Managing Burnout – From Prevention to Re-ignition | Matthew Bennett Willow Ethos

Every day on LinkedIn, I see new posts and articles about burnout. It is not a new human experience, but it is a relatively new workplace label, and the way we work today, especially in “digital-first, always-on" corporate environments, helps explain its extraordinary rise.

I have been through it myself, and I have supported many colleagues and teams through their own difficult journeys. So I thought it might be useful to put down some practical guidance for leaders, where pace, pressure and performance expectations often collide.

I know prevention is better than cure, but this is not a perfect world. Burnout is an intensely individual outcome and there is no single intervention that works for everyone. As a leader, even with the best intentions, you should expect to encounter burnout at every stage: the early warning signs, the crash, the recovery.

And here is the real secret:

how you respond can do a lot more than help just one person. It shapes a culture that prevents others from reaching the same point.

Support one person; help everyone.

What follows is a brief, experience-based guide that might help. I do not claim to be an expert, and frankly, in the world of managing humans (who never stop surprising you), I question anyone who does.

A: Prevention

Let us start with prevention, because this is where leaders in corporate and professional services have the biggest opportunity to make a meaningful difference. These three lessons have consistently had the most impact.

1. Understand the pressures

Every organisation has predictable pressure cycles: year-end, audit season, deal peaks, policy changes, client renewals, product launches, regulatory deadlines. You know the rhythm of your business better than anyone.

And if we know this already, there is no reason we cannot be proactive.

Action:

Take time, first alone, then with your senior team, to map the known pressure points across the year. Then review them against your people. Who is consistently hit with multiple competing deadlines? Who is exposed to sustained client intensity? Who carries hidden emotional labour for the team?

If you can see the wave coming, do not wait for it to crash.

Ask where support is needed. Offer resource reprioritisation. Show you have noticed.

You would be amazed how far this goes. Feeling seen is a deeply underrated antidote to burnout. Empathy, paired with action, is one of the most powerful preventatives we have. To know that you are in the trenches with them rather than just handing out orders from HQ far away (I hope images of Blackadder Goes Forth are playing in your mind) will make the world of difference.

2. Listen, and keep listening

Corporate teams talk, gossip and moan. They vent, they decompress, they let off steam. None of this is unusual; in fact, it is healthy. And yes, you did it too, just with different colleagues at the time.

But as a leader, you need to tune your ear to the difference between healthy moaning and early distress signals. Over time, you will learn who your “indicator species” are, the people whose frustration or fatigue signals that something bigger is brewing.

Action:

Spot patterns early. Connect with line managers to understand what is happening underneath. Is it workload? A client relationship? Team dynamics? Misaligned expectations?

If the pattern is new, add it to your list of recurring risk points. What you catch early can prevent a future crisis.

3. Know your people

Burnout is rarely “just about the job.” It is usually the product of professional pressure and personal load, filtered through whatever mental frame the person happens to be in at the time.

Knowing your team as people, not just doers and producers, matters. Not in an intrusive way, but enough to understand context. As Kim Scott puts it in Radical Candor, caring personally is what earns you the right to challenge directly. Relationship matters! That principle applies just as clearly when supporting someone under strain. It’s why a teenager takes on board the discipline from a teacher or parent and won’t answer back, but would argue with a stranger in the street when asked to stop kicking their ball against the wall of their house. It is all about respect and connection.

Action:

At the first sign of difficulty, ask line managers what they know that might illuminate the bigger picture. Do not assume, just gather perspective. The goal is not to diagnose, but to understand enough to lead with humanity and pragmatism.

B: Managing an Absence

If prevention does not work, and sometimes it will not, your colleague may step away from work, often initially for two weeks with a GP or clinician’s note.

Do not assume two weeks will fix it. Burnout is not the flu. It has often been years in the making.

Here are three principles that might help.

1. The workload shuffle

Act quickly, but do not panic. Understand what really needs doing, what can move, and what can legitimately pause.

A classic mistake is to redistribute the work equally and expect performance standards to remain identical. This is unrealistic, dangerous, and almost guaranteed to spark further burnout from the team.

Instead:

Treat this as a strategic moment.

Who has bandwidth? Who is at capacity?

Who might shine under stretch, and who must not be stretched further?

Think of this as both risk management and succession insight. If you have not already considered how the team would operate without key individuals, now is the time. Make this an opportunity for learning.

2. Do not assume they will return in two weeks

People often return on graduated timetables or reduced workloads. Sometimes they find that they need more time away. Either way, do not build a two-week plan. Build a sustainable plan.

Expect to flex.

3. Revisit the plan regularly

Once you have stabilised the team, review the plan after two weeks. Reflect on the plan and adjust if necessary. Watch for frustration building in the team. It is normal, but it must be handled early and carefully. No returning colleague should walk back into resentment from their peers because of the additional strain their absence caused. It is crucial to bring an open mind.

Empathy erodes under pressure. Remind people, gently, that none of us knows when we might need the same support. This builds a sense of understanding.

C: Re-igniting

Time away helps, but it does not fix the root causes. Burnout recovery often requires deeper reflection, professional support, and structural changes. Your role is not to be the therapist, but you do play a critical role in the re-ignition phase.

1. Ask what they want

Burnout is often accompanied by a deep loss of control. Give some of it back.

Do not assume they will return to the same role, pace or structure. Two weeks away (or longer) does not reset the system. Course correction requires more than time away to bring about effective results.

Explore together:

• What needs to change?
• What is achievable short-term?
• What does a sustainable long-term rhythm look like?
• Where can expectations shift without damaging business delivery?

They will more likely commit to a plan they co-design, one where they can ensure that the business is aligned with their unique needs.

2. Offer them a coach

Re-ignition requires understanding what went wrong, what needs to shift, and how to reconnect with the work they once loved.

This is where coaching is genuinely powerful, especially external coaching. They need psychological safety, confidentiality and space to speak freely. Internal coaches cannot provide that fully. For real growth they will require an outside voice to help them thrive.

An experienced external coach can help them rediscover energy, identify patterns and rebuild resilience in a way that serves both the person and the business. They can help place an employee's focus on what really matters.

3. Keep in touch

This cannot be forgotten about in a fast moving environment. Maintain regular check-ins. Hear their stories. Revisit the pressure points you identified earlier. Help them navigate known peaks and personal triggers. Begin to build behaviours in your company so that staff find it easy to report on any changes.

This is also how you build culture, by showing that support does not end the day someone returns. Your staff should always have someone to contact with any news or updates. Their future success will be based in the reassurance they receive from you.

And who knows, in turn, their experience may position them to support someone else in the future.

Final thought

Perhaps this is how genuinely supportive cultures emerge, one person at a time, one conversation at a time. Over time, the collective effect compounds. Workplaces become kinder. Teams become more resilient. Burnout becomes the exception, not the pattern. Things start to really click. This combination of factors is what really drives performance.

Good luck.

And more importantly, lead with humanity. It pays dividends.

Matthew Bennett

Founding Partner of Willow Ethos

Matthew Bennett is a veteran strategist in the business consultancy space, who co-founded Willow Ethos in 2024. He is dedicated to growing organisations through data driven insights and development of leaders to align their culture with their employees. A keen student of behavioural science, he believes, with the right focus, you can always find the right culture to make a company thrive.