Why Team Decision-Making Habits Are Key to Combating Burnout
Decision fatigue wears out individuals; it burns out teams
While burnout is nothing new, the prevalence of it has increased significantly since the COVID-19 pandemic began. According to the Aflac WorkForces Report, “More than half (59%) of all American workers are experiencing at least moderate levels of burnout. This is 9 percentage points higher than what was self-reported in 2021 and 2 percentage points higher than in August 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
We’re out of the crisis phase of the pandemic but we’re still very much working through the downstream consequences of that cycle with staffing shortages, talent pipeline disruptions, and the deep fatigue of people who’ve been hanging on and carrying their teams and the work for years.
While it’s true that many of the causes of burnout come from organizational culture and societal norms, some of the causes of burnout come from how our teams work. We don’t mean to contribute to our team’s burnout, but we participate in team habits that contribute to burnout nonetheless.
And, by ‘we’, I mean you. Consider two questions:
What has a teammate done over the last week that has made your work life harder than it needed to be?
What have you done over the last week that has made a teammate’s life harder than it needed to be?
The first question is typically pretty easy for people to answer. The second is harder to answer, not because they can’t think of something, but because they don’t want to own it.
It’s unlikely that either of you intended to make each other’s work life harder, in the same way, that it’s unlikely that they didn’t intend to make your work life harder. And yet, both of you made each other’s work life harder nonetheless.
I’m going to go one step further: whatever you or your teammate did probably wasn’t a one-off thing. We tend not to remember the one-off things because, while they may be frustrating in the moment, we quickly let them go and move on to the next thing.
But when it’s a thing that happens frequently or predictably, the extra 💩😖👎🏽 lodges it in our brain and gets added to the “post-workday vent to your partner” queue.
At the team level, we can’t what’s happening in our organizational and macro culture that’s contributing to our collective burnout. But we can address our team’s broken printers and the ways we’re bumping into each other.
While every team habit that I recommend makes work together easier and better (in the long run), there are few that are especially catalytic. Rather than give a brief listicle, today, I’m going to focus on team decision-making habits and unpack how they tie to burnout.
Using the Three Levels of Decision-Making to Beat Burnout
During the lockdown, many teams cultivated a “we decide everything together, all the time” team habit and it stuck. Some of the impetus of the team habit was to be more inclusive and invite more people into redefining work - which was and is a good intent - but a lot of it was just the fact that there was so much disruption and change that it wasn’t clear who was doing what and how.
In the short term, that team habit may seem to make things easier, but the long-term consequence is meeting fatigue, conversation fatigue, and decision fatigue. Additionally, in the long term, it makes it unclear who owns what decisions and actions, which creates the “need” for more meetings, conversations, and collaborative decision-making. Research indicates that decision fatigue can lead to poorer quality decisions and is a contributing factor to workplace burnout; collaborative decision-making can be more exhausting than solitary decision-making.
Working through the three levels of decision-making can help out a lot here. Team Habits goes into more about this, but here’s the short-hand:
A Level 1 (L1) decision is a decision or action someone can make or take and they don’t need to tell their team or manager.
A Level 2 (L2) decision is a decision or action someone can make or take, but they need to tell their team or manager.
A Level 3 (L3) decision is a decision or action someone can’t make or take because it’s their manager or team’s call.
Roles and responsibilities within the team should guide what decisions teammates can make.
In case you missed it, there’s a worksheet for the levels of decision-making here.
🚨 Example: Moving from a “Review Everything Together” Team Habit to “Review What’s Critical” Team Habit
One would think that a social media marketing specialist would have a lot of play area when it comes to what they post. Most of what they do should and will be an L1 decision.
But there are some kinds of statements and posts that they can’t post without affirmation or approval by their manager. Those are L3 decisions.
In this example, the social media marketing specialist and their manager could review everything the specialist wants to post, which would essentially make posting on social media an L3 decision for the social media marketing specialist. That’s going to create a predictable bottleneck and frustration between the specialist and their manager. The specialist will feel like they can’t do anything without their manager and the manager will feel like the specialist isn’t taking initiative and not really doing their job.
A far better team habit than the weekly social media review is for the manager and specialist to co-create the L1, L2, and L3 parameters so that the manager is only reviewing the few and rare posts that happen a few times a quarter, tops.
Another great team habit is to reject the assumption that it’s the manager’s job to start or lead the L1, L2, and L3 parameter discussion. The social media specialist sees the broken printer as much as the manager does and it impacts their work just as much. They can stand up and try to make work better just as well as the manager can.
(Yes, I just turned that on you. Remember, your manager is also your teammate and is probably drowning just as much as you are. What if they’re doing the best they can and just can’t get to your thing rather than not caring about your thing?)
Constant Generalized Anxiety and Mixed Messages Create Tension and Burnout
I’m going to preempt an objection someone just thought: “but what if the specialist makes a mistake IN PUBLIC?! Everyone will see it!!”
With well-defined L3s that the specialist adheres to, it’s unlikely that the mistake will be a big deal. The post can be deleted
r corrected. The specialist can practice your team’s “what to do when I’ve made a mistake” habits, which will likely be an L2 decision/action in that they’ll need to tell folks what happened and what they’re doing to address it.
Everyone’s job touches something that can be made to be so critical that mistakes are not acceptable.
I’ve heard some version of “but what if they make a mistake? A [industry- or job-specific catastrophe] will happen!” response for just about every job. The team habits and org workways to prevent catastrophes create so many barriers and review cycles that people can’t do their jobs and too many people are doing other people’s jobs.
Which leads to constant generalized anxiety, dysfunction, and burnout. Recent research by Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter highlights that burnout is not just about exhaustion but also involves a pivotal aspect: cynicism.
If you say you trust me but your actions show that you don’t, I’m not going to fully trust you. If I can’t make a trivial mistake, I’m going to skew toward perfectionism and run everything by you, which is going to make you trust me less. We’re both going to spend a lot of extra emotional and mental energy on unnecessarily shared tasks, not to mention having unnecessary meetings and conversations. And we’re not going to have the time to do our actual jobs, which will recreate this and other dysfunction spirals with other co-workers and teammates.
The burnout-induced cynicism only amplifies the bumps and distrust.
The real mistake we need to correct is not defining what a real critical mistake is (an L3 decision) and trusting each other to do our jobs, which includes making mistakes and owning those mistakes and corrections. To get there, we have to practice the #1 rule and give teammates the trust we want them to give us.
How are you going to start the conversation with your teammates?