Ever felt like your boss is unintentionally making your life a living nightmare?
In this episode, we get into how leadership habits and structural systems fuel burnout. Discover why it’s not about you being weak, but about navigating and managing the power dynamics at play.
Learn strategies to protect your sanity, communicate effectively, and regain your energy in a chaotic work environment.
You’ve probably felt it.
The boss who sends “quick updates” that upend an entire week’s work. The manager who can’t make a decision without five meetings and three revisions. Or the leader who champions “work-life balance” right before praising the person who’s online at midnight.
It’s easy to internalize that chaos… to start wondering if you’re the problem. But you’re not.
What you’re feeling is the fallout of accidental burnout, the kind that grows quietly from fear-driven leadership habits that get rewarded instead of addressed.
The Unseen Mechanics of Burnout
Every organization runs on two forces: demand and support. When those get out of balance — too much demand, not enough clarity, control, or psychological safety — burnout isn’t just possible, it’s predictable.
Most leaders don’t wake up thinking, “How can I exhaust my team today?”
They wake up thinking, “How do I survive the next crisis?”
That survival mindset shifts everything. Suddenly “yes” becomes the default answer to protect appearances. Micromanagement feels safer than delegation. And quick fixes replace actual strategy.
It’s not malice; it’s mismanagement of anxiety.
But when leaders operate from fear, their teams pay the physiological bill.
Employees pick up on that stress through subtle cues: abrupt tone changes, shifting priorities, inconsistent expectations. The nervous system reads those signals as threats.
And when your body stays in low-level fight-or-flight for weeks or months, no amount of Sunday self-care will save you.
Recognizing Leadership Stress Patterns
Poor leadership has archetypes. You’ve met them… the firehose boss who floods you with urgent tasks, the micromanager who confuses control with competence, the ghost who disappears until it’s too late, the people-pleaser who overcommits, and the conflict avoider who mistakes quiet for peace.
Each pattern originates from the same root: fear. Fear of being wrong, of looking bad, of not being needed, of not being liked.
And fear, when left unchecked in leadership, becomes contagious.
Teams mirror what they see modeled at the top. If leaders lead from panic, people learn to perform from panic.
Spotting these patterns early is how you regain leverage. Once you recognize a fear-based behavior for what it is, you stop personalizing it and you can respond strategically instead of emotionally.
Managing Up Without Losing Yourself
Managing up isn’t about tiptoeing around fragile egos or trying to fix your boss. It’s about stabilizing the system from your side.
That starts with clarity.
When your boss drops a last-minute project, don’t absorb it immediately. Pause. Respond with structure:
“I can take that on, but here’s what I’d need to move to make space for it. Which should I prioritize?”
You’re not being defiant; you’re offering a trade-off. You’re reintroducing logic into a dynamic ruled by urgency.
If you’re working under a micromanager, proactive communication is your best defense. Short, consistent updates — “Here’s what’s done, here’s what’s next, here’s what I need from you” — reduce uncertainty, which often reduces control-seeking behavior.
And if your boss is chronically anxious, your calm becomes your currency. When you regulate your tone, slow your speech, and refuse to match their panic, you reset the emotional thermostat of the conversation. You’re teaching them, quietly, that you can be trusted to stay steady.
That’s leadership, even without the title.
When It’s Bigger Than Your Boss
Sometimes, though, the problem isn’t one person, it’s the entire ecosystem.
If your workplace rewards exhaustion, celebrates “always-on” behavior, or confuses endurance with excellence, you’re in a culture that manufactures burnout by design.
You can have the most well-intentioned boss in the world, but if they’re trapped in a broken system, their support only goes so far.
That’s when you have to shift from self-blame to systems thinking.
Ask yourself:
- Is this a bad week or a bad pattern?
- Is this miscommunication or a cultural mismatch?
When burnout is structural, no amount of deep breathing or better time management will fix it. You can’t “self-care” your way out of systemic dysfunction.
What you can do is map your zones of influence.
- What can you redesign in your own role?
- What can you delegate, delay, or de-prioritize?
- And what may ultimately require you to plan an exit — not out of defeat, but out of discernment?
The Energy of Agency
You may not control the system, but you can reclaim how you move within it. That’s what agency really is — not control, but choice.
Each time you decide how to respond instead of react, you’re rebuilding self-trust. Each time you step back to assess what deserves your energy, you’re creating space for clarity.
Agency might look like muting Slack for 30 minutes to finish deep work. It might look like saying, “I can’t give this my best in the next two hours, but I can tomorrow morning.” Or it might look like remembering that staying late doesn’t always equal making impact.
Small choices send big signals to your nervous system: You’re steering again.
And that’s the antidote to burnout — purposeful direction.
The goal isn’t to fix the people above you. It’s to stop letting their behavior dictate your bandwidth.
So this week, check in with yourself:
- Where are you over-functioning to compensate for someone else’s chaos?
- Where can you bring more calm, clarity, or constraint into the conversation?
- And where might it be time to stop managing up and start managing your way out?
Because burnout might begin in bad systems, but recovery starts with one thing: remembering that you still have a say in how you show up inside them.
Got thoughts or questions from this week’s episode? Drop them in the comments. I’d love to hear from you! 🫶
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I’m Tara Kermiet — leadership coach, burnout strategist, and host of The Balanced Badass Podcast®. I help high-achievers and corporate leaders design careers that are successful and sustainable.
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