Avoid Burning Out Your Best Talent (DON'T DO THIS!)

And as a leader that the last thing that we want to do is burn out our highest performing team members. As a leader, the last thing that we want to do is drive them to resent the work or to drive them to resent us as their leaders. But that's exactly what I had done to this person that was one of the highest performing people on my team. And sure, I was saying all the right things, but it was my actions that ultimately led to him burning out and quitting. And because of that, I had to go back and completely rethink the my role as a leader. Ah, leader. What does that even mean? You know, there's a lot of us that we seek out those opportunities to lead other people. Others of us are a little bit more reluctant to take on all of the responsibilities that come with the title of being a leader. And I think for a lot of us that come from corporate America, particularly those of us that maybe come from more technical roles like a bookkeeper or an accountant or an auditor, we may have never had a lot of leadership training. And in fact, a lot of us have never had good leadership role models. And so this week I had taken some time to just kind of reflect on the job that I'm doing as a leader in my fractional CFO firm and in the connected accountant. And very quickly I was reminded of the biggest leadership fail that I have ever committed. And so today what I want to do is share that story with you in hopes that you can take some of the lessons that I learned through that abysmal experience and apply them to your business so that you can be the type of leader you want to be and build the type of team that you want to have. So let's start by getting into the wayback machine. We're going to go back about 10 or 11 years ago now to when I was working as a senior leader in a massive manufacturing facility. Now, in this role, I had 510 or so people that reported through various levels of leadership up through me. And included in that, I had six department heads that reported directly to me. And I remember so well, I had this department head, he was a young, hard charging guy. He went to Virginia Tech and he had started right after college at the manufacturing plant and very quickly worked his way up through the ranks to become one of the youngest department heads that the company had ever had. And he was amazing. I mean, he was hands down, probably the most go after it and just get it done, solve big problems kind of guy. And frankly, a lot of my success in my role was due to the hard work and the success that he had had in his role. And I was just immensely grateful to have him on the team. And one morning he comes into my office, he's got this kind of stoic look on his face and he says, mike, I want to let you know that I am quitting, effective immediately. And I was like, mind blown. What do you mean you're quitting? What's going on? And he said, mike, it's you. He said, I'm tired of being expected to work 12 hours every day. I'm tired of being expected to work weekends and holidays. I'm tired of being expected to respond to emails at all hours of the night. I have a young family. My family is too important to me and I'm not going to waste my life working 60, 70, 80, 100 hours a week in this place, week in and week out. I'm done. And he turned around and walked away. Swung by HR to drop off his laptop and security credentials, got in his car and left. And I'll be honest, I was kind of peeved at him because I told myself that he had obviously lied to me about why he was quitting. I had told myself that it was obviously because he got a higher paying job somewhere else. I mean, he's a super smart guy, he's a hard worker and didn't have the courage to tell me that he was leaving. So later that weekend I was with one of my mentors and when we got together, I just started kind of venting a little bit about the process because honestly, that guy leaving put me in a huge bind. And I said, yeah, you know, I can't believe this guy just quit. And my mentor said, well, what happened? And so I told him the story about the 12 hour workdays and the 7 day work weeks and answering emails at all hours. And I was like, you know me, there's no chance I would ever tell people that I expect them to do all of those things. And he kind of paused for a second and he took a look at me and he said, are you sure that you haven't told him that? And I said, yeah, I'm positive. I would never say that. And he said, yeah, but you regularly work 12 and 14 hour days and you regularly work weekends. It's hard for us to get together because you're working every weekend and most nights. And he said, and I know that you send emails a lot because we've been here for 30 minutes and you've already fired off three emails. And responded to a half a dozen texts. And I sat there for just a second and it just came over my. I know he saw it on my face. I realized he was absolutely right. While it is true that I never told anybody on my team to work 12 hour days day in and day out, to work weekends, to miss holidays, to answer emails at night and on the weekends, while I never told them with my words, I had set that expectation through my actions and man, it was like a ton of bricks had just fallen on me because I realized that in fact, yes, I had told this amazing department head that I expected him to do all of those things and it was 100% my fault that he had left the team. And as I thought through that, I had this aha moment, this light bulb moment that there's more to leading well than just giving lip service around your expectations. You know, a lot of times we talk about leading by example and you know, it's we do the right thing and always show up with truth, even when it's hard and we push through and we solve problems. And those are very good examples of leading by example. But I realized that there's another part of leading by example and that's about having healthy boundaries between work. It's about having personal time to be with your family and to recharge and recalibrate. It's about showing through example not just how to work at the office, but how to kind of live and have those healthy boundaries. And I had never considered that before. And because I didn't have that consideration, I burned out such an awesome person on my team. And the reason I share this with you is because as business owners, we tend to do a lot of those same things. We work all the hours and we're constantly on our phones, sending emails and responding to texts and Slack and DMs. And as we start to build a team around us, they see that. They see the hours that we work and the days that we work and we miss holidays and family time and we're always accessible. And if you build a team of high performing people, I want to encourage you to be mindful of the message that you might be inadvertently sending to these high performing people, that you expect them to do those things. Because I'm assuming if you're anything like me, you don't want them burning themselves out. Yes, there are seasons in every business, in every job where you've got to work more hours, where you've got to put in more time, where you've got to be a little more accessible. But make sure that those seasons are the exception and not the day in and day out norm, because you will burn your team out. And if I'm being honest with you, you'll burn yourself out too. Take some time this week to think about the messages that you're sending to your team, verbally or non verbally, and making sure that you are leading by example, that you are sending the message that you intend to send to them and be very intentional and deliberate about that. And I think that as you grow your team, they will thank you for it. You will thank you for it, your family and friends will thank you for it. It will pay off dividends for the rest of your life. All right. I hope this was helpful. If it was, it would mean the world to me if you would smash the one of the like buttons and maybe share the episode with somebody else that could hear this message today. I look forward to seeing you right here next week. In the meantime, have a great day. My. Sam.