Burnout, Jaded Techs, and Growing Without Becoming That Guy LoL

That means we're live. If you are tuning in, you can see already, as is typical with anything I do with Tara and now Matt Topper, we are not 100% prepared on how to use the tools we're using. Whoopsie doodle. Welcome everybody to this special live edition of Managing Up. We are going to talk about a fairly heavy topic and try to have— keep it a little bit light, but I don't want to make anybody think that we're going to be overly silly because normally if you do watch Managing Up, I try to be at least slightly silly. I have 2 amazing smart people with me that I will do a quick job introducing now and then we will get more into in just a few moments. But I have the amazing Tara Rummer, who many of you know, and if you don't, you should know.

Hi.

From ImmeBot and Immense Networks. And I have Matt Topper here who gets— no, I'm just kidding. The founder of RMSP, the single largest collection of MSPs on the face of the planet. We have Matt Topper here to represent all of you. And incidentally, on this topic, Matt Topper was the very first person I ever heard present a session that taught me about burnout. So we'll get into all of that in just a minute. Before, uh, we get all of our, uh, I'm reading our private chat now. Uh, before we get into all of that, I want to pull up a couple of slides from a presentation that, uh, Tara and I gave on this subject in London, just to kind of set the stage a little bit about what we're talking about. And What exactly high-functioning burnout is and why we're all here today.

We're here because I can blame Matt Topper for starting RMSP. That thing is a— you were right. You could cure cancer tomorrow and that is still how you'd be introduced.

Right? Like no matter what I contribute to the industry, like that, that's it for some reason.

Well, I guess I'm gonna have to—

like I always say, had I known I would go to vendor space, I may or may not have actually done that.

Really? Oh, Dean, I'm, I'm trying to give you time to bring up whatever.

No, it's— I, I don't have, uh, I don't have admin access to, to move sources around. I'm trying to put the slides on screen, but our admin left.

Well, we'll just have to wing it.

Our admin left?

Wait, what?

We're like triple booked right now. We're so— we're really good at planning over here.

Princess says she's here, so this is my fault. Sorry guys, I had to move it. I'm going to Empaths. Uh, live event.

I have to be there right after summer, summer school, which I've totally forgot that we were even hosting. All right, I'm solving the problem a different way because part of being in the MSP industry is solving problems. So let's see if this works. Now I've got multiple sources I'm trying to pull on screen that I can't pull on screen because I'm not an admin.

You're just being resourceful.

There we go. Thank you.

There we go.

Amazing princess behind the scenes. So I just wanted to share a couple of slides from this deck to read you all in on high-functioning burnout, because it's a little different than regular burnout. And it's really what we're talking about here because it's so prevalent in help desk and within our industry. So have any of you watching from home Ever felt any of the following? Exhaustion and/or chronic fatigue. I would argue probably anyone who's Gen X or younger, yes. Uh, sleep disturbance or poor concentration. That's everybody on the call today. Uh, irritability and/or cynicism. I am definitely not cynical and did not create Spicy Monday, and Tara doesn't post on Spicy Monday. And actually, I don't know that Matt Topper is. Uh, emotional flatness or withdrawal. I mean, this is a mask. I am dead inside. Uh, physical symptoms and/or reduced effectiveness. I can't speak for all of you, but until very recently, I had become a, quote, fat piece of crap and have only finally maybe starting to get a handle back on that. The point here is probably most of us have experienced some or all of these symptoms the longer we've spent time working in the MSP space, especially on and around the help desk. And a lot of what I'm talking about here are typical symptoms of burnout and specifically high-functioning burnout. But I keep saying they're different. And so that's kind of why I wanted to steal a couple of these slides. Traditional burnout, we are all familiar with because it's very, very visible. It's somebody within— I'm not even using presentation mode here. That's how much of a pleb I am. With using, uh, uh, what's it here, uh, Restream. Traditional burnout is very visible, you know, it's somebody disintegrates in front of us. We, we all know somebody like, like they literally crash out, usually in an MSP, they become antagonistic. And it's somebody that we see both visually, auditorily, and behaviorally just degrade. And we usually don't want them in the org. This is an actual toxic person. That's not really who we're talking about today because Most of our MSPs are relatively small companies. Even if you're, you know, got a couple hundred employees, still small company. These people don't last because they either, they either exit out in a few months or we get rid of them because we don't want somebody who's overtly toxic. The other category, it's all of you who don't become toxic, don't degrade in any noticeable way. You keep doing your job. You keep doing your job. Well, in fact, you keep doing your job maybe even better than you did it, but you're exhibiting all of the other symptoms of burnout and paying the toll and the tax for it. That's high-functioning burnout. And the risk, and what Tara and I talked about quite a bit when we were in London, the risk is someone with high-functioning burnout is not going to display symptoms and often won't even admit to them until they someday reach a breaking point, and then they'll very quietly and quickly exit. And if any of you have worked at an MSP with more than a handful of employees, you know somebody this happened to on your team. They were like the person at the company, intrinsically part of the system, happy, showed up, did the things, and then suddenly one day they had submitted their resignation and left to go to like another MSP or do something else kind of out of nowhere. That is almost certainly what we're talking about here with high-functioning burnout. There's a lot of research and data and science on this. This was one, one particular doctor. whose research I had went through for our presentation that went through a typical cycle that we see, sort of hope, frustration, anger, apathy, and burnout. We've all felt a lot of this stuff. This deck and these resources are going to be available to everybody on, on this webinar, and they're all on Empath as well. And you can just message me and I'll send them to you and I'll give them to Matt and Tara. You can message them, they'll send them to you as well. So I don't want to kill you all death by PowerPoint, but hopefully that sets a little bit of the stage here of what we're talking about. There's one final thing I want to tee up that was a little bit further on in our presentation. And this is my wonderfully AI image. I had mentioned that high-functioning burnout, especially within a help desk, we tend to hide, we tend to mask it. And even if our leaders ask us— you two are both leaders— even if we ask our employees, Hey, you know, you kind of— you've been putting a lot of extra hours. You've been burning the candle at both ends. Why don't you take a break? How you doing? Most of us are not really going to admit that we need that help. We're not really gonna— we might laugh it off, really. Yeah, yeah, I'll leave early on Friday. I'll take a long weekend. But most of us are not really gonna be like, I, I'm dying because of what I have on this slide. High-functioning burnout follows an incredibly similar pattern to patterns of addiction, except your addiction is addiction to being a hero. And that hero complex may be completely internalized where you're just a hero to yourself, but it's such an important component of this conversation. I wanted this slide to be up here for a minute, and I wanted to kind of bring it up to the two of you as I pull this off the screen now. Tell me a little bit about how both of you ran into burning out yourselves because you were both acting as a hero. I don't know who wants to go first.

Matt, I'm gonna let you go. I'm gonna voluntold you that you're— voluntell you.

Yeah, I can go first. I mean, you guys have heard my story before. Um, Dean, to what you were saying before, it's not even necessarily that I'm actively deciding to not speak up. It's that I didn't even realize the state I was in until much later on looking back, right? So it's not as if somebody said, hey man, you've been working a lot, you okay? Like, yeah, isn't that just normal? Um, right? Later on you come to realize that, oh man, I really was working way too much and burned out and, you know, had the physical manifestations of getting out of shape and all that stuff. But in the moment, that's just how it is, right? Just completely normal. And The hero thing—it's an interesting way to phrase it because I don't necessarily agree that I was like addicted to the glory of being the hero and saving the day. It's really more that I felt the sense of ownership of having to fix or make whatever was happening work, or you know make sure that the client relationship continued for the sake of the company and and all of that. More so than I want to be seen as the hero, it was a. misplaced sense of responsibility for keeping things going. And the whatever praise came along with that was not necessarily the goal, but something more like a secondary, like, yeah, sure, people are saying how awesome you are. Meanwhile, I'm thinking, I mean, that, that's awesome, but I'm just trying to keep the lights on here.

The, the hero analogy is a convenient analogy And, uh, Matt, you're a, you're a Marvel fan, right? Are you a DC fan as well? Comic fan at all?

I'm a light kind. I, I always do poorly on pop culture stuff, Dean. Okay, this one's easy.

So, uh, old, old school traditional Superman, right? We're all familiar with that. He's an alien, comes to Earth, is raised as a human. His alter ego is just him taking off glasses and being a television news reporter. I, I use Superman as an example because Superman in the original comics really is not in it for the glory. He doesn't want glory. He's actually very uncomfortable with the spotlight. And Clark Kent, who's his alter ego, and Kal-El, who's actually Superman, neither one of them ever get the spotlight. But he feels this sort of intrinsic responsibility that if not me, who else? And so that's kind of where that superhero mindset comes from. It doesn't necessarily mean that you do want the glory, but it's this idea that if I don't save the Earth today, who else will? And for those that are fans of DC lore, literally it took Batman— Batman basically going, you know what, this is a problem because if he quits someday, we're screwed— to create the Justice League to try to offset that That literal problem in comic book lore. But think about that, like, at your MSP organization, we mostly hire people that are intrinsically motivated to help end users. Most of our help desk employees that we get now, we're not hiring techs first. We're hiring people people. We're hiring people that care, people that are going to lose sleep or be a little bit— they're going to take like 5 less minutes in lunch because they want to get to that ticket because they're worried about a user. It's that kind of hero mentality. Tara, I know you went through this in a different way than Matt and I did at Amens, and I probably, again, at IME. Talk to us a little bit about that.

I mean, I've probably gone through this more times than I can count, in all honesty. And I've witnessed it with my teams too, right? For me, it was a little interesting because I was actually like Matt. I didn't realize I was burnt out. It was just the way things were. And like, I'm very much a self-starter, so I put a lot of pressure on myself. And Brett and Darren would be like, we're not asking you to do this stuff. I'm like, I get it, but like, once again, if not me, who? Like, I'm the one that knows how to do this stuff. We haven't had the chance to maybe teach somebody else it yet because we were such a small team. Um, but from there, I actually— like, I was having a chat with the 2 owners of our company about becoming CEO. That was my next role in Immense. And, you know, with that came ownership shares, that came all of this stuff. And I was so over doing the stuff I had done, and I was so burnt out on it all. And I am not great at kicking people in the ass to do their job. And that's what I was— I was having to galvanize people constantly. And I'm like, no, like, I just want to trust you and then verify that things are being done. I don't want to have to look at your timesheets. I don't want to have to— like, I was not doing things that may be my highest, best use of time. And I was ready to actually leave. I was ready to be that person that slid a resignation letter across and be like, I can't. Um, and that actually kind of prompted the move to Immubot because Darren was like, I think you're going to continue running in burnout, and I think you're going to be bored very quickly if you take this role.

Yeah.

And I was like, I would be. I would— I feel like I wouldn't be growing. And that's actually why we, we moved me over. But you're not wrong, Dean. People who come into our industry, we're helpers. I still say that to this day. I'm a helper. I'm like, my role in IME is a connector of all the other roles, in my opinion. And then from there, we're problem solvers. So I don't know about Matt and you, but if somebody comes to me, and this was happening with my team at Immense, if they would come to me with a problem, immediately I would want to solve it. Like, that is where my brain goes.

Right.

It's like, okay, so I had to like take a step back and go, okay, Do you need to vent or do you need me to solve it? Like, that's— I need to know.

Let me ask you a question about that. Because I think for a lot of, a lot of people who watch Managing Up are employees. And that mindset of I bring something to my boss or somebody above me and they're going to try to solve it is often something we, we actually don't like as employees. Were you doing that because you were a micromanagerial control freak sociopath? Or because in your mind you were hearing, you know, this person is in pain and I need to rescue them from that pain?

It's not even rescue. This person's in pain and it doesn't sound like they're coming up with a solution and that they're coming to me for maybe additional knowledge or maybe I've seen it before. Like they want my feedback on it. And sometimes that's not actually what they wanted. They were like, I just want to come talk to you because I need to be mad for 5 minutes. Like, that's it.

Well, the, the reason why I kind of like, I asked you that is when, when we looked into a lot of the research that's been done into high-functioning or Type A burnout, you see these similarities in the patterns of addiction and PTSD. And so for like what Tara just described is basically a scenario that Tara half manufactured in her own brain to support a situation and then sort of give her the excuse to get involved with something. And Tara's not bad because her brain did that to her, and that employee isn't bad because they brought up a But yet you're in this situation that you may not even be able to self-identify out of. And it's why it's so common that people who do have high-functioning burnout, if they leave— this is super interesting. So people that tend to have regular burnout, when they crash out, they will tend to exit the industry that they are working in almost to 100% across the board. People with high-functioning or Type A burnout almost never leave the industry they're working in. They keep signing up for the exact same rodeo over and over and over again, thinking this time will be different. You know, it's like somebody who's been struggling with like gambling. It's like, I've got it under control this time. It's a virtual casino. It'll be different. And then same patterns again. And I say that because like things like PTSD and addiction, you don't have complete agency and control over what your brain is telling you here.

It can be different.

Did that happen to either one of you?

Well, so I didn't exit the industry, although I did take a very different role inside the industry. And I actually wonder sometimes, had I gone to a different, like, purely tech function, whether I would fall into the same trap again. I honestly think the answer is yes, I probably would. For me, though, I said, okay, I can't keep acting and behaving this way, right, just for the sake of self-preservation. So let me take a different kind of role. And there's trade-offs with that, for sure, in that I had to learn a completely different skill set and different job to be able to stop burning out that way. But I think in hindsight, yeah, I don't know that I would have been able to take a different, like, CTO-type role or architecture-type role without pouring myself into it 24/7 again. I'm actually curious, Dean or Tara, if you've been able to find a way to do that. Like, for me, the type of role that I'm in, like the natural engineer problem solver internally, just like is something I can't turn off. And for me, I'm well aware that I can't turn it off. And the solution was to take a role that I wouldn't get sucked into in that way.

Mm-hmm.

Do you guys see ways for if you know you're like that, to be able to turn it off and be healthy? Or is the solution that you have to find the right role for you?

I think you have to find a balance, right? At least for myself. So I moved into a role because I was so over managing people that I moved into a role where I was like, I don't want any staff. I just want to be myself. Like, I can, I can handle my own brain. And but now once again, I'm building another staff. And I'm like, I support our connector role. I support our dev team. I support our partner success team. I support our UX team. It's— I don't think I'll ever come out of that, right? I think I've put up some boundaries. Like, when people now come to me with a problem, they also have to come to me with like 2 solutions because I'm like, I can't make all the decisions because that's where mine was coming from, is I was constantly making decisions for other people or trying to work them out of like a corner. Um, so I wasn't getting my own role done, and then I felt like I was failing, and then you feel the burnout, right? So I've put some, some barriers, I would say, into, into it so I don't like jump in and superhero constantly.

It, it— one of the main things, and actually the, the handout material which I, I pulled up, there's a couple of worksheet packs. One of the first things that is in this handout is literally scoring yourself, or if you're a manager, trying to sort of the best you can score another person on looking for some of the signs and patterns. Because all of us have unique patterns that we tend to replicate when we are sort of overdoing it, when we're going into that, that burnout mode. You, you can't— the amount of discipline it takes for most people To learn about themselves, identify a behavior, modify that behavior permanently, and significantly change who they are intrinsically. It's certainly possible, but that's hard. So what Tara and I had said in London was, don't do that to begin with. Just get good at identifying when it's happening again. Because if you get good at identifying, oh, I'm doing that thing again where I sort of self-volunteer to just burn the candle at both ends here that nobody's asked me to. There's a chance that you might be able in that moment to sort of like very meekly raise a hand and have somebody be like, hey, just go home, or that's enough, that'll do, pig. And for me, that's where I'm still at. Um, I have not managed to stop going through this burnout cycle myself. I'm doing it at Empath. I, I, I didn't even realize that I was burned out. Until well after our MSP first got acquired by private equity. And, uh, I had said it, um, I'd said this to Tara, maybe over coffee. It was finally a day where my role was basically irrelevant. There were no more fires for me to put out. Where in the quiet, I was sitting there and I was like, oh, I'm like, a shell of a person here. Like, when there's no fires and crisis going on around me, I don't know this version of Dean. And then it was funny, the following year Matt gave a presentation on burnout at MSP GeekCon. I'm like, that, that's the thing. But I had already started doing that to myself, the same cycle again at my next job. And then I did it again, and I'm doing it again here because that's who Dean is. And I'll probably keep doing that until someday I physically can't. So what I've been working on is getting better at identifying when I lapse into that pattern and just trying to improve by 10%. I don't have Matt's level of— I say this somewhat tongue-in-cheek— I don't have Matt's level of discipline. Matt wakes up early, goes running. Matt actually has some discipline. I don't have that level of discipline. But identifying for myself when I'm going through some of these masking behaviors or compensating behaviors, basically measuring my the cost of my output and starting to identify that. That's as far as I've gotten in this entire journey. And I've been working on this now for 8 years.

I mean, none of us are perfect, right? And you're going to slide— you're going to slide back in and out, right? That's, that's common. We're humans. And it's interesting you bring this up because I think the first time I realized I was in burnout, somebody actually slid me their resignation letter.

And because— Yeah.

So, um, Kayla, uh, when we were at Immense, she worked directly under me. And one day randomly she slid me a resignation letter and I was like, all right, before I let you do this, let's chat about what's going on. And we started talking about it and a lot of the stuff that was just listed in there, I was actually dealing with, like the not being able to delegate, the taking on more things, the not sleeping. the relying on caffeine. And I had— I hadn't realized it, but she had noticed. And so how I was acting, even though I didn't think I was acting differently, it was affecting her. And so she started reacting to it and slid that resignation letter to me. And she still works for me to this day. So like, we were able to work through it. But it was like, no, this isn't a you— like, I am clearly going through something if it's affecting you this way. Like, she was convinced I hated her at that point, and I was like, girl, I am like underwater. And that's when I started having to realize it. And Brett and Darren, at that point, they sent me— I think I told you this, Dean, same coffee— um, Brett and Darren sent me for a massage, and I thought I was being fired. Like, they were like, you need to go home for the day. Are you firing me? And they're like, no, we just booked you a massage. Like, you need a break, get out of here.

It's, um, it's so tough too because The idea of like taking a break, uh, seems like— so for a normal person whose brain isn't doing this to them, and I say that somewhat tongue in cheek because I think almost 100% of our audience here will fall into the not normal category. So for a normal person, a normal person is eventually going to go, you know, I have been spending this entire week working on this project. I've been doing 12-hour days. I have done enough for the org. I'm going to put a few days in time off and just tune out work and do something else. And they will come back from that short break refreshed and back at a normal operating level. For those of us with high-functioning burnout, that literally doesn't work. And it's actually one of the best early indicators that you might have Type A or high-functioning burnout is if you do take a break, especially if your employer goes, hey, why don't you take a, you know, take a long weekend, take a few days off. And you find that whether you're able to enjoy that time or not, you sort of are immediately back in that same mindset when you come back of that, that sort of like high stress, got to put out fires, got to do stuff, got to, got to get back into it. You probably have burnout because taking a break doesn't heal you. And it's funny because quitting your job doesn't heal you. It might eliminate the conditions. That have sort of prompted the behavior from you, but it don't fix you. And, and that's such a, it's so tricky because that seems like to normal people who are trying to help us, hey, just take some time off. It seems like such a common sense piece of advice. And then we'll be like, yeah, I mean, a great example. Do either one of you have unlimited PTO where you work right now?

No.

Or any, do you, do you, Matt, do you have some sort of like unlimited PTO policy?

I think so. If I ever took—

That's like, I don't take PTO, so who knows?

That's what I was looking for. So if you're somebody who either has to be chased to consume your hours before they burn out, or you have unlimited PTO and you never really take it because there's always something to do, that's why breaks often don't really solve anything for somebody. It's good to take breaks, but they don't heal your brain from this pattern.

So that's actually why we did—

Not at all. So think about, like, when I was doing this before, like, time off was the worst possible thing I could do. I spent, like, my entire vacation just stressed about what was happening at the office, not relaxing in the slightest bit. In fact, I think I was more stressed, like, worried that I would come back to some kind of, like, crater and, like, the organization collapsed. Around me. Um, you felt like it's obviously a sign of a huge thing. Oh yeah, of course, right? I was checking my— like checking my phone, you know, constantly, or checking my email from, you know, like the hotel business center if I was out of the country, like all that stuff. And you don't realize it at the time, but like vacation was actively detrimental. I think it didn't help in the slightest. It raised my stress level, if anything.

Yeah. No, it's a great call out.

Dean, you might have actually knowledge on this because you did a whole bunch of the research for our talk is what is the overlap of like high-functioning burnout with people who have anxiety? Because that's what I noticed is I had such anxiety when I would leave the office that if not me, who, right? Are these things going to get done? And then I would come back and it's like, you know, you hear about a random fire while you're gone. I'm in like lines at Disney World, like messaging my team like, oh my God, is this being handled? Like, Is that a thing? Is like anxiety is like tied into it or?

Uh, so to, to be clear, this is, if you're watching this, I'm not an expert in depression or anxiety. This is not a clinical diagnosis. So if any of this sounds like you, please go see a professional. Don't diagnose yourself. Um, if our producer could pull up the slide I have as a source to be shared, that'd be amazing. So we had a slide for this when we presented. So there's significant overlap both with symptoms and signs of depression and high-functioning depression and anxiety. And you can see like in the Venn diagram here, there's quite a bit of overlap. A lot of the symptoms are very similar. A lot of the coping mechanisms are very similar. A lot of the personality traits that somebody who, you know, actually had an anxiety issue Are going to overlap with these other problems and they're often amplifiers. So it's ADHD is another one that I didn't put on here because it would have made the Venn diagram too complicated. It all kind of files back to, and I like how Matt had put it with vacation. Well, you know, when I leave, what if it falls apart? And that's the wonderfully insidious thing about high functioning burnout in a smaller org. It probably does. It probably does fall apart because a huge thing that happens in organizations where we have a type A performer is we tend to build systems around them. And even if we're aware of that, even if we know that we're going, bad MSP, don't ever build a process around one person, we kind of still do a little bit. And when that person isn't there, a good team, multiple resources will come together. And there won't be a fire when you come back, but it probably isn't the same as if you did it. A team that isn't quite that aligned yet, it might actually be a fire and you may legitimately be the only person that can solve it to the point where within the help desk space, there's kind of a joke that like every MSP under 25 people, the owner has somebody on their team. I call them the Wubby, the safety blanket. There's an employee on that team that's the only reason that owner currently sleeps at night. Because they know that if everything went to shit, that employee could log in and would somehow fix whatever that problem was. It's not an official title, but there's always a guy or a girl on the team who is that person. And now imagine you have anxiety and you're that person and you're dealing with burnout. So you have an extra voice in your head telling you that you can't stop, you can't turn off, even on a day you're not there, what goes wrong. In my case, I'm a psycho. I try to plan before I leave, like, all right, let me get every piece of work done. So there's just nothing anyone can get wrong while I'm gone. And if Mark's still in chat, Mark could tell you how well that works. Uh, there's, there's no way around it, you know.

There was a time when we were very small, um, where my departure legitimately may have been the end of the organization, right? Like when we were tiny, tiny, just because There was nobody else to do the super high-end technical stuff or the architecture, like the, the big escalations. Um, I, I think it takes some humility almost to internalize that that period doesn't last very long, and, and if it does, you have an issue in who you're hiring and how your roles are. Um, like, yes, when, when you're like 4 or 5 people, there may be some like super critical people that you really can't replace. Beyond that, though, once you start getting your processes in line and start systemizing things, that's not the way that the organization works anymore. And well, it does. If you came in when your company was that small, it doesn't. It doesn't. You don't think so?

So think about it more from a mental health standpoint rather than actual operational reality. I'll give you an example here at Empath. So at Empath, I run partner success. If I got hit by a bus tomorrow with Mark, so Partner Success was gone, Wes, Alex, and Kyle eventually would figure it out. Kyle would probably step in and do the best he could. 3 to 5 months later, a system would be reestablished or our processes would be followed and things would be fine. But for at least a gap period, there would be some friction. The fear of what that friction could be often is a bigger problem in your brain than the reality. If I go back to my Justice League example, well, in some DC Comics where Superman is gone off planet, otherwise disabled, there's storylines where we have a world-ending event and the rest of the Justice League is kind of panicked about that because like Batman's just a guy with a lot of money. Um, if it's not a version of the Justice League with Wonder Woman, we kind of don't really have a real immortal superhero available. Like we, we could lose. And that's an entire story arc in there because that's a real fear your brain plays when pragmatically, do they ever lose? No, of course not. Because there's so many good people that can step up and help and save the planet. There's more good than problematic. Same thing at your org, but that don't help your brain. It doesn't help you at all when you're in this situation.

Yeah.

And, and so that's even when you have a process and you're well oiled. Even if it's to the point where most people can step in or out of that process and it's not even visible, that person who's suffering from that high-functioning burnout in their mind, they're still probably anchoring themselves to, okay, maybe for a couple of days the team will be okay, but gosh, if I'm not there, you know, to feed and water these crops, they're going to die without me. And that could be completely nonsense. But in your brain, that is real. And that adds to that stress. Now you're opening your phone. While you're on, you know, your honeymoon in the Caribbean or something, checking on messages. How many owners here have done that at their MSP and their team eventually has had to lock them out of a tool because it's like, we literally don't need the boss. We got it covered. It's just so easy to let you fall into that trap of they must need me. So even to Matt's point, even when you get to organizational maturity where the actual reality is nonexistent, And it's good, it's a good, uh, foreshadow. So we were talking about what to look for here as a leader is exactly what Matt just brought up. So you have to start looking for a couple of patterns. And the 3 biggest patterns that we kind of found, we went through the research ourselves and Tara and I looked at a bunch of other MSPs. You tend to find 4 key areas that a leader might want to look for. That person tends to Yes, functionally to everything, whether that is direct or indirect. So they become the person who always agrees to just take care of it, either directly— I've got that— or they don't vocalize they don't have it, and then they just go absorb it. That's actually very easy to spot once you know it. They become a shortcut whether they should be or not. That's exactly what Matt was talking about. They may insert themselves as a shortcut, or they may just become a natural dependency as a shortcut. Well, once again, that's easy. Do the hit by a bus test. If they weren't here, who else would we have to talk to? Redistribute some of that. Do it against their will. We talked earlier, they always tend to hide the cost. They will lie. Someone with high functioning burnout who's very Type A will lie to your face about what they need and the cost to them. You as a leader will say, You seem stressed. What can I do for you? And you will mean every minute of that word. And that person will look you in the eyes and lie to you and go, I'm good. I don't need anything, boss.

I feel attacked right now. I'm just throwing that out there. Not to bring it up.

No matter what you do and no matter how good your system is, that system will naturally learn dependencies over time. So you as a leader have this wonderful ability because you're not in the system to sit above it and look for those dependencies. Think of it like a conveyor line. You eventually build one and it's perfect, but you notice there's this guy and this guy's always there and he always reaches in and pulls one object off the conveyor line every 10 minutes. What the hell's that? That's a dependency. Why? What's going on there? That's not automated, you know, literally not automated. Leaders, we can see that. And that's where we can start to follow up on that workload and that dependency to try and help these people help themselves. So it's good that you— it's almost like we've all gone through this before. It's good that you brought that up.

Continuing to go through it all the time. I think it's interesting in the chat Mary brought up, because something I think we need to get to, I mean, at some point is how do you address this? Like, what have you done personally? What boundaries have you put up? And she said, I was talking to Amanda. from Finn, and she and her husband put their phones down when they walk in every night and unplug. I actually have started doing that at 7:30. I can't do it immediately. I mean, I probably could, probably should, but I'm slowly, because I'm still not sleeping. And so some of that, I don't think it's burnout. Like, I'm pretty good at recognizing it in myself.

Oh, it's so annoying. Can I, Amanda, if you're watching, it is so frustrating for me and Will Brooks because we're trying to talk to you about memeing on LinkedIn tomorrow for work and you're not answering us because, oh, I'm spending quality time with my loved ones.

Here's the trick. Just never answer anyone ever. And then it doesn't matter what time of day it is.

Yeah. Problem solved.

I know.

You also won't have to worry about your job too long.

One of, uh, one of our core values here at Empath, it was inspired by Kyle. Kyle calls what you guys are describing time vampires. So he kind of systematized it is like, I've got to sort of protect my time literally from time vampires. And he even has apps on his phone that will lock him out of being able to touch work stuff after a certain period of time. I'm a big fan of when you're dealing with something that's tied back to just an intrinsic part of somebody's mental chemistry. If you can eliminate variables by just simply locking something down for them, I don't think that's micromanaging or bad as a manager if you do that to help an employee. If somebody needs a screen turned off. And they won't do it themselves, turn it off on them.

Definitely not micromanaging. You're protecting your team at that point, right? Like, you don't want them— and this is part of the reason, actually, we were talking about unlimited PTO. It's part of the reason we don't have unlimited PTO is because there have been studies done on it, and I could probably find them for you, where people don't take their PTO, um, because they don't want to be seen as abusing it. And so we still have a— I mean, our PTO is, is very good, but like We make you use it by the end of the year and you can only roll over a week because we want people to be taking the time to like regroup. And I mean, just ask Kayla, she's in the chat. She just took a week off because she was going to lose it.

Have you ever noticed if we talk to our, uh, our friends across the pond in most parts of Europe, they don't connect with this part of the conversation. They're always like, huh? Canadians do. Because over in most of Europe, this type of work, you have either state or contractually mandated leave that is very, very clearly defined. And the company will be up your rear end if you are not taking your time, where there's culturally, there's no debate about that's my time, my phone's off, leave me alone. It is very much an American continent concept here, you know, with the idea of PTO, unlimited PTO, I've got to request it and Gosh, I feel guilty about it. And that's that constraint theory. They've just removed a variable across the pond there from even being available to your brain. Yeah.

So how realistic though is the— you get home, your phone goes off, you don't answer anything after hours? Because the reality is we work in tech, right? There are going to be legitimate after-hours emergencies that come up. And I think the challenge is to make that an exception, right? Like, I don't think I would ever work in a technical role and have the expectation that I work zero hours after hours, right? Like, that, that's just not how technology works. And, and so how do you balance the need for turning off and disconnecting with still being able to deal with the exceptional situation that comes, right? The migration that has to happen at night one day, the emergency patch, Right? The outage when the SAN blows up or the server fails, right? That stuff does still need addressing. And I feel like— and I think most technical engineering people would feel like— if I just go home and say, nope, not answering my phone after hours, that might be too extreme in the other direction.

So we can have an entirely separate conversation on that, by the way. And there are episodes of Managing Up that talk about after-hours work and understanding how it's set up. So just blanket advice, Your company has a policy. It was written somewhere. Go read the policy and make sure you understand it. And if the policy is not the same as your lived reality, ask questions. Almost always that lived reality is a slip that the owner never intended and is probably pretty upset when they find out is actually happening. And we did to ourselves as employees. You were going to say something, Tara. Sorry.

I was, I was just gonna say you have, you have, uh, overtime schedules and you, you try to protect people's time and so they don't have to feel this way every week, right? So, uh, you have on-call. Yes. Uh, that's the idea. And you kind of divvy up that work and then you have your escalations. But apparently Dean has another episode, so we won't dive into it.

Yeah, I'm just making the point that the hard line is too far, I think, right? If you, if your attitude is I'm never working after hours and I'm, I go home and my phone goes off at 5. That's not realistic either.

If you think of like, it depends on your role. I'll say it depends.

If you just hired some kid into like an hourly role where they have after hours component, typically you'll notice that they're very, they're very inquisitive about the rules because they're very protective of their own time outside of work because generally lower in stature and earlier in your career. You're thinking more about me and my time than work time. It's a generalization. It's very hard as you either spend more time and have up the ladder seniority or just de facto seniority from existence to continue to feel that way because you start to self-identify with the business and the business's needs. That's why I had said earlier that I think the best first step you can take if you have high-performing burnout is to learn what you're masking. Symptoms are or your masking triggers are and just get really good at going, oh, I'm doing it again. Because that might give you just a moment to catch yourself. The after hours is a great example. So like the bottom here is ambulance chasing. That after hours emergency that came in, does it actually need Matt Topper? Or does the process say that Susie or Timmy, the level 1, is going to check it first? And Matt Topper goes, well, I know they're going to escalate to me anyways, so I'm just going to take it. No, wait, let them escalate it. What if they don't need that escalation? And then if they do, they're asking you for something specific that's probably got a little bit of a perimeter around it. And you can take the stance that you used to have earlier in your career of, well, I don't want to be doing this. So what do I need to teach these 2 people next week so they don't have to escalate this again? You can't take any of those steps unless you sort of identify that you're exhibiting any of these masking traits or symptoms that are so common with high-performing burnout. So if that after-hours thing comes in and you're immediately, I got it, you're replying instantly and not waiting, maybe there's an SLA or response window, you're not waiting for that. You're already overprepared. That would probably be like the— I would, I'm assuming, I'm assuming on Tara's behalf, that would be me and probably Tara's behalf where we would have like every version of a uniform and a tool we might need packed and ready in case. We had to go do the thing. Um, maybe you're like what I imagine would be more Matt here, and you're that like overly calm, demure Bob Ross in that moment of like, everything's fine and we have a plan. Let's go ahead and pull the incident response book and go through what we need to do next. All of these can be actual masking symptoms for high-performing burnout. And if you just get good at noticing I'm doing them, you buy yourself the opportunity To start trying to use some of that discipline and willpower that Matt was talking about earlier. Caleb says, this is the kind of conversation our space needs more of. That's right. We need more Tara and more Matt.

So I think, I think it's interesting, the last sentence there. This gives words and a description to a struggle that we don't even know what is happening. So that is the other thing that I would encourage. And Dean can give out all these, all this literature, is I've noticed this in other people, and generally other people have noticed this in me before I notice it in myself.

Yes.

Um, especially before I kind of learned what burnout was and what my triggers were and all of that. Um, it's take care of each other at the end of the day. And if you notice it in somebody else, have the conversation. Like, I will say, Kayla is actually in the chat. The first time I ever went on— we were talking about vacation earlier. The first time I ever went on vacation and didn't have to answer anything, it's because she straight up was like, I am not getting ahold of you unless literally the building is burning down. Like, I can handle it. I need you to trust that I can handle it. So have those, you need to find those people that can be your support system there.

One of the worksheets that you'll get, um, was this idea of silent trades, which is that there's no, there's, there's no free being the hero all the time. And, uh, so this, this idea is there's things you silently trade because you're not complaining. If you're complaining about these things actively, that's regular burnout and you become toxic and we'd all hate you. You're just doing it. We've talked about a lot of these. You give up your lunch, your sleep, your time off. You give up your honesty and telling everybody that you're fine. You give up a lot of your boundaries. If you've started to notice what tends to trigger you to jump into your high-performing burnout mode. A good next step is to take stock of all the things you've silently traded and not judging yourself that you were right or wrong to do it, just taking inventory. So one of the worksheets helps you go through and, and kind of list out, I traded this for this. And the more honest you can be about how your own brain chemistry works here— so like I put here, I traded lunch for praise. Well, Matt may not trade lunch for praise. He may not care at all about being praised. For him, he might have just traded lunch because he doesn't want to deal with, uh, a P1 ticket at 4 o'clock or something, you know, who, who knows. But every one of us has these silent trades we make that we don't articulate. So listing these out is really helpful because it'll then give you this scope where you're like, whoa, I've given away a lot of things that I can't get back for actually very minimal value. And what's funny about that is like, if you, if you ever look at any like employee You know, like, uh, my job sucks memes anywhere. What do you usually see? Like something like, you know, you, uh, headstone, like, you know, this person gave their entire life to this company and got nothing in return. That's sort of like the most jaded manifestation. What we're talking about is you someday later have this realization that like, I gave all my best years, all my extra time to this instead of family or children or hobbies or got whatever. Don't wait that long to have that realization, because I think for all of us who have high-functioning burnout, we are expert rationalizers. So use that brain chemistry deficit to your advantage. Well, if I've made a list of all of my silent trades, maybe I go, you know what, I actually am okay with skipping my lunches 2 or 3 times a week. I still eat. a banana at my desk, that's good enough. I actually don't care. Like, I'm not going to look back someday and go, I'm sorry I missed all these lunches. That's worth it. But after-hours work I spend with Tobias, the most adorable dog on planet Earth, and I'm not giving that up for work.

I have my hand raised for a reason. So the other thing I want to say is, and this is like me working through burnout sometimes, I love my job. Like, I love my role in my company. I have a lot of fun with it. Just because you love what you do and you're having a good time does not mean you won't get burnt out at some point. You are still trading. There's, there's a likelihood you are still trading something, and maybe you're not accounting for the cost in something. You know, I always say different things refill your cup in different ways. Just because you love what you're doing doesn't mean this won't happen. So just—

That, that, um, I'm glad you said that because the I, I love what I'm doing here and I'm overcommitted. Um, most of us, loving what you do doesn't mean that you necessarily love the actual work or the place you're doing the work. It's collectively this nebulous concept of I get enjoyment from being occupied by whatever this is. And when I said earlier, like being a hero or firefighting, literally for me, it was not until there was an absence of anything to do. It was literal silence around me. When they were like, hey, we don't, we don't, we don't really need you to be the service manager of these locations in the Northeast anymore, but we know you're important and we haven't figured out an exact new role for you, so stay in your corner office with the glass walls and here's your paycheck and do whatever you're doing. That was when finally, a few weeks of that, where I'm like, oh, the things I like doing that were hiding stuff, they aren't happening now. Oh wow. And that was like a weird feeling to go through that. Um, that happened here at Empath earlier this year. We, we made a— we started doing a fairly major migration on the back end, and it caused a period of time where Mark and I had to spend every day in our support chat, which is not really what Mark and I love doing. And there was definitely like a month there where I think the two of us were like, whoa, we've been doing a lot of stuff here. And like, This, this is kind of not the best headspace to be in. We, we should do less of it. And they kept doing it anyways because it's almost like this, like the background noise of enjoyment can go away for a minute and you hear what you couldn't hear before.

Dean, how do you like— so we, we said before, a lot of this is geared towards somebody maybe in a support desk role or maybe like a field tech kind of role. How do you Be okay with letting stuff drop, right? So in an extreme example, right, take the, the overworked support desk. Like, we're not going to know that we need to hire more people if everything is getting done, just as, as an example to bring some relief in there. Like, you have to be okay not with letting stuff down, but, but almost, yes, with like letting stuff fall through the cracks if you're too busy. Like, how do you get in that headspace that that's okay without feeling like you're letting your By itself?

Well, it's not okay. So you have to figure out a way to rationalize it where you understand it and accept it. Um, imagine you're the only EMT in a town who drives the ambulance. You are it. Well, anybody having an emergency objectively requires you. You can't not show up for a call. You're the only person available to drive that ambulance. If you show up for every call, 2 things will happen. One, they will not hire another person. The town will not budget for another person, another ambulance, until it gets so bad that people start dying because you're oversubscribed. And secondly, over time, by doing all those extra callouts, you are going to make mistakes. You maybe are going to show up late, go to the wrong address. Someone's going to get hurt even though you were trying to do the right thing. thing because you have overcommitted and oversubscribed yourself. And I think operationally, what Matt was saying, if you're an operations person, then yes, pragmatically, you have to let some balls drop so the data is there to resource for it. But a lot of us on the help desk, we don't live in that world. So living it emotionally, if I try to do everything, that will work for a while. It will. You're good. But it won't work in perpetuity, and you'll start making mistakes. Or eventually won't be in 2 places at once and something bad will happen to a teammate or an end user you care about. Are you willing to pay that price? And probably not. And so when you start looking at it that way, you're not letting a ball drop. You're expressing the fact that you are oversubscribed. You are basically communicating here. You are, you are basically saying, I'm a great swimmer, but this Titanic doesn't have enough lifeboats, and if we hit an iceberg, someone's gonna drown, and I can't live with that. And if I hide that from all of you, you won't find out until Rose doesn't let Jack on the door and he drowns. And then, you know, 60 years later, she throws away the world's most precious gemstone because she banged a homeless guy in the past. That's right, friends, that movie's not that great. Uh, But my point here being that, like, if you don't let that ball drop pragmatically, let it drop emotionally. Because if you don't, it's going to drop either way and the damage is worse. You're going to hurt somebody you didn't mean to hurt. And nobody in this space wants to do that. I've never met anyone in this industry who owns an MSP or works in an MSP who wakes up and goes, screw my users, screw my coworkers. I want everyone to have a bad day. F you all. I hope this all burns down. We may feel that way for a moment. No one who stays in this space is actually motivated that way. Not a single one of you. Use that. Use the emotional weight of, if I don't start raising my hand and saying, I can't do all of this, we need help, someone has to take this, other people have to be involved, people will get hurt. How long do you think you sat in the burnout space until you recognized it? Well, at least for me, it was for years.

Years.

For years. And then I noticed the symptoms of it but didn't know what it was. And then a year later, Matt was giving a presentation at MSP GeekCon that I sat in because I like Matt. And then he was explaining something to me and I was like, Whoa, that's what happened. And I had a label for it. And I'm still, still sitting. I, I just now it's, it's more, it's a little bit more of a choice. I have a little bit more agency in it. I'm sort of, you know, that everything is, this is fine, uh, image. I'm sort of that now where I'm like, okay, I know I'm burning myself out, but at least I am choosing to do it.

I would say months and years for myself, just because you slowly sometimes fall into it, right? And you're not going to recognize maybe on the front end, because of— I mean, I have my neurodiversities, like, this is my normal, is I have high anxiety, I have my ADHD, I'm a little all over the place. And it takes a while for me to recognize that, oh shoot, I am skipping lunches. Oh, like, because it's just not something I think about in the day to day because I'm medicated. So sometimes I don't eat lunch. Because I take Adderall and it just doesn't make me that hungry sometimes. So burnout isn't just once though. I'd say I've hit it so many times in my life, right? Um, luckily I don't feel like I'm in it right now, but I would say weeks, months, and years, uh, for myself.

For me it was years for sure. I didn't even notice until like after the fact.

Looking to see, I, uh, early, early on, uh, if you missed the very beginning, I pulled up a slide, uh, of one of the many different, like, doctors and psychologists that have actually put quite a bit of actual clinical research into burnout. Uh, traditional burnout, people, when they eventually experience it and it hits them, to answer your question, Caleb, and kind of the callback to Mary's thing about quiet quitting. That person is likely going to quit or leave the industry they were in entirely and is typically not going to repeat the same pattern. And unfortunately, it often manifests in a toxic way that hurts everyone. You know, it's not say, screw the MSP space. I'm not doing IT anymore. And they just leave. And the downside to that is, of course, if they were talented or good at this, everybody loses. Folks with high functioning burnout, even once they know they have it and they start working on it. They will continue to repeat the cycle. So you'll see somebody with high functioning burnout almost always will eventually quiet quit and then go sign up for the exact same rodeo going, this time it will be different. And just do that over and over and over again. It's sort of funny if you look around, if you're a little more connected to the, the sort of vendor and community side of our industry, if you look at some of the folks It's a little more easy to see on the vendor side that have done the same role at half a dozen vendors and they've loved every vendor they've worked for. And every one of those vendors reflects on them very positively. There's no negativity or acrimony there, but you're like, how come you keep doing the same thing for 2 to 3 years and then you leave and you say you're tired and then you do it again? It's very likely it's this kind of a cycle because it's, it's your brain. It just, just does it to you. So. Even once you know this is happening, and even once you start to maybe even start to take steps, you may find that you're just in a pattern that now you're just an active participant in, as rather, you know, rather than like a, a passive passenger in. And I'm not saying that's good or better, but it's, it's an improvement over being unaware. I'd like to think it's an improvement over being unaware, but I think a lot of us live in that state. I do.

Yeah.

I, I certainly still live in that, that space. What other questions? Any people have any questions for us?

I'm gonna have to— I am gonna have to drop. I have to go get on a flight to head to California for Empath Summer School. So—

Summer School, a live workshop that we're running. Kyle Christiansen will be teaching everybody a bunch of stuff and they're gonna shoot guns. So if you're going to that, it's funny because Kyle's actually Super, super like California liberal and he tries to hide it. So I can't wait to see photos of him holding a firearm.

I would love to continue this conversation again though, because I think this is a really good one and I think it's not spoken about enough, like Caleb said.

Yeah. So yeah, I don't, I apologize. I didn't have it ready. Everybody's contact info, but reach out if anybody here has said something that resonated with you, reach out to myself, to Matt, to Tara on LinkedIn. Anywhere. Don't be ashamed, even if you want to have a little bit of a private conversation with what you've been through. We all know a ton of people collectively, and if we can't help you directly, we might be able to point you in a direction. But I'll just say it again, none of us are, you know, licensed therapists, doctors. It's not a clinical diagnosis. And if you ever are thinking in your head, even for a minute, gosh, I might need help, trust your gut and talk to a professional first. Better to have a professional go, you silly goose, you're fine, than to not have that happen.

Well, thank you, Dean and Empath, for having us. And Matt Topper has to leave too because he would be skipping lunch if he didn't leave.

Right.

He sent that in the chat.

Thank you both for being here. I really appreciate it.

Yeah. Thanks for having us, Dean. It was a good combo.

And make sure Uh, any of you, the next time you're on RMSP, if you have any problems, to personally tag Matt Sopper and complain to him, and then type in all caps ADMIN ABUSE, as is internet culture. Thank you, Princess.

Princess says say goodbye, so I guess this is us wrapping it up here.

Thank you, Princess, for being our production assistant here.

Bye, everybody. Bye, friends.