🔥 The Burnout Paradox: The Hidden Contradictions Driving Employee Burnout 🔥
A senior lawyer I once knew sent her team a flurry of work messages at midnight on 31 December. Just as everyone else was raising a glass to the new year. Everyone laughed about it at the time. It became a bit of a legend.
But I’ve often thought about that laughter since. We laugh at things that are absurd, and also at things we’ve learnt to accept. Nobody said it was a problem. Nobody needed to. The message about what commitment looked like had been received loud and clear.
Most organisations today promote work-life balance, flexible working and mental well-being, and most mean it. But what employees experience day to day often tells a different story. And when the official message and the real one point in opposite directions, people end up confused, stressed and, eventually, exhausted. In 2023, the Boston Consulting Group found that almost half of employees worldwide were struggling with burnout.
Caught in a double bind
As an executive and team coach, I meet many professionals caught in exactly these contradictions. They’re doing their best, yet they’re working against expectations nobody has ever said out loud.
The anthropologist Gregory Bateson and his colleagues had a name for this as far back as 1956: the double bind. A person receives two contradictory messages from someone they depend on, they can’t comment on the contradiction, and they can’t leave. Whatever they do, they can’t win. Bateson developed the idea while studying communication in families, but it fits today’s workplace remarkably well. Employees depend on their organisation for their income, their career and much of their professional identity – and they’re often sent messages that make it impossible to comply fully without paying a price.
Some sectors are particularly exposed. In exhibitions and events, the industry I worked in for twenty years, heavy workloads, immovable deadlines, frequent travel and unsociable hours are part of the job. The contradictions are the same as elsewhere. They just hit harder.
Three paradoxes come up again and again:
- An “always-on” culture alongside official work-life balance policies.
- Instructions to respect working hours, combined with workloads that don’t fit into them.
- Blaming individuals for their perfectionism while demanding flawless results.
Paradox 1: “Always on” vs. work-life balance
Many organisations have clear policies: nobody is expected to read emails late at night, answer messages at the weekend or be available outside working hours. Sounds good, doesn’t it?
But culture speaks louder than policy. If your manager answers emails at midnight, you feel you should too. If promotions go to the people who always seem available, rather than the ones who get the most done, everyone notices. And people instinctively follow the example of those in authority. When the manager stays late, the team stays late. Or feels it should. And those who can’t, because of children, caring responsibilities or their own health? They fall behind. Or feel they do.
So employees are left with two options. Conform to the unspoken rule of permanent availability and head towards burnout. Or follow the official policy and risk looking less committed.
Paradox 2: the overwork trap
The second contradiction appears when an organisation asks people to respect their working hours but gives them more work than those hours can hold.
Nobody explicitly asks for overtime. But with understaffing and rising demands, deadlines can’t be met any other way, so people stay late. Even flexible working can turn into a trap: “work whenever suits you” quietly becomes “work all the time.” It’s the illusion of flexibility, with none of the control.
Leave on time, and you risk being seen as underperforming. Stay late, and you pay for it in exhaustion. Either way, you lose.
Paradox 3: “It’s your perfectionism”
The third paradox is perhaps the most painful, because it moves the problem onto the individual. Organisations say they care about mental health, yet when burnout appears, it’s often put down to personality – and perfectionism in particular.
“Your perfectionism is the problem” – while flawless work is expected on impossible deadlines.
“You need to prioritise self-care” – while workloads leave no time to switch off.
Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter, two of the leading researchers on burnout, argued decades ago that burnout says more about the workplace than about the people in it. Yet the message employees receive is the opposite. So on top of exhaustion comes guilt: they feel responsible for their own burnout and don’t see the structural problem behind it.
Why people can’t simply say no
What turns these contradictions into a true double bind is the combination Bateson described:
- Conflicting messages: “look after your balance” alongside “deliver, whatever it takes.”
- No room to name it: pointing out the contradiction openly feels like a professional risk.
- No easy way out: leaving the organisation isn’t always a realistic option.
Watzlawick and his colleagues at Palo Alto later showed how corrosive this kind of communication can be. Applied to the workplace, it helps explain the confusion, the withdrawal, the sense of helplessness and the chronic stress that so many people describe long before they reach burnout.
How coaching can help break the cycle
Bateson saw the way out of a double bind in what he called meta-communication: stepping back to talk about the communication itself. That’s very much where coaching starts.
Working with individuals and teams, I help them:
- Make the invisible visible: name the contradictions they’re caught in, which is often a relief in itself.
- Reframe expectations: move the conversation from constant availability to real contribution and a more sustainable pace.
- Open up the conversation: find ways to raise these contradictions with their manager or team without putting themselves at risk.
- Lead by example: for managers, recognise the signals their own behaviour sends, and change them.
From policy to practice
Policies alone won’t solve burnout. Organisations that want to make real progress need to look at the contradictions their culture creates: aligning what leaders do with what they say, matching workloads to working hours, and valuing people for what they contribute rather than for how available they are.
And for any leader, it starts with one honest question: which contradictions am I sending my team without realising it?
If that question resonates, for yourself or for your team, I’d be glad to talk it through.
References
Bateson, G., Jackson, D. D., Haley, J. & Weakland, J. (1956). Toward a theory of schizophrenia. Behavioral Science, 1(4), 251–264.
Boston Consulting Group (2023). [Check the exact title of the report before publishing.]
Maslach, C. & Leiter, M. P. (1997). The Truth About Burnout. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Watzlawick, P., Beavin Bavelas, J. & Jackson, D. D. (1967/2014). Pragmatics of Human Communication. New York: Norton.
