COOL CURES FOR BURNOUT As companies shrink and workloads rise, even the best managers are losing their old pizazz. Try an evening with Chopin -- or a month in India.
By Brian Dumaine

(FORTUNE Magazine) – HOW DOES IT FEEL to burn out? The architect who was the hero of Graham Greene's haunting novel A Burnt-Out Case explained: ''At the end you haven't even got a self to express. I have no interest in anything anymore, doctor. I don't want to sleep with a woman or design a building.'' It isn't always that bad, but burnout is a growing problem in businesses everywhere. Increasing numbers of executives are plain worn out, complaining of fatigue, anxiety, and ennui. In a new study by Opinion Research of Princeton, New Jersey, one-third of 3,000 managers surveyed reported increasing work pressure, up from only 22% in 1980. This spring a large New Jersey corporation hired a prominent psychologist to treat middle managers for burnout -- in groups of 50. As the CEO of a FORTUNE 500 company recently told a consultant, ''I can't get through to the guys. They don't seem part of the management team. What's going on here?'' Answer: plenty. Part of the problem is that over the past five years, more than a million professional and managerial jobs have disappeared. Managers who have survived are working harder and longer than ever, putting such enormous time and energy into their jobs that the jobs sometimes end up controlling them. These people aren't maladjusted, they have just been loaded with so much work that they can't get fired up for that next project or assignment. Widespread social changes are in some ways making matters worse. The number of dual-career couples and single parents has increased to the point where only one in ten American families now fits the traditional Ozzie and Harriet mold. Parents already dizzied by work feel additional pressure as they struggle to spend more time with the kids while climbing the managerial ladder. Baby-boomers who made sacrifices in their 20s and early 30s to reach middle management are coming to the nasty but inevitable realization that, despite tons of hard work, not everybody will make it to the top. Staggering from exertion, they're tempted to ask what it's all about. Why fight so hard? Who cares? The problem is insidious because it is most likely to affect a company's best people. Managers who care deeply about their jobs, who put in long hours, who sincerely want to make things better, are the ones most likely to wipe out. Nor is the trouble apt to correct itself. Fearful of being pegged as wimps, good managers rarely admit to the boss that they're feeling frazzled. You can't blame them. The CEO of a major corporation recently told a management consultant, ''If a guy is burning out, I don't want him on my team anyway.'' Burnout has no precise medical definition, but the commonly accepted symptoms include fatigue, low morale, absenteeism, increased health problems, and drug or alcohol abuse. Says Herbert Freudenberger, a New York psychologist who has written two books on burnout and treats executives in major corporations: ''It is a process that happens over time. There's a wearing down of our hopes and ideals.'' Look for the star performer who suddenly doesn't seem to care anymore. Instead of arguing vigorously over a point or strategy, he'll just say, ''Sure. Anything you say.'' Some burned-out managers become hostile, blowing up over unimportant matters. Others suddenly start missing deadlines, making stupid mistakes, and showing up late for meetings. Sometimes a manager will deliberately stretch out his projects, afraid almost to the point of paranoia that he'll work himself out of a job. At one major corporation, a manager put in charge of developing an in-house software manual took months longer than necessary to complete the job. He also made it so murky that colleagues using it had to consult him from time to time. Top executives generally do less than they should to help a burned-out manager. Some are confused by conflicting advice from management gurus, psychiatrists, psychologists, and the occasional charlatan. Many shy away from involvement in a problem that may be partly rooted in an employee's home life. Barr Taylor, an associate professor of psychiatry at Stanford, says these executives fail to appreciate how high the stakes are: ''I'd like to tell CEOs that they have to help these people or they will die.'' The most important step a company can take to rescue victims of burnout, and help prevent it in others, is to change from lean and mean to lean and not mean. Of all the factors contributing to burnout, job uncertainty tops the list -- workers terrified of getting the ax are most likely to push themselves too far or just give up and quit trying. All the coddling words in the world won't quell the fear and anxiety spawned by the massive layoffs of the last few years; only action will. The most reassuring policy, lifetime employment, is not one that many U.S. companies would consider. Think again, says Meyer Friedman, the San Francisco cardiologist who coined the term ''Type A'' to describe driven behavior and whose clients include Levi Strauss, Transamerica, and Pacific Gas & Electric. ''The Japanese have full employment and are beating us badly, partly because every Japanese worker believes the company is for him.'' In America, IBM is one of the few major corporations with a no- layoffs policy. When the company faced shrinking profits recently, it retrained thousands of workers for different jobs rather than fire them. Now Big Blue is turning around financially, and while it won't release the data in its latest internal opinion surveys, it says they show the highest morale scores since the company started the surveys in 1958. Those who can't afford the luxury of offering lifetime employment might emulate Hewlett-Packard. When faced with tough times a few years back, it cut salaries 10% from the top down. Middle management didn't feel like a scapegoat, and morale remained better than expected. At the least, a company must make sure that dismissed employees are humanely treated. This should slightly reduce remaining workers' terror of being fired. . During downsizing, the problem often is not that managers are overexerting themselves irrationally. They really have to do more work with less help. Says Harry Levinson, a management psychologist and faculty member at the Harvard Medical School: ''When responsibility is pushed down, you can overload people who may not have the conceptual ability needed for the new job.'' Smart bosses can help prevent such people from failing. At a major manufacturing company recently, a manager with good leadership qualities was promoted but couldn't handle the analytic demands of the new job. The CEO saw this and gave him an assistant who could do the number crunching. Says Margaret Regan, a human resources specialist at the New York consulting firm of TPF&C: ''Don't just say, 'Here's your new restructured job.' '' At Hewlett-Packard, says benefits and policy manager Arthur Young, ''part of the corporate culture is to have enough people to get the job done.'' No company's top executives can always know how many people or how much time a job will require. Middle managers must understand that it's okay to say no to an unreasonable deadline or to demand more people, if needed, for a project. Managers are more likely to burn out when they feel a sense of futility -- when they have no idea what their superhuman efforts are supposed to be accomplishing. One implication is that top managers must communicate a clear vision of the company's goals. Burned-out middle managers often complain that top management lacks a sharp vision of what the organization can and should be, as well as the ability to rally others around that vision. Says Julien Phillips, a consultant with McKinsey & Co. in San Francisco: ''If you expect employees to shift to an unexpected course, they need to understand why. If it looks arbitrary and capricious, it's bound to fail.'' Managers will feel more strongly motivated if top executives also evince a humble willingness to listen and learn. But don't expect your troops to change if you don't. One CEO brought in a consultant to improve management morale, but the boss turned out to be a large part of the problem. Recalls the consultant, Carol Dubnicki of Hay Associates in San Francisco: ''He was autocratic. He pretended to be listening to people but wasn't really. He put people down in front of others.'' This doesn't mean that you have to be a touchy-feely manager to inspire the ranks. Says Kenneth Pelletier, a stress management consultant and psychiatrist at the University of California in San Francisco: ''A middle manager isn't looking for a sweet guy to hold his hand. A boss can be tough and confrontational. What's unacceptable is when a boss finds a mistake, pulls the rug out, and screams to get the hell out of his office.'' Taking a mistake as a lesson to be learned and recognizing a job well done with a kind word or a bonus can lift spirits dramatically. Adds Pelletier: ''Appreciation for effort is the most underestimated benefit I've seen.'' A RECENT SURVEY of some 200 FORTUNE 500 companies revealed that 70% offer some kind of anti-burnout training, from Transcendental Meditation to yoga to breathing exercises -- not to mention trampoline therapy -- but there is little scientific evidence that it works. Says San Francisco's Dr. Friedman: ''You can't change 40 years of bad habits in three days.'' Many employees say they have been helped by these programs, but few companies can prove they pay. To make a real impact on corporate culture, managers have to be made to feel like part of a team, and that means learning to cooperate. Retreats and training sessions can help, but beware of so-called human potential gurus, consultants who promise to change your life forever in a weekend by exposing you to some sort of ''breakthrough experience,'' such as launching yourself off a cliff while hanging on to a pulley that races down a cable. A sensible approach used by Hay Associates' Dubnicki brings executives together for a weekend retreat at which managers can mingle in an environment away from the office. In what she calls the desert drill, Dubnicki, whose clients include Xerox and Pacific Telesis, gives a group of managers a long list of items that might come in handy for surviving in the desert -- matches, a knife, a coat. Each manager is asked to list them in order of importance for survival. The managers then create a list together -- and almost without fail the team's list is much closer than any individual's to what survival experts recommend. The exercise teaches managers that they'll get better results as a team than by knocking themselves out heroically and individually. But what about the side of burnout that is outside the office -- the family pressures that, combined with work, can wear managers down? Several major corporations have found that they can help here as well. ''An enlightened benefit program can dramatically raise morale in the company,'' says Regan of TPF&C. Many middle managers are part of the so-called sandwich generation, simultaneously taking care of their kids and their parents. Last February, IBM started the first nationwide elder-care service to help employees cope with aging parents. A manager at one of IBM's suburban New York City facilities was spending hours on the phone trying to find a nursing home for his mother in Texas and even had to take some days off to fly down there and make arrangements. Says he: ''It was getting to the point where it was taking too much time away from my work.'' Once IBM's elder-care program became available, this employee called the service's office in Texas and got expert advice and a list of the best nursing homes in the area. So far 4,400 IBMers have used the service. Throughout business, flextime programs are becoming more popular, allowing at least one member of a harried, dual-career couple to leave work, say, an hour earlier to pick up junior at the dentist. Many companies offer day-care referral programs that help working parents cope with the ubiquitous shortage of qualified nannies. Sometimes burnout prevention can be as simple as making sure managers take their vacations each year or occasionally giving them a surprise three-day weekend. A middle manager in an East Coast corporation explained that he often skipped his vacations; when he finally did take them he couldn't relax but would read trade journals even in Hawaii or Tahiti. Now, after a heart attack, he takes a week off in the sun each quarter and reads only novels. John Larson, a Norwalk, Connecticut, psychiatrist and lecturer at the Yale School of Medicine who works with burned-out executives, suggests that managers try to take vacations in exotic places like southern India, where many people have less materialistic values and a more relaxed sense of time. Says Larson: ''You can begin to get another perspective on life when you see how others live.'' For those who can't afford such a vacation, Larson recommends simply taking a trip someplace new rather than returning to the same lake or ocean house every year. Several companies, including Time Inc. (publisher of FORTUNE), Intel, Apple Computer, and IBM, believe that a sabbatical is the best way to keep their best people from burning out. Intel encourages employees to pursue a new but job-related course of study. IBM lets workers take a year off with pay to teach, say, in an inner-city school or work for a nonprofit organization. Employees of even the most enlightened corporation can nonetheless burn out all by themselves, neglecting aspects of their lives such as art, music, and sports. Says psychologist Freudenberger: ''In chasing the American dream, we're sacrificing self and family for money and power.'' Some managers put so much into their work that they become their work. Despite all their efforts, of course, things can still go to hell at the office -- and then these managers, with no other dimensions to their lives, feel lost, empty, and depressed. Friedman notes that some managers don't realize how out of touch with the other aspects of their lives they have become. To prove his point, he once asked a group of executives to repeat, ''Merrill Lynch is selling at $48 a share.'' The managers repeated the line without missing a beat. Then Friedman asked them to say, ''The pond is pink with June.'' What? Friedman recalls that the managers were so ''left-brained'' -- trained to think only in terms of numbers and analytical problems -- that not one of them could repeat this line from Emily Dickinson before hearing it three times. A patient of psychiatrist Larson had suffered a couple of heart attacks and was feeling burned out. Earlier in life he had painted, but now he thought his daubings so bad that ''a 5-year-old could do it.'' At Larson's urging, he took to painting again -- at first reluctantly, but then enthusiastically. Says Larson: ''You have to realize the important thing is that you love doing it. People don't recognize this side of life. They think it's not worth it because it doesn't pay.'' In Friedman's view, ''Today's managers can read Barron's but not Beowulf.'' The experts' advice: If you once read the great books, go back and reread them. If you played the piano, play it again. The cost of preventing or correcting burnout often seems high. To the manager who thinks he's rocketing toward the top, slowing down may appear foolhardy. To top executives trying to cut costs, such benefits as sabbaticals, elder-care programs, and shorter workweeks may look like expensive freebies with uncertain payoffs. On the bottom line, is fighting burnout worthwhile? Says Walton Burdick, vice president of personnel at IBM, which offers one of the richest benefits packages: ''If you believe that, long term, a company will prosper based on the quality of people it attracts and keeps, then it makes sense.'' That is a tough idea to swallow for managers who ^ live and die by quarterly results, but one that, in the long run, may be too important to ignore.