The Aetiology of Burnout

CIOs are very vulnerable to stress. The systems they work with are prey to hackers, viruses and programming bugs and can crash for myriad reasons, all of which contribute to their lack of perceived control. Corporate officers above the CIO often don't understand the systems the CIO controls, so they may do things out of ignorance that do major damage. This lack of control causes countless symptoms (from hair loss to impotence), but the most common are irritability, poor concentration and a general sense of malaise.

Christina Maslach, a pioneer researcher on burnout, claims that burnout derives from a disconnect between what people are and what they do. To her, there is a spiritual underpinning to burnout: It represents a deterioration in values, dignity, spirit and will - what she calls "an erosion of the human soul" - that occurs when our careers cause us to feel chronically exhausted, cynical, detached from work and increasingly ineffective.

Unlike the person experiencing stress, the person suffering burnout is not anxious but, rather, detached - from work and from his colleagues. You're suffering burnout when you're "going through the motions". My burned-out clients, all C-level executives, tell me: "I'm in it only for the money." The other signs of burnout are watching the clock, being passive-aggressive to higher authorities, or fantasizing an escape from work that involves seeing the company suffer when you're gone. ("We never appreciated Jones's contribution until . . . ")

The CIO is a prime candidate for the generic form of burnout not because he has protracted emotional demands but because the efforts he expends are not fully valued or appreciated. In effect, the CIO can grow alienated because his contributions go unnoticed. When you have to tell your superiors what those contributions are, the resultant praise (if it comes) loses much of its value. Praise is a funny thing; when you solicit it, it's worthless. The CIO who has to explain what he's done is often in the position of bringing pearls to swine and wondering: "Do I belong here?" That's disheartening, demoralizing and a precursor to burnout.

The other reason CIOs are vulnerable to burnout is that because the corporation is now completely dependent on the technology the CIO provides, he must oversee ever more extensive and complex networks and systems. The responsibility for developing a company's IT architecture and integrating new technologies is the CIO's, yet many companies claim to want their CIO to also be a strategic thinker involved in business plans and projections. Far too often this message is not consistent: Although they're put on corporate leadership teams and told to maintain a strong position there, in the event of a technological snafu, CIOs are returned to their technical role and expected to serve a support function.

The problem boils down to the fact that a CIO may actually do four jobs: strategic planning, IT planning (such as creating architecture), IT oversight and supervision of IT operations. It's an ambiguous life and one fraught with anxiety (the dominant symptom of not working with clear expectations). Thus, I would wager that most CIOs suffer burnout more than stress. Although the workload is enormous (stressful), they never know when those they are trying to please will be pleased (leading to burnout).