I started in the film industry as an SFX artist and onset illustrator. The work was physical, immediate, and relentless. Fourteen-hour shoot days, overnight setups, props that had to be camera-ready before the crew arrived whether you'd slept or not. I loved it. And I was good at it. But I didn't yet understand the difference between being dedicated and being depleted.

Over 20+ years, my career evolved from onset into visual effects post-production. These days, I've taken that experience and started working directly with directors and showrunners as an Executive Producer and Operations Director, helping guide projects from early development through delivery. The work changed. Drafting blueprints, call sheets, prosthetics and film sets became pipelines, render farms and Flow dashboards. But the intensity didn't change. It just became less visible, and in some ways, harder to manage because of that.

Over the course of that journey, burnout found me three times. None of it happened because I stopped being good at what I do. I was working inside systems that weren't built to sustain the people running them. It just took me a while to see that clearly.

The first time, early in my career, I mistook adrenaline for stamina. I said yes to everything, worked through every gap, and wore the exhaustion like proof that I belonged. The second time, managing teams... it was different. I was carrying responsibility without matching authority, staying connected through nights and weekends to keep shots moving because the decision-making structure above me couldn't give me clarity during the day. The third time was the most invisible and the hardest to name. The weight of making calls that affected people's careers and livelihoods, sometimes in ways that didn't sit right with my own values, without a trusted space to process any of it.

Each experience taught me something I couldn't have learned any other way. And each one redefined how I lead.

What I came to understand is that burnout, in most cases, isn't a failure of the individual. It's a signal that something in the system needs to be redesigned. The workflows, the decision structures, the way pressure is distributed. The most talented, committed people are often the first to burn out, precisely because they'll keep absorbing what the system won't contain.

"It's not the work that's breaking people. It's the friction surrounding it."

This isn't just my experience. The data tells the same story at a much larger scale.

Eagle Hill Consulting's 2025 Workforce Burnout Survey found that 55% of U.S. workers are experiencing burnout, and that it's directly affecting performance, retention, and organizational outcomes. Their framing was clear, burnout isn't just an employee wellbeing issue. It's a business performance issue.

Deloitte's 2025 Workforce Intelligence Report identified a shift that matched with everything I've seen on the ground. Mental fatigue, cognitive strain, and what they termed "decision friction" have now overtaken workload volume as the leading indicators of burnout. It's not the amount of work that's breaking people. It's the friction surrounding it. Unclear ownership, constant context-switching, decisions that stall or get revisited without resolution.

And Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace report revealed that global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, the lowest since 2020. The most significant driver? A historic decline in manager engagement, from 27% to 22% in a single year. The people organizations rely on most to hold teams together are the ones under the greatest strain.

These findings reinforce a principle I've built my leadership around. If your most capable people are exhausted, the problem is rarely effort. It's architecture.

Burnout Shows Up Differently Depending On Where Someone Sits

One of the most useful frameworks I've encountered recently comes from Daisy Auger-Domínguez, a Chief People Officer and author, writing in Harvard Business Review. Her argument is that burnout is shaped less by workload and more by where someone sits in the organization, how much clarity they have, how much control they lack, and whether their values align with what they're being asked to do.

That lines up precisely to what I've observed leading post-production teams, and what I've experienced personally at nearly every stage she describes.

Early in people's careers, burnout often looks like disorientation rather than exhaustion. I've watched junior artists and coordinators spend enormous energy trying to decode what "good" looks like. Reading tone in messages, interpreting vague or contradictory feedback, trying to figure out who actually has final say. When direction shifts without explanation, they don't push back. They just rework everything, because that feels safest. Their output still looks fine, but their confidence doesn't. One of the things I've learned to prioritize as a leader is making expectations clear before people have to guess, and creating an environment where asking questions is treated as a sign of engagement rather than a problem.

At the mid-level, the experience shifts to what I think of as compression. Leads, supervisors, and producers absorb pressure from above while protecting their teams below. They're translating creative intent they may not fully agree with, defending schedules they didn't build, and improvising in real time because the original scope didn't account for reality. They log on Sunday nights not out of poor boundaries, but because it's the only quiet window before Monday hits. The OECD's 2025 Skills Outlook found that nearly 30% of roles in advanced economies are now structurally mismatched with how digital-era work actually moves. When I see a mid-level lead burning out, I've learned to look at the structure around them before I look at them.

At the senior level, burnout becomes harder to pinpoint. Auger-Domínguez calls it moral injury, the cumulative weight of decisions that affect people's livelihoods, sometimes in ways that conflict with your own values. Approving overtime on a project you know is under-resourced. Letting someone go after they gave everything they had. I've been in those situations. The composure is real, but so is the cost. What I've learned at this level is that isolation compounds everything. Building trusted spaces, whether that's peer forums, advisors, or even just one honest relationship with another leader, isn't a luxury. It's infrastructure.

And for founders, burnout can turn existential. I can speak to this personally. As a founder of a startup currently in stealth and co-founder of The VFX Mentor (which is currently going through its rebranding and restructuring), I know what it feels like when the organization and the person become indistinguishable. Stepping back feels like abandonment. Rest doesn't feel like recovery. Instead, it feels like betrayal. I've had to learn, and I'm still learning, that the organizations that endure are the ones where the mission can survive without any single person's nervous system holding it together.

The Questions I've Learned To Ask

Over the years, I've developed a practice, a set of questions I return to whenever I sense a team is starting to fray. These aren't performance questions. They're design questions.

What is consuming more energy than its impact justifies? Every show has work that persists out of habit, not necessity. The daily meetings that could have been an email. The approval chain that adds two days but not one pixel of value. The internal review before the internal review. Identifying and removing this kind of friction is an operational discipline, and one of the most direct ways I've found to protect my teams.

Which decision keeps getting delayed, and who actually has authority to make it? In my experience, more burnout comes from decision ambiguity than from decision volume. When nobody knows who owns a creative call, whether it's the client, the supervisor, or the director, everyone holds, and artists rework shots that should have been locked. Clarifying decision rights is one of the highest-leverage moves a leader can make.

Where has availability become a stand-in for performance? The film industry has long celebrated the all-nighter, the weekend warrior, the artist still at their desk at midnight. I've been that person. And I've managed those people. What I've learned is that without guardrails, flexibility becomes constant availability, and personal time becomes overflow capacity. The most disciplined and committed people burn out first, because they keep absorbing what the pipeline won't contain.

What work are we continuing out of habit rather than necessity? VFX productions are prone to scope creep, not just in shot counts, but in process. Every legacy workflow, every "we've always done it this way" is potential burnout fuel if nobody is evaluating whether it still serves the work.

What I've Found Actually Works!

After burning out three times and leading teams through dozens of productions, I've stopped believing in silver bullets. There's no single fix. But there are patterns I keep coming back to because they consistently make a difference.

The biggest one is simplicity. When I started limiting active priorities to three or fewer at a time, something changed. People stopped guessing and started executing. It sounds almost too basic, but in practice, most teams are drowning in competing priorities that nobody has explicitly ranked. The moment you call out what matters most and, just as importantly, what doesn't matter right now, you give people back their focus.

Decision clarity is the other thing I've seen change teams almost overnight. Early in my career I didn't think much about who owns a decision versus who gives input versus who executes. Now I write it down for every project. The amount of rework, blown schedules, and the frustration that comes from unclear ownership is staggering, and it's almost always preventable.

I've also gotten more deliberate about building recovery into how we work, not as a perk, but as part of the operating rhythm. No-meeting blocks and pacing decisions so they don't all land at once. I used to think this was soft. Now I see it as one of the most disciplined things a production leader can do. The teams I've led this way deliver better work and stay engaged longer.

And maybe the hardest lesson... I had to stop rewarding endurance. For years I unconsciously valued the person who stayed latest, responded fastest, never said no. I've learned that what looks like commitment is often just a system that's failing to contain its own demands. These days I pay more attention to clarity of thinking and quality of outcomes than to hours logged. And I've tried to be more intentional about noticing who carries the emotional weight on a team, the person managing morale, absorbing conflict, reading the room so everyone else doesn't have to. That work is real, it's usually invisible, and it falls disproportionately on a few people. Making it visible and shared has been one of the most meaningful changes I've made as a leader.

What This Comes Down To

Gallup estimates that disengaged employees cost the global economy $10 trillion annually. The organizations that will sustain high performance aren't the ones adding wellness perks on top of broken systems. They're the ones willing to look honestly at how work moves, from priority-setting to decision-making to recovery, and redesign what isn't working.

Every time I burned out, the lesson was the same. The problem wasn't my commitment. It was the architecture around me. And every time I came back, I led differently, with clearer systems, better questions, and more respect for what it actually takes to sustain great work over time.

If you lead a team and your people are exhausted despite being talented and deeply committed, I'd gently offer this... the answer probably isn't another resilience or well-being workshop. It's an honest look at how the work is structured, who carries what, and where the system is quietly asking people to absorb what it won't fix.

Burnout doesn't start with the person. It starts with the system they're inside. And the sign of a good leader isn't enduring a broken system longer than everyone else. It's having the clarity and the courage to redesign it.

What's one thing about how your work is structured that you'd redesign if it were up to you?

#Leadership #BurnoutPrevention #SystemsThinking #FutureOfWork #OrganizationalDesign #PostProduction