to be told my work burn out is my own fault?

[Menora]

Not posted for a long time but been here years.

I would like some advice as I feel like I have been gaslighted into taking all the blame for my work burn out by my manager.

I am in a senior management position in a fast paced, fairly stressful environment. I have worked in the industry for 20 years in various roles so I am not new to it. My manager is newer to the industry (4 years). Manager is very different to me in style and thought processes.

Manager doesn’t come to the office every day, and doesn't communicate what they are working on. I am in the office all the time, visible and contactable I never WFH. I feel like they dominate all my time through hundreds of small micromanagements, endless phone calls, messages, lots of repetitive meetings and questions and instructions. I can find this frustrating and time wasting.

Recently I have reached burn out, all the small micromanagements and noise from the dozens and dozens of daily calls and instructions have made me feel drowned and unproductive.

We spoke today and I tried to express myself, that I was feeling frustrated, burnt out, unproductive and needed to regroup myself somehow. I am working, but I am not working as well as I would like to be, my work-life balance was not ideal and I would like some quieter periods of space to focus.

Manager asked me to be very specific about what pieces of work were causing the burn out feelings, so I tried to start explaining that it was less about the work and more about general burn out/noise to be told the following:

-It had been noticed by people I wasn’t doing any work
-It wasn’t obvious what I am doing all day
-They don’t think I really have any work to do
-I am distracted and uncontactable
-They never WFH and are always visible
-They are picking up all my slack and protecting me from work I should be doing as I keep saying I am stressed
-I need to give them a list of all the jobs I should be doing for them to compare with
-I am too sensitive
-I get over involved in trivial matters
-I need to learn to not care about things as much

I feel even more depressed and demoralised now than I did. Is work burn out usually just all your own fault for being an oversensitive weakling? I mean if I am performing like this, why wait until I am on my knees to let me know?

Why do you feel burnt out? Can you respond to her comments?

Time to start looking for another role.

Does the reality lie somewhere in the middle? You each have very different approaches, what could you learn from each other?

Sounds like you are working for a narcissist who is projecting their own behaviour on to you. No easy solutions to that situation, but prioritising yourself is essential. Start documenting everything, keep notes, and involve HR right now. Go to the doctor and get stress, mental health issues on record. Work have a duty of care and need to be supporting you. Your manager is not capable and will thwart the process which is why HR needs to be involved. I will guarantee they have a history of this behaviour.

Is there a middle ground where you are both 'right'?

You need to give specific examples back to her. Eg I was working on project X. You contacted me Y number of times in Z working hours about it. This made me feel XYZ.

There are some bosses you need to "manage upwards" and there are strategies to be assertive about, say, blocking off chunks of your day with a diary entry "finish X report". And then if anyone interrupts you, just give a cheerful, " Gotta get this done, let's speak at 3!"

But if she's committed to gaslighting you, just leave. Seriously.

Some of these responses are truly dreadful.

'It had been noticed by people I wasn’t doing any work '

'They are picking up all my slack and protecting me from work I should be doing as I keep saying I am stressed'

If either of these were true, they'd be addressing it as a performance issue.

It sounds like they perceived you were fault-finding with them & started to attack.

It sounds like they are ill-equipped to deal with matters like this & certainly haven't handled it well.

I'm sorry you are feeling so burnt out, and I suspect it relates mostly to your manager. Is there anyone you trust (a peer or another manager) that you could discuss options with?

I'm a bit triggered as the kids say because I was in a senior position in my last job and I got tonnes of kickback if I tried to just block off time to do my job. It's a woman/emotional labour thing. I brought it up once, then quit.

I am in no way senior but i had a lot of people trying to give me tasks and trying to micromanage me so i just logged out of Teams, and blocked 6 hours on my calendar every day. And the first time someone asked me about it i just said "look how productive i am when you all STFU" and since then it's been fine.

No chance to do something like that, OP?

They are picking up all my slack and protecting me from work I should be doing as I keep saying I am stressed

Are you really telling subordinates that you're stressed out?

I get this. My (soon to be old) manager is like this. The minute you raise issues, she turns it back around. There is no simple discussion and finding solutions. It was like working with my narc ex. I've found a new job with what appears to be an empathetic manager.

@HellToTheNope

They are picking up all my slack and protecting me from work I should be doing as I keep saying I am stressed

Are you really telling subordinates that you're stressed out?

Where are you getting subordinates from? She's talking to her manager?

Wow

I had almost identical comments from a manager in a previous role, especially other people notice you're not working/don't know what you're doing/trying to protect etc.

It absolutely destroyed my confidence and made that job a misery. I'd been there a year, and never in an previous jobs had anything but glowing feedback.

Ultimately I left, whatever the problem was it wasn't going to change.

In my new job regained my confidence and motivation, back to glowing feedback and feeling productive.

It was a real learning experience in how terrible at managing some managers are! I don't think it's you. It feels like awful feedback but a decent manager should never allow a member of staff to get into that situation.

You really need to leave as the manager won't change and it will ultimately damage you. You can be you again in a new job.

Leave.

It's not you, it's them. I've seen it done to others and fallen victim to it myself. Classic crap manager script here

Thank you so much for all responding, yes I think I need to
a. Get a new job
b. Be firmer about my time

I am going to block out my time to concentrate on jobs and not keep picking up the phone. I had already started trying to do that and trying to get off phone calls and explaining they are interrupting me. Now I feel like everything I have been doing is just trivial rubbish

I was totally trying not to lay all the blame on manager, as I knew it would make them angry and make it worse and there are 2 sides to each story - so I had already said essentially ‘I am taking responsibility now to ask for some space to regroup and acknowledging to both of us I am burning out’

It’s hard to give an example without outing myself but I am given a specific job to do, and during the course of that job, I have to feedback all the minute details in phone calls until it’s finished. I can’t really make any decisions on my own. Other people see how many times I get phoned too.

There is so much more, manager has really broken my trust lately and I think it’s something deeper going on. I am collateral damage but to get to where they want, they have had to trample me

You maybe could think about tactic I used with a bullying boss- this micro management and then blame shifting does sound a bit bullying. I was off work for some weeks with stress and anxiety as a result

When I got back, I went to HR. I said I needed someone to come along to my 1:1 with my boss as an observer to help me understand what I was doing wrong and how to modify so that I could better manage my stress. Of course I bloody well knew it wasn’t what I was doing- I’d be doing it for 25 years plus and was very senior. It was a personality clash and boss was picking holes in my personality when he couldn’t pull my work apart.

HR came into a number of meeting between us to observe . They then offered independent coaching for both of us. Must have cost a bloody fortune. He soon stopped bullying me and knew he couldn’t get easy with trying to micro manage and belittle me. The coach was pretty frank with me about what my boss was doing and why, and got us to the point where we could “safely” interact.
My boss ‘s career progression as the blue eyed wonder boy was curtailed about a year later and moved to a position where he was no longer managing people. I think HR found out from their observations that they had completely over estimated his ability to manage people and was actually quite toxic

By making it my”responsibility ” to fix, and asking Hr how I could improve, I did not put anyone in a difficult position. I knew he was in the wrong, but if I had complained or raised a grievance it would have backed HR into a corner and his word against mine. They were forced to actually listen and look at what was going on first hand

@HellToTheNope

They are picking up all my slack and protecting me from work I should be doing as I keep saying I am stressed

Are you really telling subordinates that you're stressed out?

No I heard today my manager is apparently ‘protecting’ me from my own work because I was stressed and doing it for me.

If it makes a difference, I am part time and that’s a major issue I think

If it makes a difference, I am part time and that’s a major issue I think

I would absolutely think it does and suspect you're being managed out. Leave before they destroy your confidence

I had a similar experience and tried to face it head on. The firm will not admit responsibility for employee burnout as they will have to do something about and have admitted liability. Instead they will turn it around on you and your the one struggling and facing mental health issues. Ultimately I think you will have to look elsewhere as unless management changes the culture will not.

I have a colleague who is never at her desk and she is always in meetings. How she gets anything done is beyond me? She has to catch up in the evenings and weekends when really, she should be at her desk doing her work and not attending every meeting going. The last person who did her job rarely went to these meetings and went home on time and certainly didn’t work evenings and weekends.
I think things like endless calls and meetings and micromanaging staff are unproductive as the actual work that needs doing doesn’t get done.

I don’t think the problem is that you are ‘burning out’. Presenting it like that will feed into your manager’s treatment of you and what they say to others about you.

Your primary concern is about your line manager’s actions towards you: small micromanagements, phone calls, messages, meetings, questions and instructions.

If you don’t want to leave, and/or you think others senior to you would listen, I would record evidence and raise the concerns with your manager and/or the grievance process.

And be very factual, eg X calls on date X taking up X hours. X requests for immediate response.

@Menora. This sounds awful. Can you go above the manager, maybe to HR?

Your manager sounds very like mine and I’ve had to go to HR (with union support) to get the bullying and micromanagement stopped. I’ve been told by the manager that I’ve brought the stress on myself because I have high standards and won’t go into a training session unprepared and she thinks I need psychological support to learn to cope with her management style.

You have my sympathy, it sounds like an impossible situation.

Are you working properly or just faffing about? It's good that you went to your manager to speak about feeling burnt out and needing time to prioritise tasks but they can't have said that others have mentioned that you aren't really working and they're not sure what you're doing out of nowhere surely

The interruptions, micro managing and multiple meetings will have a massive impact on your productivity. It's not multi-tasking. It's switch-tasking. DH works in IT and his company make everyone work on one project at a time for this very reason.

I've seen managers do this before. It will not end well because your manager will not see your point of view. It is possible that there is an ulterior motive. The PP who said request a meeting with HR present so you can better understand what you are doing wrong (ha!) is a good way forward.

Is there any way you can take a sideways move to get away from this manager? If not, I would be dusting off my CV.

In your position I would get a sick note. Your manager sounds like a cf. Leaving you with all the day to day running of things whike she is hiding away working from home. Not on. Thrn when you come back go to either HR or her boss and say this set up doesn't work for you. And the fact that she was not pulling her weight and doing her job made you ill.