Positioning is Power: The Keys to Owning Your Influence in the Workplace
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Why Burnout Is the Conversation We Need to Have About the Future of Work
The digital age is rapidly unfolding and blurring the lines between personal and professionalism. Everything is driven by AI or hybrid models and promotes an always-on culture. The one topic that consistently gets sidelined in strategic conversations is burnout.
More than 70% of the workforce admits feeling it as outlined in DDI’s Global Leadership Forecast from 2023 and in 2025. Burnout ranks higher on a business's challenges list than employee retention. Let’s think about that for a second. There’s been a mass amount of layoffs since 2021 and burnout beats that.
We’re not just the kind that leads to exhaustion or frustration, this burnout is the deeper kind that signals unsustainable systems, blurred boundaries, and outdated definitions of productivity.
On June 18, I’ll be speaking in Pittsburgh on exactly this in a workshop for The Pittsburgh Promise. The theme?
Positioning is Power: The Keys to Owning Your Influence in the Workplace
Because here’s the truth:
If we’re not designing our careers at a personal level to sustain and protect our performance then we are contributing to the problem.
Why Burnout Is a Future-of-Work Issue
Burnout isn’t just a personal failure to "manage stress." It’s often the result of systemic misalignment:
Workloads that reward over-functioning
Leadership models that glorify urgency
Cultures where rest is stigmatized and silence is normalized
And as automation takes over repetitive tasks, the work left to humans will require more creativity, empathy, and deep thinking—not less. That can’t happen in environments where people are running on fumes.
What the Future Demands
In the rooms I work in—startups, corporate teams, executive leadership—there’s growing awareness that the future of work isn’t about doing more. It’s about doing what matters better and more sustainably.
That means:
✅ Building emotional sustainability into business strategy
✅ Redefining productivity metrics to account for energy, not just output
✅ Investing in capacity—not just performance
If You're in the Room, You're a Culture Shaper
The people who join this conversation on June 18 won’t just walk away with tips on avoiding burnout. They’ll walk away with a new lens for building—one that aligns performance with well-being, growth with groundedness, and ambition with longevity.
Because the future of work will reward those who can go the distance. And distance requires design.
If you’ll be in Pittsburgh, I hope you’ll join us. RSVP here
