194. Day 2: Your To-Do List Is Lying to You: The Hidden Cost of Misaligned Work

In today's episode:

🔗🔗Links for today's episode:

Blog post for today’s episode: https://www.kathieowen.com/blog/burnout2-leadership
Links for Kathie Owen: https://www.kathieowen.com/links

5 Key Strategies to Prevent Burnout with Leadership Coach Doug Kothe

In today's episode of 'Burnout in the Workplace,' Kathie welcomes Doug Kothe, founder and principal consultant at PeopleSmart Group, to discuss ways to prevent burnout in the workplace. 

Doug shares valuable insights starting with the importance of identifying burnout, then diving into strategies like establishing a shared purpose, understanding personal energizers through assessments, building strong team relationships, maintaining a balanced life, and engaging in restorative activities during breaks. Doug also emphasizes teamwork and leveraging each other's strengths as a countermeasure to burnout. 

Tune in for actionable tips to enhance both professional and personal life balance.

00:00 Introduction to Burnout in the Workplace
00:23 Meet Doug: Leadership Coach and Consultant
01:08 Identifying Burnout: Key Indicators
01:47 Strategies to Prevent Burnout
04:17 The Importance of Strong Relationships
05:20 Building Balance in Life
06:17 Restorative Activities for Recharging
07:06 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
09:30 Where to Find More Information
10:51 Closing Remarks and Farewell

Transcript

Audio Only - All Participants-1: 0:00

All right, welcome to another day of Burnout in the workplace. And today I'm bringing in a leadership coach of C Suite, one of my friends from Instagram. His name is Doug. And before we even start talking, I'm going to let Doug introduce himself to you so you can kind of know what we're going to talk about today. Thanks so much, Kathie so my name is Doug Kothe I am the founder and principal consultant for PeopleSmart Group, and we are focused on helping organizations build healthier teams, get greater clarity, and get greater alignment of their people so that they can be a healthier organization, so that everyone will be on the same page, rowing in the same direction, getting great results. Awesome. Love that. Sounds just like what we want to talk about today. So my main question in these 12 days of holiday, I'm going to be asking different experts on their topic on how they prevent burnout or whatever they may call it in the workplace. And so today, that's my question for you, Doug. How do you help us prevent burnout in the workplace? So I think as I think about burnout, the key piece is not everyone can identify it, right? And so for a lot of people, they're feeling weary, they're tired. For some people, especially men, it can come out as anger. Very often we're, we're so down and we can't, we don't have enough to handle things and that secondary emotion comes out instead of the primary of, hey, I'm frustrated, I'm angry all the time. I don't know what's going on in me. And so. Just being able to identify it in the first place is vital in terms of, Hey, what, what's going on? Why do I want to go ahead? And sometimes it'll just be, Hey, I just don't have enough, get up and go. I just, I've lost a gear. What's going on with me. And so those identifiers and helping leaders identify that is a really helpful piece. I would say for me, and a lot of my work starts with the C suite. And so for me, I'm constantly working with leadership teams as a whole. Um, and I think one of the things I share with them for them and for their organization is. That one of the first things I think is a, is a shared purpose, a shared purpose that actually transcends the organization and is really exciting and drives people. Because if, if you are, um, you know, if you're excited about what we're all doing and trying to accomplish together, well one, that builds energy. It builds excitement. It gets us going. It's not draining. You know, I remember yesterday we talked, Kathie and I just said to you, you're so passionate about what you do. I love that. And you're so energetic about it. And so when you're focused on that, I mean, do you get drained and tired? Probably a little test, but not overall, right? It's just a driver. You're going, hey, I get to do this. You're excited. It's a get to, and it gets, it drives engagement and it drives energy. It drives excitement. So that'd be the first I thought of. The second I would think of is the ability to know ourselves better. And so when I dive in with a team, I'm always doing assessments. And I know we've talked and you do assessments as well with a larger organization. And so those assessments, one of them for me is a assessment called the six types of working genius. And what that gets at is. What brings you joy and energy to do in your work? And so it breaks work down into six categories and it says, which ones bring you energy until I know that I'm going to spend a whole lot of time spinning my wheels on stuff that drains me. And I won't see it until I reach more closer to that burnout stage. Right. But if I can, I can assess and figure out, Hey, what brings me energy to do? I can, I can spend more time in those areas and less than the other, or I can compensate. And so every, every job we're going to do things to drain us. Right. But the reality is I can do tactically things that would help me. And so one of the things I talk about is bookending. And I say, look, if I can bookend the draining task with an energizing task on either end, I get energy on the way in and I get energy on the way out. And so I can get through the task and I'm not burning out because guess what I've re energized. And so that's a key way. And then the other thing I talk to people about is partnering. Find people who have different, uh, energizing things than you do. And when you're working in those tasks, bring them in, feed off of their energy, let their energy be a feeder for you. And so that teamwork is just vital in those areas. And so I think so many of us miss that because we, we work in such a individualistic way, right? We think, Oh, I've got to accomplish my tasks. And it's like, no, actually, if we know each other and we know where each other is energized and where each other is drained. We can put it together and work together in a much better way. So, the third I would say is strong relationships. Um, I think we build strong relationships with one another. That's a supportive thing as well, right? Because I have other people encouraging me. Other people who are for me. That energizes me. I don't know about other people, but that energizes me when I know I have a team around me that cares about me and is for me. And so when that happens, Again, a strong team that is around you is going to be energizing and, and as well, if I have the trust with them, they're going to be there to challenge me or encourage me to take a break and get recharged if I need it. And so I think that's a key piece for, for organizations. Will you build great teams that there's a trust? And when I talk about trust, I talk about a vulnerability based trust, a trust, not that it's just like, Oh, I know you can do your job, but a trust that says, Hey, you know what? I know. Your weaknesses. You know my weaknesses. I know I can tell you what I'm struggling at. And you're not going to judge me. You're not going to be bothered by it. You're going to help me. You're going to be for me. And so that type of trust is vital in teams to really build what we really need. Um, fourth, I had five here, so bear with me. Fourth, I think of is building balance into our lives. And this one gets a lot of lip service, but not a lot of practice. And I think that's the, that's the shortfall. It's not that we don't talk about it, but I know for myself, when I get stressed, I push in and do more and more and more and I, I, I weed out all the stuff that recharges me and re energizes me. That's where I naturally go when I'm in stress. And so that's what we do and we start to push and push and push and push harder and all we do is burn ourselves out quicker and more. And so if we would, You know, put in as big rocks in our day and in our week and in our months and in our year. Hey, these are the things that recharge me. I've got to make sure I do them. Like I do this with my marriage. Like my wife and I, we say, Hey, every year we're going to do this. We're going to go away together and spend time. Just us. We're going to have a date night each week. We're going to put in those big rocks and say everything else that gets planned around it. Well, what are those things that recharge you? You need to do that. And, uh, with that, my last one would be this is, and this, I got advice early on from someone and I love it. It was so great. And he just said, look, when you take a vacation, don't just rest and lay around on the couch. Don't just do mindless stuff. You have to do things that are restorative. And how many of us go on a vacation and we come back more tired than when we left? And it's like, no, not that you, you have to be mindful of what restores you and do those things so that you can be reenergized. And that's not just on our vacations. That's all the time. You got a day off. Hey, do something restorative. Don't just lay on the couch, watching football all day. If you're a guy like me, who likes football. Yeah, sure. I love that. But guess what? If I just sit there and watch three straight games, I'm exhausted at the end of that. That's not energizing. So I've got to do some energizing stuff. So maybe I pick a game and then I go do something else that really reinvigorates me. And so those are some of the things that as I think about it, and I know there's so many more, but you've got time to cover those. And I know you've got other people coming to cover them as well. So. Wow. I love it. So I almost got tears in my eyes when you were talking at the beginning. The, book ends is really important because it will help you avoid procrastination too in there because if you have something that energizes you at the end and the beginning and also I love this. What, what really brought joy to my heart is I can sense the momentum that each step brought. Each step builds momentum off of the others. And honestly, from this episode, you could take notes. And I'm thinking in my mind, I'm going to, I want to write this down, but thank goodness this is being recorded and I'm going to be editing it. And I'm going to be writing notes. And also from this episode, I include a blog post with. every episode I do. So I will have links to that in the show notes and description below. And then you can take these insights, And really put them to memory because they will be so, so helpful because what Doug is talking about is not just in leadership, not just in C suite, not just at work, but at home and in your life in general. I like the balance aspect too, because what happens with me when I start to feel burnt out, I always remind myself. Things have balance, balance in life, balanced forces. And when you work with the other side of the balance, let's say you are stressed out and you go to the other side of the balance, it evens everything out and then you feel better and you're more productive, you're more successful. So all of these. Tips that, that, that Doug gave us today are very helpful, very helpful in life in general, and, and stopping burnout because, as he said, we all call it something different. You may not realize that that's burnout, but why am I angry right now? Why am I getting so short tempered with my husband, with my wife, when, They didn't have anything to do with what's going on. And when you do that introspection, you start to realize, Oh, that's burnout. Well, how can I balance that out? So these points are very helpful. And each day we're going to have another episode that we'll talk about different ways we can deal with burnout, whatever you may call it. And we will definitely be having Doug back on another episode just to Get more, pick his brain a little bit more, because that was some good stuff. And before we close, I want to give Doug the chance to tell you goodbye, where you can find him. Again, there will be links to, to find out any information about that, especially inside the blog post. I will include links to where you can find Doug. Let me give him the opportunity to give his final word and then I'll close out. Thank you so much, Kathie and I'm so thrilled you're doing this. I think this is so vital for, for so many. So this is, this is just fantastic. Um, for those of you, if you wanted to reach out to me, chat more, you had questions, I would love that. Uh, you can do so. I've got, my website is, uh, www. peoplesmartgroup. com. Um, and that's a, uh, Excellent place to just kind of be able to contact me through. You can also reach out. I'm on Instagram. I'm on LinkedIn regularly. And so those are places where you just shoot me a message or whatever, and I would love to connect with you and talk. Um, and if you wanted more information about the six working geniuses, there's the, the six working genius website is working genius. com. And that's straight through Patrick and Tony who created it. And then I've got one on workshops for it, which is six, the number six working genius And so you can check out both of those and get a whole lot more information just on how it works and how you can understand yourself. Perfect. I love it. All of those will be linked in the blog post that goes with today's episode. So you could check that in the show notes and description below. And again, thank you very much, Doug, for being here today. So appreciate your, your insights and perspectives. And if. You know somebody who can benefit from this, please share it with them. And I trust you found it helpful. And until next time, I'll see you next time. Peace out and Namaste.