What if burnout isn’t a personal failure, but a leadership and structural one? Dr. Sergey Gorbatov, Co-Director of the Advanced Program in Strategic Talent Management for the Next Era at Porto Business School, believes organisations need to move beyond surface-level fixes and take a systemic approach to well-being, leadership, and talent.
We sat down with Sergey to explore the leadership behaviours driving burnout, how to balance pressure with performance, and what business leaders should be preparing for in 2025.
What Drives Burnout?
You’ve said weak leadership can be a key driver of burnout. What are the most common leadership behaviours or gaps that contribute to this?
Burnout can be understood as the opposite of engagement. Research and experience confirm that the direct supervisor is the key driver of engagement. So, we can reverse the question: “What is missing in leaders’ efforts to drive and maintain high engagement?”
There are three basic psychological needs that all of us strive to satisfy: get ahead, get along, and find meaning. Leaders help their teams satisfy these needs. For example, to help people get ahead, they must provide sufficient resources, including time, to complete their tasks. Lack of time, combined with big deliverables and tight deadlines, often causes stress, and accumulated stress may lead to burnout.
For getting along, leaders should foster psychological safety on the team, provide space for real human connection beyond tasks, and make an effort to get to know their employees. And to help people find meaning, leaders need to create a compelling vision, continuously reduce ambiguity, and do a lot of sense-making.
Pressure vs. Stress
In your experience, what’s the difference between high-performance leadership and high-pressure leadership? How can leaders push for results without pushing people over the edge?
We must distinguish between pressure and stress. Pressure is good. Those with a few ambitious goals outperform those who have no goals (no direction), goals that aren’t stretching enough (no pressure), or too many goals (which causes stress).
Goals provide clarity and direction. When I have clear goals, I know what’s expected and can make plans to achieve and exceed them. When I discuss those plans and progress with my manager, I receive feedback that helps me course-correct and invest my resources wisely.
Of course, goals change, especially in today’s high-speed, high-change environment. Helping employees prioritise goals gives them the agency they need to keep their work under control and prevent stress. On the other hand, unexpected, unreasonable, unsupported goals are major sources of stress.
Systemic Causes of Burnout
Employee burnout is often treated as a personal issue, not a systemic one. What are companies still getting wrong about the causes of burnout?
I often hear phrases like “He’s burned out. Just couldn’t handle the heat” or “She’s on the verge of burnout. She should learn resilience.” These comments make it sound like burnout is the individual’s fault as if it’s their personal failure that work became a source of stress.
Of course, there are personality traits that make us more or less prone to burnout. But if we agree that the key driver of engagement is the direct supervisor, an external factor, then the sources of burnout are largely external, too.
High workload, constantly shifting priorities, low psychological safety, abusive supervision, lack of communication – these are the real contributors. Most workplaces have at least one of these, and many have several. In excess, they can devastate an employee’s sense of worth, self-esteem, and well-being.
Burnout needs to be treated as a systemic issue. We need to ask:
- Are our managers effective in leading others?
- Are spans of control fit for purpose?
- What’s our guidance on rest and vacation?
- Does our technology facilitate or hinder goal achievement?
You can’t yoga your employees out of burnout. A systemic problem needs a systemic solution.
Building vs. Needing Resilience
We’re hearing a lot about “resilience” in the workplace. Is resilience something individuals should be expected to build, or should leaders focus on reducing the need for it in the first place?
Many good things in life are harmful in large doses. A vaccine boosts immunity, but too much virus causes illness. Being organised is good, hyper-organisation becomes micromanagement. Resilience is the exception.
If we define resilience as the ability to bounce back from setbacks, there’s no such thing as too much. Setbacks are inevitable — so the more resilient we are, the faster we recover. It’s a meta-skill that should be developed and practised.
That said, resilience alone isn’t enough. Leaders can’t promise employees that there will be no change, no setbacks, no failures. That would be naive or misleading. But what leaders can do is reduce chaos — plan better, avoid last-minute non-critical changes, and support people in managing the unexpected.
The best approach is two-fold: build resilience and reduce the need to rely on it.
What’s Coming in 2025
Looking ahead to the biggest talent challenges in 2025, what should business leaders be preparing for now?
It’s a hard question to answer universally. Some companies are scaling, others are barely surviving. Some regions are talent-rich; others face shortages. That’s why I always ask two questions:
- What’s your strategy?
- Which external talent trends influence your ability to execute it?
Globally, we’re seeing major trends:
- The 65+ workforce is the fastest-growing segment
- There’s growing disillusionment with corporate jobs
- Mental health concerns are rising
- AI is disrupting roles
- Many large companies are cutting middle manager roles by up to 50%
Which of these are most relevant to you? It depends. As a business leader, you need to be aware of them and expect your HR team to have a talent strategy that supports your business now — and in the future.
AI and Talent Strategy
How do you see AI impacting workforce planning and recruitment over the next 1–3 years? What’s the biggest misconception about AI’s role in talent strategy?
The biggest misconception? That AI will fix bad leadership on its own.
AI-enabled talent marketplaces — platforms that balance supply and demand by matching people to opportunities — promise to accelerate internal mobility. But over 70% of managers are talent hoarders. They want to hold onto their best people. A tool can’t fix that mindset without addressing the culture behind it.
In recruitment, AI is already shaping how candidates are screened. But AI also floods applicant tracking systems with automatically generated applications. This means that the best candidates are often the ones who know how to game the system — not necessarily the most qualified.
AI holds a lot of promise. But it’s not a silver bullet for organisational dysfunction. The human element still matters — deeply.
Aligning People and Performance
Finally, how can leaders balance the need for operational efficiency with creating a people-first culture? Are those goals in conflict or can they be aligned?
You can’t have high performance without people. And you can’t be a great employer unless you drive high performance. These goals are not in conflict — they are co-dependent.
Great leaders set high expectations and provide strong support. They give direction and create room for experimentation. They lead with vision and listen to others. It’s about mastering the both/and.
Leadership versatility will be increasingly important in a world defined by complexity and contradiction. It’s what will allow organisations to thrive, sustainably.