Tech workers say poor leadership is number one cause for burnout
There are so many articles that blame leadership for all that ails a company. To me, it seems a bit like saying &quot;most program crashes are caused by runtime errors&quot;. While both are true, there are deeper explanations that can be more helpful in starting a discussion.<p>In the case of crashing a program, maybe it&#x27;s because of a misused raw pointer or a type error in an untyped language. As soon as you frame it that way, you immediately see possible paths forward to improve the situation.<p>In the case of burnout at companies, I&#x27;ve found it has more to do with the mindset of the top leaders (who other managers down the chain tend to emulate). The mindset is that the company is &quot;a machine&quot;, which makes the rest of us &quot;cogs&quot; (or pick your favorite machine part).<p>The leaders may be perfectly nice and considerate people in general (or not), but regardless, the company-as-machine mindset leads them to set aside their humanity in the interests of the company. All of sudden everyone on the team needs to be replaceable, have predictably high output, etc. Those might be fine concerns for a business, but they end up blinding managers to the flesh and blood human beings in front of them and they start to see employees as the means to the greater business ends of output, productivity, growth, etc.<p>I believe this is an issue of human development that affects most companies eventually. Only companies with really developed leaders who, when faced with serious pressure, are able to see people as the unique and complex beings that they are and not make people feel like they somehow don&#x27;t matter at a fundamental level.