Beyond KPIs: Building Teams That Perform and Endure

Deepa had not taken a single day of leave in eleven months. 

As the operations head for a mid-size logistics company, she had become the person every problem eventually found its way to. A supplier delay. A client escalation. A team member walking out the door at precisely the moment she had no capacity left to handle it. She answered emails at 11pm because that felt easier than facing a backlog the next morning. She told herself this was simply what leadership required. 

By month nine, she had started forgetting small things. Names of vendors she had worked with for years. Deadlines she had set herself. She put it down to being busy. By month eleven, she sat in her car in the office car park for twenty minutes before a routine team meeting, unable to summon the energy to walk inside. Deepa was not lazy, disengaged, or poorly suited to her role. She was burnt out, and like most managers in that position, she was the last person to recognise it.   

The Scale of the Problem 

Deepa’s story is not unusual. It is, in fact, the norm in a worrying number of organisations. According to Gallup, 76 per cent of employees experience burnout at work at least sometimes, with 28 per cent reporting that they feel burnt out very often or always. Managers, who carry both their own workload and the emotional weight of their teams, are particularly vulnerable.   

Workplace burnout is no longer a fringe concern. It sits at the centre of conversations about people management, organisational performance, and long-term business sustainability. 

McKinsey’s research adds a further dimension worth sitting with.

Their global survey found that leaders consistently underestimate how burnt out their teams are, often by a significant margin, because the visible signs of burnout are easy to mistake for ordinary fatigue or a difficult quarter.   

For organisations investing in leadership development and manager effectiveness, this gap between perception and reality is one of the most consequential blind spots to address. 

For senior leaders and HR professionals, this is not simply a wellbeing issue. It is a performance and retention issue with measurable financial consequences.   

Why Managers Are Particularly at Risk 

Managers occupy a uniquely demanding position. They are accountable for results, yet have limited control over many of the factors that determine those results. They are expected to support their teams’ wellbeing while frequently neglecting their own. And in many organizational cultures, asking for support is quietly read as a sign of weakness rather than self-awareness.   

This combination creates a slow, sustained pressure that rarely announces itself as a crisis. It accumulates instead, the way Deepa’s did, until a manager finds themselves unable to do the very job they have spent years excelling at.   

What Genuinely Helps  

Preventing burnout while maintaining performance is not about working less and hoping output holds steady. It requires a different approach entirely. 

The organisations that get this right treat managerial resilience not as a personal virtue but as an organisational capability, one that can be built, supported, and sustained through structured intervention. 

Build recovery into the system, not just the calendar.

A single day of leave does little if a manager returns to the same unsustainable workload. Genuine recovery requires structural changes: redistributed responsibilities, protected time, and a culture that does not quietly penalise managers for stepping back.   

Normalise the conversation before the crisis.

Most organisations only discuss burnout after someone has already reached Deepa’s car park moment. Senior leaders who openly acknowledge their own capacity limits give their teams permission to do the same, considerably earlier.   

Separate urgency from importance.

A significant driver of managerial burnout is the inability to distinguish between what genuinely requires immediate attention and what merely feels urgent because of habit or anxiety. This is a learnable skill, not a personality trait.   

Invest in peer support structures.

Gallup’s research consistently shows that employees who have a best friend at work are significantly more engaged, more productive, and less likely to report burnout. This is one of Gallup’s most replicated findings across decades of research.  Isolation, not workload alone, is often the deciding factor. 

What This Means for Organisations 

Deepa eventually spoke to her own manager, who connected her with a structured leadership coaching programme. It did not reduce her responsibilities overnight. What it did was give her language for what she was experiencing, practical frameworks for managing her own capacity, and the confidence to model healthier boundaries for her team.   

Six months later, her team’s engagement scores had improved. So had hers.   

Her story is a reminder that burnout prevention and high performance can go hand in hand. With the right investment in leadership development, organisations can achieve both. 

At Concordia Solutions, we work with senior managers and HR leaders to build exactly this kind of capability, not as an afterthought to performance development, but as a core component of it. Because a manager who understands how to protect their own sustainability is, almost without exception, a manager who leads their team more effectively. 

Whether you are an HR leader looking to strengthen your organisation's approach to manager wellbeing, or a senior leader who recognises the signs of burnout in your own team, the right support can significantly change the trajectory. 

Concordia Solutions partners with organisations to build leadership capability that sustains both performance and wellbeing.

To explore how we can support your senior managers, we welcome a 20-minute conversation. You can book a slot that works for you here – 

Bookings | Concordia  

We are committed to enabling human potential to reach its highest level. 

Sources referenced:  

Reference 1: Employee Burnout, Part 1: The 5 Main Causes  

Reference 2: Addressing employee burnout: Are you solving the right problem? | McKinsey 

Reference 3: The Increasing Importance of a Best Friend at Work