We should protect emerging talent from burnout rather than waiting for them to fall, explains Anna Champion at The Talent Lighthouse.
In a recent graduate coaching session, this question literally floored me.
It was the conviction that burnout was an inevitable part of everyone’s future. They weren't asking for help; they were asking for the ‘weather forecast’ for the storm they assumed was coming.
We finally have a language to talk about being overwhelmed, but in doing so, have we accidentally made burnout feel like a mandatory rite of passage?
If you’re responsible for these pipelines of emerging talent, ask yourself: how do we protect talent before they hit the wall, and how do we actually catch them if they do?
Support ecosystem
Before we look at any big, systemic changes, we should verify that the immediate support net we wrap around this talent pool is working. Their support ecosystem is vital.
Ensure line managers are well trained to spot differences in patterns of behaviour. Keep your talent team available for ad hoc conversations and more regular check-ins.
Facilitate peer support to share their experiences, buddies can who help them navigate the unwritten rules, and mentors who can provide that vital longer-term perspective.
Even with all that internal care, there is also a great deal of power in providing an independent, external coach in this mix. Providing a ‘neutral territory’ where a graduate can exhale without worrying about how it looks on a performance review can be extremely important.
In my coaching, I see graduates open-up in ways they simply won't with their boss or a peer; it gives them a safe place to build their mental fitness. This type of support can be offered on-demand and should be supplemented by trained counsellors if required.
Perceived availability
It is worth remembering that the true value of support networks often lies in their perceived availability.
Research suggests that the mere knowledge of having a mentor or a buddy even when a graduate doesn't reach out for support every single week acts as a powerful 'insurance policy’.
This sense of psychological safety signals that the organisation is invested in their long-term growth, which is often enough to lower their baseline anxiety, regardless of how many hours are spent in actual sessions.
But even with a great team around them, we could go further to more proactively support potential burnout situations.
4 ways to support potential burnout
Here are a few areas to consider implementing into your programmes:
- Share the ‘messy’ side of success
Perfectionism is exhausting. Ask your senior leaders to share their own ‘failures’. When a director talks about their early-career blunders, it lowers the collective heart rate of the cohort. It tells them they can learn without having to be perfect every single day.
Make this a key part of your leaders’ stories or put it as part of an interactive group scenario solving exercise.
- Pulse checks of capacity
It’s very hard to highlight to a manager that you are at capacity and to say ‘no’ when you are asked to take on an extra task.
Instead of the vague question at a check-in of ‘How’s it going?’, using a pulse-check system - where a graduate can highlight their capacity - could help change the conversation from being a confession of stress to be more about strategic resourcing.
- ‘Moments of truth’ audit
Map out the entire journey of an employee from the point of hire to exit. Pinpoint every key activity (from performance reviews and project deadlines to life events like moving home or the disappointment of being overlooked for a promotion).
Walk through these scenarios, auditing where current processes could create friction or undue pressure. This will allow you to iron out the creases in your interactions, ensuring that at these critical, high-impact moments, your support feels deliberate rather than automated.
- Schedule mental fitness
Treat wellbeing as a core skill, just like Excel or presenting. If we bake ‘energy management’ into formal learning hours, we show that staying healthy is part of being a professional.
In this we can highlight that it is human to feel discomfort and fear. One organisation included a coaching session about managing energy and high performance in their onboarding. This helped highlight areas that would be potentially draining and stressful, but also created the opportunity to add in a clear individual growth plan related to wellness.
Pre-empt support
Ultimately, by building these systems, we stop accepting that burnout is just the price of admission. We change the answer to that question that floored me.
When a graduate asks, ‘How will I know when I experience burnout? the goal isn't to give them a checklist of symptoms to watch for. It’s to create a culture where the answer is, ‘You shouldn't have to’.
We aren't just protecting a pipeline; we’re dismantling the idea that toughness is the only thing keeping them from the brink. It’s time we stop waiting for them to break before we decide to support them.
If we get this right, we aren't just teaching the next generation of leaders how to be kinder to themselves; we’re demanding that they build the sustainable, human-first cultures that our industry has been putting off for far too long.