The Demand

Before you write off your next departure as burnout, you answer five questions about your own leadership. If you use the word “burnout” instead of running the diagnosis, you clear your own account without doing the work, and the same failure produces the next exit on schedule.

The Work

Run the five-question diagnosis this week on your most recent departure, and again on anyone currently showing early exit signals.

  1. Did you micromanage them? Check whether you were in their decisions before they had a chance to make them.
  2. Did you give them authority equal to the accountability you held them to? If not, you assigned blame, not accountability.
  3. Did you build systems that made the work sustainable, or did they inherit tribal knowledge held together by the last person who left?
  4. Did you evaluate by output, or did you hover? Count the check-ins that were really audits.
  5. Did you hire them into a domain you don’t understand and hold them accountable when it broke?

This week, write the honest diagnosis for your most recent departure using these five questions, and identify one system or authority gap you will fix before the next hire walks into the same trap.