Sandro da Silva is the chief growth officer at bettercoach, a triple-accredited executive coach and coach supervisor.
Burnout has become a pressing challenge for both individuals and organizations. Despite growing awareness, it remains difficult to define: It overlaps with exhaustion and depression, yet it isn’t recognized as a formal mental disorder.
When we hear that someone has suffered from burnout, our immediate response is often to treat it as an individual problem. We assume it’s about that person’s inability to cope, their workload, their stress-management skills or even personal weakness. And most remedies follow that logic: rest, therapy, mindfulness, resilience training.
But what if we’ve been looking at burnout the wrong way all along?
Over years of working with executives and organizations, I started to notice a pattern. Burnout rarely showed up in isolation. Where there was one case, there were usually more. And that led me to a different question: What if burnout is not primarily about the individual at all? What if it’s the organization that is unwell, and the individual is simply showing the symptoms?
Burnout As A Symptom, Not The Illness
That shift led me to a different way of looking at burnout—not as an illness itself, but as a symptom; a signal pointing to deeper issues in the system. We know this idea in medicine: A fever isn’t the illness; it’s the body’s way of signalling that something deeper is wrong. A plant’s yellowing leaves are not the real problem, but an indicator that the soil is poor or the roots are diseased.
Seen this way, burnout is like the fever or the yellowing leaf. It’s a signal that something in the system is off balance. The symptom appears in individuals, but the root causes live in the wider organization.
Organizational “illness” often takes the form of relentless pressure: more, faster, cheaper. Organizational cultures built around control mechanisms—KPIs, evaluations, endless reporting cycles—fuel anxiety and erode psychological safety. Add to this poor emotional literacy, a lack of transparency, back-to-back meetings and the energy-draining complexity of navigating competing priorities. The result is not just one exhausted employee, but a system that steadily depletes its people.
What Research Tells Us
This is not just an observation. Research increasingly supports the idea that burnout is systemic:
• The World Health Organization (WHO), in 2019, classified burnout not as a medical condition, but as an occupational phenomenon “resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.” In other words, it is tied to organizational context, not individual pathology.
• Decades of research by Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter show that burnout arises when there is a chronic mismatch between people and their workplace in six areas: workload, control, reward, community, fairness and values. These are not individual shortcomings; they are organizational design issues.
• The Job Demands–Resources (JD-R) Model demonstrates that burnout occurs when job demands (workload, pressure, emotional strain) consistently outweigh the resources provided (support, autonomy, feedback, learning opportunities). In other words, the health of the system is decisive.
Together, these perspectives reinforce the same point: Burnout is less about individual fragility and more about systemic dysfunction.
Why This Matters For Executives
If we see burnout only as an individual problem, we risk two dangers:
1. Blaming The Victim: The exhausted employee is told to toughen up, take yoga or download another mindfulness app while the workplace that produced the stress remains unchanged.
2. Missing The Signal: Treating only the “fever” means ignoring the infection. By focusing on the individual alone, organizations miss critical feedback about the health of their system.
Executives and HR leaders have a responsibility to widen the lens. Supporting individuals through recovery is essential, but it cannot stop there. The real leadership challenge is to ask:
• What is happening in our system that makes burnout likely?
• What signals are we ignoring when multiple people show the same symptoms?
• How do we design an organization that nourishes rather than drains?
Leaders As Gardeners
I often use the metaphor of the leader as a gardener. Flowers don’t thrive because you tell them to be more resilient. They thrive because the soil is rich, the roots have space and the environment is healthy. When the leaves wilt, no good gardener blames the flower. They look at the soil, the light, the water—as well as at what they have done or failed to do themselves.
Organizations are not different. Burnout is not a sign that you have weak people; it’s a sign that your organizational garden may be depleted. If the soil is poor or toxic, even the strongest plants will eventually wither.
A Call To Reframe Burnout
So, perhaps the question for executives is this: When burnout shows up in your organization, do you treat the fever, or do you heal the system?
It might be worth looking at burnout as a warning signal, not an indictment of individual capacity, and as feedback that something in the organizational ecosystem needs attention. If we take that seriously, we can move beyond patching up individuals and start cultivating workplaces where people—and performance—can truly flourish.
There are already examples of systems recognizing this. In Quebec, for instance, burnout is formally recognized as a work-related condition, which shifts the focus from the individual to the workplace. We don’t need to wait for regulation to push us in that direction in Europe or elsewhere: Organizations can start now by treating burnout as feedback about the system, not as personal weakness. That shift alone could change the way we work—and the way we thrive.
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