Team burnout is hard to spot, and it’s hardest to spot in your highest performers. They often keep delivering, so nothing looks wrong until their work finally slips or they hand in their notice.

When you do notice burnout setting in, you might assume your team member is overloaded, or even that the job isn’t right for them. Here’s what’s actually driving team burnout, and how you can help your team build sustainable performance instead.

Team Burnout Starts in the Survivor Brain

When you run into a challenge, like a pressing deadline or a conversation you’ve been dreading, your brain falls back on the same reactions every time. These reactions come from the Survivor Brain: the fight-or-flight system that evolved to protect you from real danger. It’s fast, it’s automatic, and it can’t always tell the difference between a work challenge and an actual threat.

Your Team’s Saboteurs

That’s when Saboteurs take over. They’re the automatic patterns you pick up in early life to feel safe. Now, they get in the way of your success. Every member of your team has Saboteurs. Someone takes on a whole project alone because they don’t trust others to do it right. That’s the Stickler Saboteur in action. Someone else sits on a concern because speaking up cost them last time. That’s the Avoider Saboteur at work.

The more pressure your team is under, the louder those patterns get. Every one of those Saboteur reactions burns energy and costs your team in productivity and collaboration. Over time, it all adds up. That’s team burnout, building long before you see it.

Addressing Team Burnout the Sage Way

Your Saboteurs have a counterpart: your Sage. This part of your brain fuels high performance and enables you to thrive. When this part of your brain is active, you stay centered even when things go wrong. It lets you view a setback as a potential gift or opportunity. You access curiosity, clear-headed action, and creativity to tackle challenges.

If you want to know whether your Sage or a Saboteur is in charge, check how you feel. Feeling calm and curious means your Sage is leading the way. Feeling anxious, resentful, or full of self-doubt means a Saboteur has taken over.

When you feel hijacked by a Saboteur, naming it helps. It’s hard to argue with “this plan is going to fall apart.” It’s a lot easier to argue with “my Judge says this plan is going to fall apart.” This allows you to pause during a Saboteur hijacking, name what’s happening, and choose a Sage response instead.

Turn Saboteurs Into Your Team’s Trainers

Once your team learns to recognize their Saboteurs in action, they can use them as trainers. Every time they catch a Saboteur, they have a reason to do a PQ Rep: 10 seconds of focus on the body or one of the senses.

PQ Reps help your team shift out of Saboteur mode and build their Sage muscle. When challenges arise at work, your team members will inevitably feel their Saboteurs rising up. But each time this happens, they get a chance to practice the shift from Saboteur to Sage, and over time, the Saboteurs get quieter.

How to Prevent Team Burnout During the Workday

Your team doesn’t need a lot of time for a mental fitness practice. They can do it in a few minutes a day by attaching PQ Reps to their routines. Here’s how you as a leader can set the stage for this type of practice:

• Create a habit of daily PQ Reps. Encourage your team to start their workday with five to 15 minutes in the PQ Gym to build mental muscle.
  
• Make naming Saboteurs normal. When someone can say “my Hyper-Achiever wants me to take on another big project before I’ve finished this one,” this opens the door for a pause and some PQ Reps.
  
• Let tension be the cue. When a meeting gets tense, or your team has a big presentation to give, make a habit of doing PQ Reps together to ease the pressure.

How Team Burnout Spreads

Stress tends to spread throughout teams. This is because of the Saboteur contagion effect. When a team member shows up in Saboteur mode, it draws out Saboteur reactions in others. Fortunately, the opposite is also true. When your team members approach challenges with a Sage mindset, it causes a Sage contagion effect.

One Fortune 100 company discovered this as they partnered with Positive Intelligence to implement a mental fitness practice across the organization. By improving individual well-being, the company is helping foster better relationships and performance, and employees are demonstrating higher engagement, more resilience, and increased innovation:

• 93% of participants say they manage stress better
  
• 70% say they feel more engaged at work
  
• 70% say their work relationships have improved
  
• 97% say they’ve strengthened their emotional intelligence

A Note on Burnout and Mental Health

Mental fitness and mental health are related, but they’re different. Mental fitness helps your team members handle the everyday ups and downs of life with less Saboteur noise. It isn’t a replacement for mental health support, which may require time off and access to professional mental health care.

From Team Burnout to Sustainable Performance

Every day, your team will face challenges, and their Saboteurs will show up. And as pressure mounts, the Saboteurs will get louder. Each time this happens, your team can use it as a cue to do a PQ Rep. Every rep builds mental fitness, whether done individually or as a team.

As a leader, you can help your team build sustainable performance by setting the stage for this daily mental fitness practice. Ready to get started? The PQ Program gives your team guided PQ Rep sessions, a shared vocabulary for naming Saboteurs out loud, and a practice they build together. See how it turns everyday pressure into mental fitness training for your whole organization.

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