The Breaking Point

Burnout rarely announces itself. It arrives through behavioral drift — the vocal person who goes quiet, the meticulous analyst who starts making errors, the reliable contributor who stops volunteering. Managers who wait for explicit complaints will almost always wait too long, because burned-out employees routinely self-report as fine. Recognizing the gap between what someone says and what their behavior signals is one of the most consequential management skills, and one of the least trained.