Let me introduce you. You have worked hard for a decade or two, strategically choosing roles that would escalate your rise through the corporate ranks. Your family supported your efforts and paid the price of your absence. You finally reached the point where you [and your team] are often credited with achieving great results, even achieving annual awards for your efforts. If that sounds like you…then yes, you can congratulate yourself for becoming a star performer. The accolades, and the financial rewards may be the upside, but what about the downside? Let’s just explore that for a moment.

As a star performer, you are expected to continue to perform at your power-level, much more so than other top performers. Why? Because your immediate boss also received accolades for your efforts and he or she wants to maintain that status. So let’s continue to story…

You start suffering symptoms of burnout and stress – loss of energy, unexplained chest pains, irritability, loss of passion and sense of worth. You feel your performance dropping off, so you put in even longer hours to make sure the work still gets done…your boss expects it right! And, if you don’t deliver, they will be constantly on your back 24×7 until you do. You start wondering about your boss’s homelife – they don’t seem to want to have one, and almost seem to be using ‘having to meet with you’, or scheduling a ‘team event’ on the only weekend you and your team have had off in the past two months to avoid being at home themselves.

You feel the stress growing, and make more and more effort to engage in aerobic exercise, just to get the endorphins…and that means even more time away from loved ones. At this point, your job is slowly killing you – mentally and physically.

Once you reach the upper ranks, you have the privilege of mixing with some great C-suite executives from other companies. You are eager to learn from them in any way. However, have probably also more than once wondered how some of the CEO’s you met ever got the job. You are astonished at how under-whelmed you are at their lack of strategic sense and the frustrating inability to make decisions. You know why these types of CEO’s exist in such large numbers…it’s because all the superstar predecessors in their company…the ones like you…are dead!

Burnout is reaching epic proportions – reportedly affecting around 30% of employees. One of the toughest roles is in Sales. In Sales, your performance is directly connected to results – it’s highly visible. You are constantly being tapped to ‘close the deal’, to write up a perfect ‘narrative’, to put together a compelling presentation – all the very skills that got you promoted to the position you are in now. When compensation is tied to direct bottom line results you will often find an inequity across the ranks – you are working your guts out whilst someone in the next cubicle is playing online games and getting the same compensation as part of ‘team performance’ bonuses. There are also superstar teams that all deliver to the max – another testiment to your ability as a leader. However this means that you are being driven both from both the top, and the bottom. You also end up having to drive your team more and more to deliver unrealistic performance, and end up perpetuating the cycle set by your boss.

In a 5-year comparative study[i], 69 percent of Americans surveyed, agreed that there were “similarities between toddlers with too much power and bosses with too much power”.

It is very likely that your boss is offloading their ineptitude onto you – they know it, but are masters at disguising it and making you feel like you are the only one that can deliver what is needed; and that it is your job duty to do so. He or she is probably getting paid twice what you are, and are working at half the effort. They know they have you over a barrel – they know you don’t like conflict, and are too afraid to raise the ‘overwork’ issue with them for fear of being labelled as ‘incapable of performing your role’ and even risking losing your job. And for your part in this dysfunction – you keep delivering. So they believe that you must be able to deliver…and don’t give a second thought to the 3 hours sleep you are getting each night and how you only ever see your children at weekends. Even then it’s a quick walk to the park before you have to catch up on those 680 emails that have accumulated during the week. Your boss may get slight pangs of guilt about loading you up more and more, but they always find a way to justify it to themselves.

Communist leader Karl Marx once said, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”.

Performing your job well in exchange for a pay check [and if you are lucky, personal satisfaction] is a fair exchange of value. Performing beyond your capability just to meet the needs of someone else’s dysfunction, well, that’s just martyrdom. If your boss lacks the capacity to sense that you are stressed and overworked, then they lack empathy…they are psychopathic! And you, my superstar, are enabling that emotional dysfunction by continuing to deliver to their totally unrealistic expectations. And remember, it’s not just you paying the price – its your spouse, your children, your team, and other people that are meaningful in your life. You are trading their lives, and your time with them, for time with a psychopath!  And we get sucked into the naïve hope that if we work hard enough we will be taken care of. Fact – humans are, by and large, concerned first and foremost with themselves, even if they manage to conceal that fact most of the time.

Even if your efforts are being recognised by accolades and awards; those tokens are meaningless when held up against ‘your life’. The greater the difference between your abilities, and the abilities of your boss, the less your boss will admit it to themselves, and use ‘driving you harder’ as compensation for their own failing efforts. Remember the ‘Peters Principle’ where in large corporates there is a tendency for managers to be promoted to their level of incompetence. If you are in this situation described above, it is very likely that your immediate boss is in that very position and is shrouding their lack of ability to their boss, by offloading their incompetence onto you. I have had the pleasure of working alongside some great managers and leaders in my thirty years of consulting, but I have also witnessed the Peter Principle in action this far too often. It’s tough for them to face up to their weaknesses – that’s all part of the low emotional intelligence. To acknowledge their own failings is to shatter their fragile self-image of themselves as holding an important senior management job.

So, in summary, your superstar performance has raised the average output of your team – and in many cases your boss and your team gain more from this effort than you do. Now so far, because of the insidious way that performance expectations and workloads can be slowly elevated bit by bit, we often don’t realise we have reached breaking point, until our body provides us with some very clear messages.

So how do you get off this treadmill and regain control, not just of your job, but your life. I’ll admit right up front, it’s not easy to change your approach to work; and even more difficult to get your boss to literally ‘pull their head in’. However, the good news is that first up you only have one decision to make; and it should be any easy one.

Do you want to live or die in the next 5 years?

Yeah, yeah, I know that sounds dramatic – but if you are showing any symptoms of overwork, especially if you are suffering physical manifestations of stress such as chest pains, anxiety, headaches, difficulty sleeping, gastric issues etc; choosing to keep working as you are, is choosing a very high likelihood of a serious medical event in the next five years, one that you may not survive.

So, enough of the context. Let’s get down to what you can do to fix this. It’s a multi-step process, and some of the steps are difficult.

Step one – admit to yourself that your work life is dysfunctional and that to change your life, you need to change things at work.

If you can do this read on, if not – get back to work, you obviously love it more than life itself.

Step two – know what you are up against.

This requires some serious analysis – mostly of yourself, because the problem isn’t everyone else. I hate to say it, but it’s not even your boss. Any senior manager that is driving their reports to overstress is lacking in management skill – and certainly in emotional intelligence [EQ].  You can’t fix them. So, it’s up to you to look at your own management skills and EQ. It’s easy enough to find yourself in this position [think ‘slow boiled frog’]; but you have to work out why you are letting this situation persist. And, it’s not because “it’s just what is expected if you want to keep your job”, or “all senior executives work this hard”. That’s a very socialistic attitude towards you job.

You need to assess your ‘work identity’. Remember, the first step of EQ is self-awareness. How much of your self-image is tied to your job? Are you able to compartmentalise your life and prioritise different parts of your life at different times – or does your job [and your boss] always take precedence? It’s very natural to let work take a stranglehold on your life – especially if you hold a senior role in a highly reputable company, and are earning good money.

Worrying that you will lose your job or be seen as not able to work hard enough, or smart enough leads to you suffering in silence. You blame yourself for not being able ‘to handle it’. This is short-term thinking and sabotaging your future. There is nothing wrong with being ambitious and wanting to show your commitment, but not being able to maintain your quality of delivery will eventually erode the impression others have of you. This is where self-compassion comes in. You need to cut yourself some slack. In spite of the advancement of ‘machines’; you are human and cannot just run at a consistent pace 24×7. Technology has sped up many of the operational cycles in business – as yet, man has not worked out how to keep pace. In most instances, man is lagging machine – largely through processes that are retained from pre-technology era; and unrealistic expectations. Turning down requests will not make you appear lazy or reflect badly on you. On the contrary, it shows you are capable of managing yourself, and if you cannot manage yourself, you are unlikely to be a good manager of others [resemble someone!]. Yes, of course it feels uncomfortable, but it is the responsible thing to do, and takes away the fear that you will let your team down if you don’t deliver.

This is where a mentor or coach can be helpful in confirming that you indeed have too much to do for one person and provide strategies for overwork. A process consultant can also help streamline processes, identifying upstream constraints and resolving bottlenecks.

Consider how other significant people in your life being affected by your physical or mental absence? How do you approach your relationships, at work and in your personal life? Do you feel you have to continually work harder and harder to win approval at work, and to meet financial goals at home? These are very normal goals. The key is to determine which one has become the most important…..really, really think about this. The answer may be difficult to admit.

Other helpful self-analysis questions to ponder include:

• Do you consider dedication and loyalty to be among your most valued characteristics? How is this being played out at work, and at home?
• Do you hate disappointing others – and will do nearly anything to avoid it, especially if it may lead to conflict or disapproval. This can be a very difficult emotion to deal with, as it is deeply rooted in our formative years.
• How hard is it for you to say no to others? Can you even say no to your boss? I’m not talking about a ‘skirting around the edges’ kind of no. I am talking about a direct No – I can’t do that tonight, I have an important family event to attend.
• How often do you find you later wish you had refused a ‘request’ from your boss? From a family member or friend?
• How comfortable are you with confrontation? Does the mere potential of it make your stomach churn?
• Are you a control freak? Do you believe that only you can do the job that needs to be done, to the standard that you want? Are you struggling to find ways to delegate your workload? Are you the victim of your own success – do you need more headcount?

The answers to these questions are the foundation to the reasons you may be being taken advantage of. And yes, working you to overload point is taking advantage of both your capabilities and your personal traits.

Do you feel you still have something prove at work? For superstars you have already received recognition at work for your results, but what about internally? Maybe you feel you lack the academic qualifications normally required by your company to move to a higher position – is this driving you to overcompensate by working harder to deliver superior results to prove your worth? Are you in competition for a future role with one of your peers? Is the game playing by your boss making you feel like you are constantly not delivering to their expectations? You really need to give this some real thought to work out what is driving you to working the way you are.

Step three – determine if are you willing to change your approach to work?

It’s nearly impossible to change others, but you can change yourself. Regardless of why your boss might be less than ideal, you need to determine the best way to work with them, especially if changing roles isn’t a viable option

Self-mastery is the second phase in EQ maturity. In taking this approach, don’t hold back on being honest when asked to participate in a ‘360 Analysis’ of your boss. However, your main focus is going to be on changing yourself – and that may trigger some very real discomfort deep inside. You are challenging long-held values and behaviours that [if you were honest] you identified above. These keep you on the mouse-wheel, with your boss turning the handle.

Think about it. If you dislike confrontation, hate disappointing others, have a need to constantly succeed and raise the bar, and cannot bring yourself to say a hard ‘no’; then you either have some work to do, or get a job where you are not confronted with these events.

Are you willing to be vulnerable to your team? If you are a superstar, you will likely reach a senior management position in the fastest possible time, and you will hire top people to work with. These are people with which you share a mutual respect. That adds pressure to perform from below to that coming from the top. Recognise that this is your own doing [and a great strategy], but that it does make you feel more vulnerable to limiting your performance going forward. You feel you don’t want to let your team down, or worse, lose their respect. The good thing is that it is an inherent human quality to want to ‘help’ those in need. Sharing your state of overload with your team gives individuals in your team the opportunity to shine – to step forward and help reduce your load. It doesn’t make you weak; on the contrary, it takes courage, and that shows strength. It requires that you not let emotions drive your decisions. If you have a boss that is unwilling to yield pressure on you, this may be your only option. Ideally, work on both fronts to reduce your workload.

So far you have covered off two tiers of EQ, self-awareness and self-mastery. The next two phases focus on others, with social awareness, and social mastery. Social awareness is about understanding social norms, the culture in which we work; and also understanding the beliefs and values that may be driving the attitude and behaviour of your boss.

Step four – understand the culture at work.

The impact of culture can vary across roles. Some companies just don’t have a culture that allows individual performers to stand out or be fairly compensated. Certainly, high performance generally pays off over time, but often your escalation is constrained by cultural ‘norms’ … with little chance of circumventing the commonly trodden path.

For sales roles, and others where results are directly tied to your efforts, and only your efforts provide the greatest challenge for star performers. You are goal driven; you always have been. You love the feeling of achievement, of bettering yourself. You may even be addicted to it. But what is the compensation for such efforts at work? Are indirect performance elements such as ‘time in service’, the ‘tier’ of a role part of the formula? Are salaries capped? Are bonuses capped? Are promotions limited by time of service periods, for example, no more than once every 2 or 3 years?  If you are in Sales, it is often found that management earn less than the members of their sales teams due to lack of exposure to commission bonuses. Is it likely that you are gaining elements of commission and earning more than your boss, causing envy?

Step five – assessing your boss

Even though you may feel there is little you can do to change the behaviour of your boss [and this is a realistic perspective] understanding them, and also their boss, will help you formulate the best approaches to changing the dynamics of the relationship. It’s a similar approach to that which you would have been taught for negotiation, and dealing with conflict. The difference is, that when it involves you personally, your life, our emotions play a much greater role in our decisions and actions [or inaction]. So let’s start with your immediate boss…

• Do you actually like them as a person? What personal attributes in particular, and how do these play out at work?
• Do you find them easy to get along with? Apart from those times when they are making what you feel are unreasonable demands?
• Do they manipulate your work effort – giving you things to do claiming they will only take an hour when they will take 5-8; or making out that only you can do the task?

The answers to these questions will generally provide some signposts as to where you can push back, or some personal characteristics that you can use to reset their expectations or dissuade manipulative behaviour. The end goal is to discourage them from overworking you, and you have to be willing to do what it will take to achieve that goal. You need to teach others how to treat you – and how you respond to their demands on you is the quickest and most effective way to achieve this.

The key is to still give your boss more than they expect, but not the ‘knock it out of the park’ performance that has driven you to the point of overload. Think of it as adding +10% to realistic expectations, without adding more hours. It’s the same economic approach high tech companies take to delivering value to their markets. So set parameters for your own effort – your personal ‘minimum viable product’.

Also take a walk through the same questions in terms of the relationship your boss has with their boss? Is your boss just an agent for unrealistic demands from above, that are simply being offloaded to you?

Step six – take action.

The higher your EQ, the more skilled you are in getting along with others and the better position you are in deal with tough situations like a difficult boss. This is where you get the payoff for all the analytical work you have done above. It’s the social mastery phase of EQ, where armed with a far greater understanding of both yourself and those with whom you seek to influence, you start taking action to changing your work life.

Don’t let your boss steal your mental energy – it is easy to fall into the trap of spending precious energy thinking about how angry you are when your boss nearly ruins a client deal with their power-plays, or how frustrated they make you feel by continually calling you all hours of the day and night. Remember – your stress doesn’t seem to be worrying him or her at all. So, stop wasting energy on things you cannot control, maintain the high road, and start building a strategic roadmap to put into play things you can control. Don’t try to do all of these at once, just master one at a time.

Start with a conversation – knowing what you now know about your boss you can find the right approach, and words, to inform them that you have reached overload point. Rather than pointing to them as an overbearing taskmaster, or incompetent in their own role, find something that gives them an out.

For example, tell them you are dealing with some health issues and that whilst you can still perform your role, you need to back off a bit, and at times take time out for ‘medical reasons’. This gives your boss the ammunition to say to themselves that the problem is because of you, not them. It matters less that they need some way to justify their poor management, than you getting the relief you need.

Another approach is to talk through the company goals and how you feel you can best contribute to meeting those goals. List what you see as the current priorities, and outline those tasks you are currently performing that are preventing you from delivering your best on the most critical tasks. Then, proffer a solution. Identify what tasks can be deleted, diminished or delegated or projects that can be delayed.

If you simply cannot talk directly to your boss, consider talking with an in-house mentor. Rather going in with a ‘complain and blame’ approach, frame the situation from your own perspective. For instance, say “I’m having a difficult time in dealing with X and am looking for some guidance or suggestions as to how to improve the situation.” An in-house mentor will likely already be aware of your bosses personality and provide some constructive options to consider.

Manage your time more effectively – disconnect for family time. Find ways to work around the unwritten ‘rules’ set by your boss. Did you know that a study uncovered that consultants working for major consulting firms cover for each other to avoid working an expected 60-80 hour week? You are not the only one facing this challenge, and you are not the only one seeking ways to work around these expectations. Your boss may set the rules at work, but your life is your game – you set the rules. You determine who you want to play with, when and where. If you can’t find a way to play your game in your current job, then you need to seriously consider some alternatives.

Find your own way to send subtle messages that their behaviour is unacceptable. For example, if your boss is one who continually messages you at 10pm at night and expects meetings at weekends – start bombing them with text messages late and night and early morning – then turn off your phone! Hopefully they will get the hint, if not, it just confirms what a major problem you have.

Stop delivering 200%. Overwork is not sustainable. We covered this earlier with setting a target of no more than 110%. This has the effect of lowering the expectation of others on you. This is extremely difficult for superstars to do – but it is very much part of fine tuning your management skills. Remember – if you cannot manage yourself effectively, you cannot manage others effectively. You will just end up another replica of your boss, and pass your current situation on to someone else. It may mean disappointing someone now and then, but keep your vision focused on the big picture – surviving the next five years.

Learn how to avoid more work without saying “no”. A tactic I have often used when asked to take on another task when I was already overloaded [if you cannot say no], is to simply say yes, and add that you are already overcommitted, so which of your current deliverables would they like you to put aside. If you are unsure whether you can take it on or not, ask them what is expected and then buy yourself some time by saying “let me figure out if I can do it based on the other urgent tasks I have on hand – can I get back to you tomorrow? If you then decide that you cannot take it on yourself, offer to carve out some time to provide direction to someone else to do it.

Stop volunteering or accepting extra ‘projects’ – you have already proven yourself. Focus more on doing a great job of less, than ending up burning out and doing a poor job of more. Every time you add more to your workload you raise the benchmark of what you can deliver. If someone else doesn’t meet their deadline, don’t pick up their work just because you finished ahead of time. This may mean a little subterfuge, and not admitting, or delivering your part of the effort ahead of time. If others are not held accountable for their lack of performance, knowing that you will pick up the slack is not helping them or you.

Pick up a few commonly used phrases in your organisation for why you are unable to deliver to unrealistic expectations – you would have heard a few of these ‘excuses’ over the years. Now start ‘parroting’ them as your quick response phrases. Knowing and practicing what to say in situations of demand help to stop your emotions hijacking your senses, and rewires your previous reactions. You now have ‘responses’; you don’t need emotionally loaded ‘reactions’.

Prepare for the fallout – its all very well talking about changing the expectations of others, but the work still needs to be done, and if its not you – then who. You don’t want to become your boss and overload someone else in your team. This is a tough love situation – you will instinctively know whether this is work that your boss should be doing themselves. Whether you push it back to your boss ‘as being a better candidate for the task’ or delegating it to someone else – they both need to rise to the challenge, just as you had to. This will take a lot of courage, so again, practice the scenario so that you have a couple of canned responses to pre-empt your habitual reactions.

All of these tactics retain your work identity as someone who is committed to the success of the organisation. It is how you frame your response, or refusal, that supports your identity, not whether you take on the work or not.

If you need to take personal time to for example, attend your child’s school event, or to support your spouse in a medical procedure – be upfront about it. Again, use framing to make it situational and time-bound. A good boss will appreciate your honesty, even if they don’t have the empathy to understand your need to attend to this personal matter.

Workforce planning is the one of the most important considerations in running an efficient business. If your boss is not effective in this skill, it is you that needs to take the initiative and upskill your own capability in this area – starting with yourself.

The process above is not a quick fix – but it is an essential one. Resetting expectations and realigning relationships takes time – even a year or more. But like most things in life, it is not the end goal that ends up being the triumph, but what you learn and experience along the way – how you grow as a person, and as a leader.

You will experience many ‘aha’ moments along the way, and the small personal triumphs of overcoming resistance to say no, help build a stronger sense of self-awareness and self-control. You will also find that your source of validation moves from external sources to internal – and that in itself is a major milestone and achievement. What’s more, you validate others by affording them more time and focused attention. You no longer see sitting on the couch watching a movie with your children whilst doing emails as ‘spending quality time’ with your family.

Your world is bigger than your job. And your world needs you – alive.

[i] Conducted by Lynn Taylor Consulting