The burnout trap: When high performance comes at a cost

McGrath Aspley sales manager, Tamika Kent, said while it was important to create teams that wanted to perform to the best of their ability, burnout can come easily and drastically affect revenue.

“If someone who is sitting at high performance hits burnout, a lot of the time those people can be primary performance workers in an office,” she told REB.

Achieving a balance

According to Kent, agents can sometimes fall into a trap of believing their wellbeing was dependent on their results, but leaders should encourage them to prioritise both equally.

“They might think, ‘when my business is doing well, my wellbeing will do well’, or ‘I will start going to the gym when I have 20 per cent market share’ or ‘I will start eating better once I can bring on an associate, and I have more time’,” Kent said.

“Particularly when the market’s changing so much, they have to be resilient and adaptive – those two skills are the biggest burners of cognitive energy that we possess,” she said.

Kent said that if leaders prioritised results over wellbeing, without seeing them on equal footing, they risked the business being run on fear rather than a sustainable framework.

“Sometimes people need to rest, sometimes they need to recover, sometimes they need to have some fun; it can’t always just be about the results,” she said.

“You are just building a house of cards that will inevitably fall over and will not only impact results, but the rest of the people and culture within that office.”

Knowing the warning signs

Kent said real estate leaders should always look for the early signs of burnout and help their agents overcome it with dedicated resources.

“I always go back to, what’s ‘burnout?’ And I think the opposite of burnout is ‘fired up’. Many agents, when running their own businesses, they’re throwing everything into that fire,” she said.

However, Kent said that after being constantly driven by ambition and making sacrifices to build their businesses, agents often became more despondent and less motivated.

“When we look at those people we know have been fired up for a period of time, there are warning signs we can see – being a bit more reactive than they normally are, they fail to respond in a timeframe that they normally would,” she said.

To assist burnt-out professionals, Kent said leaders should seek to give them sufficient opportunity for rest and recovery, and speak to them about options to help their wellness.

“We have a mental fitness plan that our team can take up at any point if they are feeling overwhelmed or overworked or they’re feeling like just not themselves,” she said.

Future-proofing

Kent said one key way to help agents maintain their ambition while avoiding becoming burnt-out was to teach them how to future-proof their businesses so they felt they had a purpose.

“I see people get so caught in the everyday – they’ll get caught up doing things to try and build the business without remembering why they set out to do it in the first place,” she said.

Kent said agents should constantly plan ahead and think about where they wanted their business to be, and what its future growth would look like, so they could navigate it with ease.

“If your business was to increase by 50 per cent tomorrow, what would that look like, and what would your challenges be, and how can we make sure we have a framework so you’re ready for that?”

Kent said two agents in her business recently had their first child with their wives, and had taken two months off, but still managed to increase their business by 40 per cent by future-proofing.

“It’s about what can we put in place today to ensure that it’s not a setback for you when you get there, and you’re prepared for that, and it won’t take too much out of other aspects of your life.”