing themselves very deeply. And so one of the very first things that I do with any new patient, I’m big on homework assignments. The first homework that a patient is going to get is for them to track their mood for me, and they’re tracking their mood with two very distinct things. The first one is qualitative information and then quantitative information. So, scale of 1 to 10, how is your mood today overall, one being the absolute pits, 10 being everything was awesome? Then the qualitative aspect comes in with you identifying what actually contributed to the score that you listed.  

They will begin to identify patterns, patterns related to maybe a particular time of day, a conversation, a particular person, a particular activity that they’re doing. And that increased level of awareness helps to then lead to a lot more self-compassion. My role as a therapist is really to help people learn how to navigate those particular aspects so that they are more comfortable showing up for themselves first, so that it removes that barrier for showing up for everybody else. 

STEVE HENDERSHOT 

Are the strategies for counseling leaders, team members dealing with burnout specifically the same across every profession? Or what’s unique about project workers, project professionals, project leaders?  

VALERIE CARMEL 

They are a little bit different. Understanding the role in and of itself is really, really important because the role is where a lot of the stress actually comes from, right? There are lots of nuances within each individual role. And so when I’m talking to project leaders or program managers, one of the things that is very specific to them is the constant context switching that they have to do. Because they work on teams, and they are oftentimes not necessarily the manager of the other people who are on the teams but really play on the role as the collaborator.  

The frequency of having to also manage lots of different personalities and perspectives. Oftentimes the people that they are engaging with all have different roles and all have different needs and all have different points of reference. And so really learning how to have that EQ and having the ability to shift gears very seamlessly while still being able to be very in tune with how they are feeling is oftentimes a skill that needs to be developed.  

STEVE HENDERSHOT 

So far we’ve focused, rightly, on what burnout does to people. How does that affect the work product? Based on what you’re saying, what goes wrong? How does the team suffer when someone is dealing with this condition? 

VALERIE CARMEL 

One of the things that I’ll often hear when patients are coming to me, especially my project managers, they definitely will talk about the increase in the mistakes. And what they will do to overcompensate for that is to overcommunicate things. And so what they end up doing is having a lot more, I guess, stimuli being exposed to them on the daily basis. Now they feel like they need to send multiple additional Slack messages. Now they’re sending multiple emails and feeling like they have to almost begin to micromanage all of the different steps because of the fear of making a mistake or overlooking something because brain fog, distractions, concentration are usually one of the things that are mostly impacted when someone is experiencing burnout. 

STEVE HENDERSHOT 

That is fascinating because I would’ve expected that someone burned out would just go to the office and close the door and disappear for weeks at a time.  

VALERIE CARMEL 

Some people will absolutely disengage and become a little bit more detached, but I find that with project managers, because their role is oftentimes so forward facing, they don’t actually tend to have the luxury to kind of hide. So they actually go into overdrive and try to overcompensate for the areas that they feel they’re experiencing challenges in. 

STEVE HENDERSHOT 

Have you noticed that, Michele, in practice?  

MICHELE BADIE  

I see it more so when dealing with other project managers. If you’re working like within your team. And it doesn’t show up in the way that Val just described all the time, but it is one of the top ones. But I see a dueling battle between decision fatigue and cynicism.  

You just want to get to the next point, and you’re just at capacity. And so it’s like, okay, you know that you have to put on a certain face, which we’ve been discussing in this conversation. And you really do battle cynicism sometimes because you have the decision fatigue because everything that Val mentioned earlier. Your level of enthusiasm is going down, and it’s showing up in your body. It can show up in your language, and sometimes that can impact your peers. So with your stakeholders, you’re great. But when you’re just going back and forth in your conversation with your peers, it can show up differently, which impacts others, and you have to be mindful of that sometimes, of being able to read the room and the energy levels that you interact with on a regular basis. 

STEVE HENDERSHOT 

Let’s talk about early warning signs. So what can you see either in yourself or in others on your team, both in terms of behaviors or changes in work product or habit that can indicate that burnout is beginning to set in.  

MICHELE BADIE  

Well, for my experience, when boundaries are not realistic. Everything almost seems [or] feels like a Hail Mary, and that doesn’t always serve you well. And longevity wise, it could just not show that you understand the execution of the project by having that type of mindset and philosophy.  

Another thing that comes to mind is not giving yourself time to recover. We’ve all experienced it at some point. Not every project is this euphoric, beautiful experience. Sometimes you’re just like, “I made it through, and I’m good to go.” So what does that look like? And when it comes down to recovery after the retrospective, what does a break look like? That’s different for everyone, but I think also just communicating the impact of that experience to leadership when it comes to planning the next project—demonstrating the lessons learned, demonstrating the communication cadence or style that may need to change, but also just being open and honest with yourself to take time if you need it. Take a half a day if you need it.  

VALERIE CARMEL 

If we’re looking at early signs, one of the things is impacts to your sleep. That’s number one. Most people, that is usually the first thing that they will begin to notice because project managers are problem solvers by nature, right? And if there is a problem that still needs to be solved, then you’re probably going to sleep with four or five tabs in your mind, still running in the background. They’ll wake up in the middle of the night, and then their brain automatically turns on, and then they’re thinking about things for the next two, three hours and can’t get back to sleep. So sleep disturbance is usually the first thing.  

Second thing, changes to their nutrition and appetite. Mood in particular. If you’re noticing that you are more irritable than usual, indecisiveness can be an additional piece because of the decision fatigue that people often will experience. That cynicism that Michele mentioned as well are also very clear early signs that we are moving in a direction we don’t want to be moving in.  

STEVE HENDERSHOT 

If you’re so fortunate as to catch yourself in that moment when it’s not too late, what can you do? What can your manager do? What can your organization do? What are some strategies to rescue people from the brink before “almost burnout” becomes burnout? 

VALERIE CARMEL 

I would start off with, really, breaks. I think we oftentimes want to run off of the adrenaline of the deliverables that need to be done, the meetings with the stakeholders. We just finished one project. “Oh, I can tee up and do another one.” Slow down. Slow down. Take a moment. Michele mentioned recently that my favorite word is to recalibrate. Give your body some time. Give your mind some time to settle in, andthen allow yourself time to just reflect. How did it actually go? Were there things that you could do differently? Were there things that you did really well? And I think allowing yourself to celebrate those things that you did well, but also be willing to make small changes that can be sustainable moving forward. 

The next one is set great boundaries around work. I have a lot of patients of mine who are project managers, and one of their biggest challenges is the stakeholders who are across multiple time zones. That is a really big challenge because sometimes when you’re available to work, there are people in Amsterdam that might be asleep right now. So those kinds of things can be really challenging, but I think being really specific about what your boundaries are so that you have that time to turn off and decompress from work. People are not going to respect your boundaries if you don’t. So boundaries [are] always the name of the game, allowing yourself time for those breaks, and being intentional about celebrating those wins. 

STEVE HENDERSHOT 

That was a great list of personal strategies, kind of interventions to practice with yourself. What can you do to help others that are on the brink? 

MICHELE BADIE  

Two things come to mind. Be committed to being an active listener, and not just what people say, but what is not said. Be mindful of what is said or not said, what someone is not doing. If they break their process, what’s going on? Anxiety might be showing up, things of that nature.   

And also, I would say really promote or advocate and share mental health resources that are offered by the company. Or if there’s an app that you use, share that and just make it a part of your normal conversation, not an ad hoc conversation with an alarm around it. It’s okay to be vulnerable, and there’s awareness without someone feeling stigmatized or making them feel like they cannot be human-centeredin the workplace. 

STEVE HENDERSHOT 

Any thoughts to add on what you think practices for a healthy organization are? 

MICHELE BADIE  

One is encouraging people to use their PTO (paid time off). One, leadership has to demonstrate it, and that does not mean be on PTO and still answering Slack and Teams [messages]. Be on PTO, and be offline and committed to that. And also making an effort to make sure when people come back from PTO a lot is not waiting for them. There was a team effort in order to help them make sure things progressed. Solet’s demonstrate that when it comes to our self-care and demonstrating that we’re truly a collaborative team that believes in the whole wellness of a person while they’re driving change and impact strategically. 

STEVE HENDERSHOT 

What happens when this is worse? I mean, so far we’re talking about a dangerous but manageable condition. You can make a sports analogy, like the strained muscle that the trainers can keep you running out there every day, but at some point, you broke something. You need some time away. 

Val, clinically, how do you tell when this is burnout? It requires a different strategy. It is full-fledged. And then secondly, what does rehabilitation look like? 

VALERIE CARMEL 

Oftentimes, when people are coming in, they recognize that they are stressed, right? They understand, “Oh, I’m having these challenges,” but they may not necessarily recognize all of the ways that it’simpacting not just work, but also their personal life. And that’s usually when people recognize, “Oh, this is getting out of hand.” Now they’re not just irritable at work, but they’re irritable at home, and they’reirritable with their families. They are less engaged in doing their hobbies. They don’t want to spend time with their friends, and they’re really becoming very, very work centric and very work focused. And that in and of itself, when you’re doing that at a time when you’re also feeling the heaviest level of challenges in that space, it really begins to impact your sense of self-efficacy. It begins to impact your sense of self-esteem. So it kind of becomes this cascade of reassessing all the things. And that’s usually when I’m like, “And I think we’re at burnout.”  

STEVE HENDERSHOT 

So then what do you do? 

VALERIE CARMEL 

Then the next thing is to figure out, “Okay. Do we have the availability to take some time? Do you have PTO? Is this level of burnout to the point where maybe taking a leave of absence from work is necessary?” Those are all conversations that people don’t necessarily like to have, but they are absolutely important ones in order for us to be able to provide them with the skills, tools, support, really learn the strategies that they can begin to implement during that period of time while they are taking that leave from work so that they are able to then reintegrate themselves back into work and be in a much better place. 

MICHELE BADIE  

I want to say thank you to the Projectified team for having this conversation. 

VALERIE CARMEL 

Absolutely. 

MICHELE BADIE  

It’s not an unusual conversation. It’s an essential conversation—showing it as a necessity, just as much as it is to understand a budget, understand execution, understand agility. Your mental health is importanttoo. 

STEVE HENDERSHOT 

Yeah, agreed. Thank you guys very much for helping us shed light on this topic and for your insight. Val and Michele, thanks. 

VALERIE CARMEL 

Thank you.  

MICHELE BADIE  

Thanks. 

STEVE HENDERSHOT  

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