673 | How Your Work Habits Are Creating Burnout in Your Team

You think you're modeling commitment, but your team is watching you answer messages at night, push through exhaustion, and never really turn it off. And what they're learning is this.

If I want to succeed here, I don't get to stop. And without meaning to, you've built a culture that burns people out. All of that is coming up next.

Welcome to The Chris LoCurto Show, where we discuss leadership and life and discover that business is what you do, not who you are.

Welcome to the show, folks. I hope you're having a fabulous day wherever you are.

Today, we are talking about the difference between what we think we're modeling and what we may actually be modeling.

Now, if your business still depends on you even a little, your behavior carries way more weight than anything you say. Not your values, not your vision, not even what you tell your team to do.

What you model becomes the standard. And here's the hard truth. Most leaders miss. Burnout in your culture usually doesn't start with your team. It starts with you.

Not because you're doing something wrong, but because you care so much. You've set a pace that many people might not be able to sustain. Today, I want to help you see that clearly and show you how to shift it without lowering your standards.

Now, I will be the first to tell you I have been an entrepreneur for decades, and I will tell you that I set a pace that sometimes surprises people.

I've had team members say, man, that guy never stops. I've had to come to a place of realizing that that kind of pace is not sustainable for everybody. It's definitely not sustainable for all personality styles. And what am I modeling in that moment?

Now, I don't have a problem with me busting it, getting things done, making things happen. I expect the same thing for all of my team members. But to what extent?

Right now, you've heard me say bajillion times, if the ox is in the ditch, we got to get the ox out of the ditch.

But the ox doesn't need to be in the ditch every day of the week, every month, you know, 365, we've got to be able to create a pace that people with standards that people are able to follow that also tells them that their personal time is of great value as well.

We want them to bust it while they're here. We want them to, you know, do as much as they can, get as much done as they can, but also realize that there's a time to stop.

So we're going to go through a couple of questions here. And just kind of see what this looks like.

Question 1: What are you actually teaching your team about work? (00:03:03)

The first question is, what are you actually teaching your team about work? Well, the reality is that you might say something like family comes first or take off time when you need it, but what does your team see?

They see you answering messages at 9pm We've all done that. I used to do that. I used to send stuff out, you know, emails, even, sometimes texts.

Not realizing, well, actually when I started getting responses back is when I very quickly shifted away from that.

But you know, sending an email out at 9pm at night or something like that to a team member thinking there's no way that team member is checking their email.

And then I get a response back in five minutes and I'm like, hey, why are you responding to me right now? Well, you sent an email, yeah, but you should be having family time.

And I'm sitting there thinking, shouldn't I be having family time at 9 o'clock? So I will tell you, a long time ago is when I decided that that wasn't okay, that I needed to shift and do things differently.

Really wish they had that thing, you know, where you can send emails at different times. That would have been really nice back in those days.

But it also gave me kind of a slap of reality. You know, if I'm answering messages at night or sending messages at night, if I'm working through lunches, if I'm never unplugging and my team doesn't see that, then I'm modeling exactly what they're experiencing.

A guy who never stops. So it doesn't matter what my words are, what matters is my behavior. And again, like I say, a long time ago I had to start putting a cap on time spent.

So I feel like I do a pretty decent job of wrapping up the day by a specific decent hour still in the day, not running into the night, not sending messages at night, not doing things that is modeling to somebody else that I never stop.

Also, it became something that was vitally important to me in my personal life. I didn't want to just be that guy who never stopped when I made the shift all of a sudden.

And with it came a very important part of the process which is part of our Killing the Leadership Crazy Cycle, which is Closing Out The Day. I closed out my day well, which meant that I didn't carry it into my night.

This is now something I've been teaching for, gosh, I don't know, 15 plus years, maybe 13 plus years, something like that, where I--

I've been teaching folks how to Close Out Their Day so that when they get home they can put their phone down, they can keep their computer off and they don't have all of these things pounding them in, you know, an hour, two hours, three hours later, saying, oh, I forgot about that.

Oh, I didn't get that done. So what do we need to do?

We need to have a leadership shift. We need to model boundaries as clearly as you model effort. So it's great to model effort during the day. They need to see that.

They need to see that you're a hard worker. They don't need to see that you're always slammed in tasks. That's my caveat is you're leading.

You should be the heavy load of your leadership should be leading people to success. Let me just say that. But that means that you have to log off at a consistent time. Right.

They need to see you shut down. You need to, you know, don't respond to non urgent messages after hours. Right. Surely if something is urgent, get after it, solve it, fix it. They need to see that you actually take time off.

Now if you can't do that, that's a whole 'nother discussion. Well, that we need to have, but they need to see you be unavailable. It was great when I took my leadership team away for two weeks and had zero problems.

No fires, no issues, a bunch of emails that we had to go through, but no problems. The team needs to be able to see that you're able to take time off and that they can lead and handle their own responsibilities while you're gone.

So what does success look like? Well, your team starts to realize, I'm allowed to be fully on and fully off.

Now if you hear me say this and you hate it and you're thinking, that's not what I want, Chris, I want my people responding at 8 o' clock at night, 9 o' clock at night.

I want them to be well, okay, then that's the culture that you're pushing for.

Just understand that will work for a period of time. You might even have great, loyal people who feel like that's exactly what they should be doing. Here's what I can promise you.

There will come a point that they get tired of it, or worse yet, their spouse really gets tired of it. And then that's when things start to get pushed around. We can't do this anymore. We don't want this lifestyle, we don't want this.

And then a great team member becomes a team member who's looking for an exit plan. So make sure that they realize that they can be fully on and fully off.

And that creates a healthier energy, that creates better focus, and it definitely, definitely creates long term performance.

Question 2: Are you leading… or just staying busy? (00:08:35)

All right, second question. Are you leading or just staying busy?

Now, a lot of leaders get stuck here because being busy feels productive.

It feels valuable. It, you know, if your calendar is packed with tasks, then unfortunately you don't have space to lead. Guess who feels that your team does?

They don't step up because you're always in motion. You're always in it. You're always ahead of them, you're always going ballistic. Right? And you're not spending time making them better.

You're not spending time leading them. So here's what they learn. They learn.

Just stay busy and keep up, folks. I will tell you, this is a trap that I would say most, if not all leaders fall into.

Why? Because we didn't have somebody who modeled correct leadership before, right?

We, the leaders that we had in our past didn't know how to model correct leadership. So we get stuck in this concept of my team expects to see me busy, my team expects to see me doing tasks.

My team expects. No, they don't. A great team understands that you should be doing a different type of lifting in the business. It's their job to do the heavy lifting.

It's your job to maybe bring different types of business, lead things to success like processes, solutions, discover issues, maybe go after bigger clients.

But definitely leading culture and definitely putting things into place that leads them to success. So what they're learning is just stay busy when what they should be learning is think, own, lead, right?

Spend time leading. What they need to be learning is to think for themselves, to own their roles and to step up and lead. Right.

If they see that you're running 90 to nothing, then they're just going to wait for you to give them guidance. You're probably going to be the one they come for all the answers. This is just going to continue to tank your culture. This I can promise you.

What's the leadership shift that has to happen? Measure your value by how your team performs, not on how much you do. Yes. Let me say that again. This is a fantastic gut punch.

Measure your value, the value that you have in the business by how your team performs, not by how many tasks you are stuck in how many tasks you get done in a day.

You need to recognize that the better your team does because of your leadership, the better your value to your own company.

If you're spending all your time, you know, blocking your calendar with a ton of tasks, well, who's going to make people better? Who's going to grow them?

Who's going to lead them to greater success? If it's all task, then what's your value to your company?

You were probably overpaid for doing a bunch of tasks that somebody else could be doing. And you're being paid to actually lead people to success.

So what can you do? Well, definitely block time for thinking and planning that you have to have that you have to spend time thinking through.

What does it look like? How do I make sure I set people up for success? How do I lead people in areas that I might not even know what they're doing?

You don't have to know how to do their job. You need to get make sure that they've got the right tools, the right processes.

Are the processes up to date? You know, are we following processes correctly? Are we working with other teams and other team members correctly? Are we communicating at high levels?

You also need to spend time developing those folks, not just knocking out a task. Hey, I helped you solve a process issue. What does it look like for you to spend time developing them in whatever area they're in?

Once again, the confusion here is that many business owners think they have to fully understand the role of somebody else so that they can lead them.

No, you do not. Discover where they get stuck to. Discover where they need help, discover where they need better tools, discover where processes aren't being followed, discover where they need new processes, new training, all of these different things.

If you will spend time doing it, you'll be blown away at how much better you can make a team member. Also, you can also ask more questions instead of jumping in with answers.

If you want to lead your team to success, don't spend a ton of time answering every question that they've got. Instead, start asking them what they think. What would they do?

Take 20 minutes, go spend some time and come up with an answer and then come back to me. Make sure that you're leading your team instead of just jumping in and telling them what to do. So what does success look like here?

Your team begins to think before acting. They start taking initiative, they start doing more, they start owning more. They start seeing a greater responsibility with what they're being paid for.

And a fantastic thing that happens if, if you don't answer all of their problems and start helping them to think for themselves, they begin solving problems without you.

So instead of just coming to you with the hey, just tell me what to do, they will start coming to you with, hey, here's what I'm thinking of doing, here's my plan, here's why I'm doing it.

What are your thoughts? Which is exactly what you want.

Question 3: What happens when you step away? (00:14:38)

Third question I want to ask you is what actually happens when you step away? And I want you to be honest, be honest with yourself. When you're gone for a day, does everything slow down?

Do decisions stall? Do people wait for you before they can make a move or solve something? If so, then that's not a team problem.

Unfortunately, that's a leadership problem issue. It means that your presence has become the system. Yes, you being there is the system. And as long as that's true, your team cannot fully stop and take ownership.

They're not going to step into something like that because you're already there and they're just waiting for you to lead them. They're waiting for you to tell them what to do. Our goal should be to get them to step up.

So if you're listening to this and you're realizing everything still runs through me, my team isn't stepping up the way I need them to. That is exactly what we help leaders fix.

At our Next-Level Leadership LIVE Event, we show you how to build a team that can lead, decide and execute without everything depending on you, the leader.

So you can grab your tickets at chrislocurto.com/liveevents. That's chrislocurto.com/liveevents.

So what's the leadership shift that we're looking for here? Start transferring ownership before you feel ready, before you feel overwhelmed, before you feel like, I got to do something different.

What does that mean? That means let decisions be made without you. Now, I'm not saying just, you know, all willy nilly. People just start making decisions. You will probably find that they don't have, you know, enough experience in that.

But allow them to come up with decisions. How do you do that? Don't answer. When they come to you for a decision, don't give them one. Instead, ask them, what do you think you should do?

What should this look like? How should this go? And get them to start thinking for themselves. The sooner that you do that, the sooner you will see them start to make decisions. And then again, instead of just going, no, that's not correct, it should look like this.

Ask them what happens if this. What about this? Have you thought about this piece over here? Continue to ask questions until they can come up with the better answer.

Also allow them to make mistakes. Right. Without you rescuing them. It is a, a great leader who knows when to allow somebody to fail. Now, I say that and probably a bunch of folks out there going, oh my gosh, I can't believe that you would do that.

Why? Failure is one of the greatest teachers. I just know which failure is going to be a teacher and which failures are going to be horrible. I stay away from the horrible ones.

You know, I allow my team to have small failures that hurts a little bit, but I don't allow them to have big failures. My goal is that they learn from their decision making.

And then when they have a failure, instead of jumping in and getting all on their case and you know, telling them that they made a big mistake and all that stuff...

We'll go through what happened, how did it happen, why did it happen, how do we fix it, how do we make sure it never happens again and allow them to come up with all of those?

So mistakes are okay, especially when you don't rescue them. Just don't let them be fatal errors. Right. Also make sure that you're clarifying the outcomes that you expect.

You don't need to have control in every step, but they do need to understand what it is that you are looking for. So what does success look like?

Well, when you take off and you come back to work, decisions were made, progress continued, and crazy enough, your team moved forward.

That is when you know leadership is multiplying and not being a bottleneck.

Question 4: Are you creating sustainable rhythms—or constant urgency? (00:19:01)

Question 4 I've got for you.

Are you creating sustainable rhythms or constant urgency? Think about this for a second. If everything feels urgent, nothing is actually prioritized.

And when leaders operate in urgency, everything feels last minute, everything feels high pressure, everything feels exhausting. And your team doesn't just feel busy, they feel behind. Think about especially separate personality styles, right?

The different personality styles can feel way behind compared to others. So when you create clear rhythms, you know, planning time, decision time, rest time, then you give your team something super powerful.

And that's the permission to think for themselves. Oh my gosh. That's exactly what I want. For every single team member on my team. I want them to be able to think for themselves.

Why? Because when they feel like they can, they start coming up with fantastic solving problem methods.

They come up with great decision making processes. All I have to do is give them the space and some tools. I guide them and direct them along the way. So what does this leadership shift need to be here?

Replace urgency with clarity and with rhythm. So practically set clear work priorities. This is what we should be focused on. This is the stuff moving the needle. This is the stuff that is getting us through our strategy.

This is the stuff that's getting us to our destination. And these are more important than those. And folks, I'm going to give you a gut punch here.

Many of you have a really difficult time setting priorities for your team. One of the worst things. And, man, I can tell you, back in my days of working for not great leaders, I can't tell you how many times I'd ask for, well, what, you're throwing 17 things at me.

What's the priority? And the answer is, well, they're all priorities. Okay, well, then for me, none of them are priorities. If they're all priorities, then none of them are priorities.

Show me what you really want me to focus on and I'll focus on that. I'll get that done. I'll make that happen.

But if in your world you just want me to think that everything is as equally urgent, well, then I'm just going to go about picking things that may not be the most important thing that we focus on.

So make sure you're setting those priorities weekly, daily. If you absolutely have to define what winning looks like, people need to understand what an outcome should be.

If I'm doing this the way that you expect, what does that look like? What are your expectations on how I do something? How should it look?

How should it feel? What should I be experiencing? What should other people be experiencing? Help them to see what winning looks like.

Also create consistent planning and review methods. Right, review rhythms, if you will, where we go over stuff instead of allowing it to go 60, 90, 180 days before we ever come back through and find out what's working and what's not.

If you will spend time reviewing stuff, if you will spend time planning for stuff, then the team can know that they're winning in a much shorter time frame.

When you do not do this, here's what happens. Your team goes on for an incredibly long period of time thinking, well, nobody has said anything, so I guess I'll just keep doing the same thing I'm doing.

And they could literally be going in the wrong direction. So make sure you spend time guiding them, directing them, helping them to see what's most important. Help them to plan through it and help them to review it.

So what does success look like? Well, your team knows what matters most, which is great because now we got the resources pointed in the right direction.

They're not guessing about priorities and they execute with confidence instead of feeling pressure and urgency. Folks, there are many personality styles that the more urgency you press, the longer it takes them to actually accomplish it.

Think about that. If Your team lives in urgency, then instead of going from checking something to double checking, many times, they will jump right past that into quadruple checking and wasting time, losing time.

You think urgency is making them better and faster and it's actually slowing them down. There's a great old military saying, smooth is slow and slow is fast.

If you're building them up with urgency, then just understand they're probably going a heck of a lot slower because of the urgency.

Question 5: What kind of culture are you intentionally creating? (00:24:13)

Question number five that I've got for you. What culture are you reinforcing every single day? Because culture isn't what you say in meetings.

It's what happens on stressful days. It's what happens on long weeks. It's what happens in moments of pressure.

I have seen leaders that I, you know, really appreciated decimate their own culture in times of stress, where they just freaked out and then, you know, ran around like a tyrant and just lost loyalty and lost respect and so much.

It's just bad when you're acting that way. In moments of high pressure, what should they see?

They should see a leader who keeps his head on straight. Keeps her head on straight, right? So if you are freaking out or if you're operating badly on stressful days, then what is your team seeing?

They're seeing that that's exactly how they should act. That's when your team decides, well, I guess what it takes to succeed here is to respond just like this, to act like this, to be like this.

And whatever you model in those moments, that becomes your culture. Now, if there's one offs, you're going to have, you know, some leniency from your team.

You're going to have, you know, if, if your team normally sees you handling stressful situations really well, and then one stressful situation, you don't handle it very well. They're not going to all of a sudden go, well, that's our culture. Let's follow that.

They're going to stick with what they know about you. The problem is, is when you're consistent with how you handle stress and pressure and all that, that's going to become your culture.

So what is the leadership shift that we're looking for? Lead your culture most clearly in hard moments, not just the easy ones.

Make sure in the difficult times that you're leading with clarity, address issues immediately, stay calm under pressure the best you possibly can.

Reinforce standards. This is how we do it, guys. Consistently. This is how we do this. This is how we do this. This is how we do this.

Yeah, but this is a different urgent situations we stick to our standards, we're going to solve the problem, we're going to take care of things, we're going to get the ox out of the ditch, but this is how we do things.

Let's stick to it. So what does success look like? Your team experiences consistency. They experience trust, they experience clarity. What are you getting from this?

Continued loyalty, continued respect, continued desire from your team members to lead in the culture the way that you're doing it. And the great thing is that your team knows that this is what good leadership looks like.

Challenge For You (00:27:08)

So I've got a challenge for you, and I want you to test this for the next seven days.

So not forever, just seven days. I want you to leave work on time twice.

Chris, what are you talking about? I can't. There's no possible. Yes, you can. Don't explain it to anybody. Just leave work on time twice.

Second thing I want you to do is, and this is just for seven days, stop responding after a set time. Oh, my gosh, this is gonna just kill me. No, it's not.

Everything is going to be fine. Focus on closing out your day. By the way, do that correctly so that you don't have to respond at nighttime, but set a specific time that you stop responding to anything, emails, texts, whatever. Right?

Third thing, delegate one. Just one decision that you normally keep. After you do these three things, leave work on time twice this week. Don't explain it. Stop responding after a set time and delegate one decision that you would normally keep.

Then watch. Don't watch what you feel. You're going to probably go through a roller coaster of feelings. Watch what your team starts to do differently.

Do they change? Do they take ownership? Do they step up? This is a great experiment because if they don't, well, that means we got a lot of leading to do. And if they do, well, that's great too, because that means that we've been getting in the way.

So once again, if you're listening to this and realizing your pace has become the standard, your team is waiting on you more than leading, and everything still feels like it depends on you.

That's not a people problem and it's not a motivational problem. It's a leadership structure issue. And the good news is you can fix that. That's exactly what we help leaders do at our Next-Level Leadership LIVE Event.

Yes, I. I'm telling you again. We'll show you how to build leaders inside your team, create clarity without constant pressure, and finally step out of the middle of everything so that your business can grow without burning everyone out to do it.

You can grab your tickets at chrislocurto.com/liveevents now. Your team is always watching you lead. That's always happening. They're never not watching you lead. They're always paying attention.

Not just when it's easy, but especially when it's hard. So don't just push harder. Lead in a way that gives your team permission to grow, not just to keep up.

Well, folks, I hope this has helped you today. It is a lot of information, but, man, this is good stuff. I'm telling you, this is the stuff that you need in your leadership right now. We can help you get there.

So take. Take this information. Change your leadership, change your business, change your life. And join us on the next episode.