27: GitHub’s Anjuan Simmons on Helping Yourself and Others Through Burnout
We’re more aware of burnout than ever before, but are we looking out for leaders as much as our teams?
As GitHub’s Anjuan Simmons can attest, burnout is an equal opportunity force, which affects teams, managers, VPs and CEOs alike.
His advice on spotting and dealing with burnout within yourself and your team is absolutely inspired, and makes for an incredibly powerful episode of Leaders Unscripted.
This Episode Covers:
- How Star Trek influenced Anjuan’s career
- Spotting the signs of burnout, and how it happens
- Leaders’ experiences with burnout
- The art of ‘self-arresting’
- How to build burnout-resilience
- Using human relationships to work through periods of stress
- Recognising signs of your team burning out
Episode Highlights:
“Often when you force engineers to become managers - this doesn't happen every time, but all too often, you lose really good engineers, because people management is hard.” - 7:30 - Anjuan Simmons
“Anything that is always on, will fail.” - 10:35 - Suzan Bond / Anjuan Simmons
“With burnout you don’t see the degradation of your performance. You need people who know what normal-you is like, to call out to you when you’re not normal-you.” - 25:55 - Anjuan Simmons
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. I needed a long term view of my success, which meant investing in relationships.” - 29:50 - Anjuan Simmons
“What often happens is that you let everyone down by trying to make sure that you don’t let anyone down.” - 37:15 - Anjuan Simmons
“People like being managed by humans. It’s okay for you to be human at work, and if you’re a human at work, then you’re modelling that everyone else can be human too.” - 44:10 - Anjuan Simmons
Links & References:
Constellary: https://www.constellaryhq.com/
Suzan Bond: https://www.linkedin.com/in/suzanbond/
Anjuan Simmons website: https://anjuansimmons.com/
Anjuan Simmons LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anjuan/