10. How to be a Supportive Boss Without Burning Yourself Out

A reading of a blog post published here.

When you manage others, it’s easy to get spread too thin. Our compassion and desire to be good leaders causes us to sacrifice our mental and emotional well-being in service of our employees. Employee problems become our problems and, over time, employees learn to delegate-up, leaving their struggles and questions at our feet and absolving themselves of the responsibility that comes from doing the hard, important work themselves. We normalize these unhealthy boundaries and soon find we have little to no time for our own responsibilities.

You’re no good to your employees burned out. An essential part of being a great leader is learning how to prioritize your well-being and setting appropriate boundaries for yourself. This means learning to support your employees without allowing yourself to fall into the trap of coddling them. You shouldn’t insulate them from the healthy stress that comes from figuring things out on their own.

By struggling and challenging themselves with their work, your employees grow and evolve. If you’re truly committed to their long-term success, you have to be willing to look at the big picture and give up the immediate gratification of feeding them fish to gain the larger satisfaction of teaching them to fish.

Being more intentional about your availability to your team will mean choosing not to get involved with employee concerns and struggles when you don’t need to. It will mean answering employee questions with questions of your own (you’d be amazed at what a “what do you think the answer is here?” or “if I weren’t here what would you do?” can do for you). You’ll go through the hard work of transforming yourself from a rescuer into a coach, by offering selective guidance without allowing employees to hand things off to you. The easiest way to start this transition is to develop a personal framework for deciding the kind of support your team needs when an issue comes up and socializing this new mindset and practice with your team.

Develop a framework for when you should be directly involved

What every leader should develop is a mental framework for when they feel like their help is needed versus wanted, and you’ll have a clearer picture of when to get directly involved and when your employee should be allowed to challenge themselves.

Every leader is going to have a different standard for when to offer their time and assistance. What types of projects? What level of urgency? Your goal is to find a balance between being infinitely available and infinitely unavailable. You want to be available for the right kinds of support, as determined by you, with consideration to the feelings of your team.

For example, my framework is if an employee a) can reasonably be expected to accomplish the task independently b) has the necessary skills and training and c) can’t irreparably harm a project or initiative if they get it wrong – then I’m comfortable challenging them to work without my direct involvement.

Share the framework with your employees in a way they can understand

Having boundaries is useless if no one follows or respects them. And people can’t follow them if they don’t know about them. After you develop your framework for where you’re willing to support your employees, take the time to talk with each employee about it and integrate it into your on-boarding for new employees. Frame this new approach as a way to ensure employees are growing and developing into independent contributors; by being more empowered they’ll need less oversight and gain more independence. This perspective will minimize push-back and make your new tactic more meaningful to everyone.

When you find yourself telling an employee that they need to struggle through something on their own, connect this decision back to your framework (to show consistency) and remind the employee that you’re wanting to challenge them so that they won’t need to ask you for help in the future. If you get push-back from an employee, you can always offer them the compromise of checking in with them after the task is complete to review the work with them one-on-one and offer feedback/coaching.

As an aside, beware of any employees that seem to negatively overreact to this new process. Every team has at least one person that uses “I’m helpless” as an excuse to offload work onto their supervisor or leader. Some people who are perfectly independent in their personal lives are somehow completely codependent in their professional lives. These individuals may not be a long-term fit on your team.

By establishing healthier boundaries and a better support method you’ll allow your employees to grow and challenge themselves while also giving yourself the energy to focus on your core priorities. You’ll have shown the courage to avoid the easier, more convenient path of constantly reacting to every small request. Instead, you’ll offer your team the kind of leadership they really need: a belief that they have it in them to reach new heights if they’d only trust in their own abilities and show a willingness to push themselves.

Good luck out there.