high performing teams burnout together

High performing teams have a number of characteristics that contribute to their success. They have high context culture and each of the individuals are highly aware of their contribution and impact on the team. They have a high level of group EQ and consider the emotions and needs of each of the team members.

These desirable characteristics of teams also make all the team members highly susceptible to the same set of external factors that could cause burnout for an individual team member. That is to say…

In high performing teams, burnout happens at team level.

The environment created by a well performing and highly gelled team means that external factors that contribute to burnout for an individual will contribute to burnout for all the individuals in the team. As each team member is aware of the impact that those factors have on themself, the team and the other team members.

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If burnout recovery for an individual is 25% of the time that it took to get burnt-out. Then burnout recovery for the team is anywhere between:

(0.25 * time_to_burnout) and N(0.25 * time_to_burnout)

N is the number of team members.

Burning out the team, can have a significantly worse impact on performance and time to recovery than burning out an individual. Taking care of the team is as easy as taking care of each of the individuals, but the cost of burnout is significantly higher.