It’s Not Burnout That’s Hurting Your Career—It’s Brownout
You don’t have to burn out to lose your edge at work. In fact, some of the most successful leaders and executives I know aren’t burned out. Instead, they’re facing another, quieter problem: career brownout.
Brownout in the workplace is a state of gradual disengagement that stems from feeling disconnected from your work and professional goals, which translates to a loss of meaning and purpose in your job. According to a Gallup survey, only 32% of workers in the US are engaged at work, and an Ipsos report found that 37% of employees feel disengaged when they work from home.
While burnout occurs from exhaustion and running on empty from overwork, brownout can happen when a leader’s motivation, and then energy, slowly drain — just like electrical brownouts cause lights to dim. The result of brownout is running on reduced leadership capacity, operating on “half-power” or less. You just aren’t firing on all cylinders with the same energy, attention, judgment, or influence you once did.
But while your capacity has collapsed, your performance hasn’t. Since browned-out execs continue to function — showing up, checking things off their list, and getting promoted — it’s often difficult to tell that the leader is struggling. The job is still getting done, so it’s easy to normalize brownout symptoms.
Consider Alex, a highly respected, smart, and decisive COO — the person everyone called when something was broken. A client escalated. Alex handled it. A senior leader couldn’t make a decision. Alex made it. A presentation mattered. Alex reviewed it. Whether a team was struggling or the CEO needed something, Alex responded and stepped in.
Alex had become indispensable — and that was the problem. One Tuesday morning, Alex realized something was wrong. The calendar was packed. The inbox never stopped. Every conversation seemed urgent. Alex was still performing, delivering, and getting results.
But when it came time to think strategically, there was nothing left in Alex’s tank. “I’m doing everything I’m supposed to do. I just don’t feel like I’m operating at my level anymore,” Alex said. That’s what I call leadership brownout, and I think it’s one of the most overlooked risks facing today’s senior leaders.
Why is it so important to understand brownout? The answer is that it can quickly become a leadership trap: the behaviors that helped you get promoted may be the very behaviors preventing you from succeeding at the next level. Early in your career, working harder creates differentiation. But once you reach the executive level, working harder can create dependency. Early on, being the person with the answers builds credibility. But as a senior leader, being the person with all the answers creates a bottleneck. Junior employees who always say yes demonstrate commitment. But executives who keep saying yes to everything end up diluting their strategic value.
When the game changes, successful leaders need to change too — but many don’t. Here are four brownout traps to avoid:
1. Over-availability
You’ve become proud of being accessible, and it worked earlier in your career to get you promoted. But at the senior level, if everyone knows you’ll respond immediately, your availability becomes an organizational expectation. Instead of raising your hand for anything and everything, be more selective and strategic about offering your time to projects. Ask yourself: Does my availability for this opportunity create value — or does it make my team and company dependent on keeping me stuck in a role of “doing everything”?
2. Perfectionism
You don’t have to be a perfectionist to fall into this trap; sometimes it simply looks like needing your fingerprints on everything. You become the one who has to review the deck, email, proposal, and presentation. Eventually, there’s a company-wide expectation that you become the organization’s quality-control department. Ask yourself: Does this need to be perfect — or does it need to move?
3. Over-functioning
This brownout trap is especially dangerous: someone on your team misses a deadline, and you rescue them. A project stalls, and you intervene. A stakeholder is unhappy, so you take the meeting. Someone can’t decide, so you chime in and solve the problem. Ask yourself: By repeatedly rescuing the organization, am I keeping the organization from learning to rescue itself?
4. Delegating work but not ownership
You tell yourself you’re delegating, moving something off of your leadership plate. But in reality, you still own the project since you’re still checking, reviewing, asking for updates, and making the final call. You’ve delegated the task, but you haven’t delegated ownership. Ask yourself: when you give someone a project, are you achieving the goal of delegation, which is a stronger organization — or just giving yourself a temporarily lighter calendar while still keeping ownership of the project?
With these four brownout traps in mind, here’s the question I want more leaders and executives to ask themselves: “If I operated exactly the way I’m operating today for the next three years, would I become a better leader — or a more depleted version of the leader I am today?” That’s the real test, because your career shouldn’t require you to become less of the leader, you’re capable of being.
The uncomfortable truth is that you can’t build enterprise capacity by becoming the organization’s biggest source of capacity. Because the goal isn’t simply to reach the next level. The goal is to have the capacity to lead well once you get there.
Contact SHAMBAUGH Leadership at info@shambaughleadership.com to take our Leadership “Brownout Assessment” and engage with a coach on your results and actions you can take. Learn about our executive coaching, executive leadership, leadership development, and sustainable leadership services.
Rebecca Shambaugh is President of SHAMBAUGH Leadership, Founder of Women in Leadership and Learning, and author of the best-selling books It’s Not a Glass Ceiling, It’s a Sticky Floor, and Make Room for Her: Why Companies Need an Integrated Leadership Model to Achieve Extraordinary Results.
