FRIED. The Burnout Podcast

Your workplace might not be toxic. It might just be missing the biology lesson that explains why everyone keeps behaving badly.

Work burnout is rarely one person's failure, and this conversation makes that case clearly. Occupational psychologist and Truth, Lies, and Work co-host Leanne Elliott joins Cait to untangle what actually makes a toxic work environment, and what we keep getting wrong when we try to fix it. Before culture initiatives and values workshops, there are psychosocial risk factors: the concrete, measurable conditions that quietly drive stress and erode workplace culture and wellbeing. Cait pushes back from the body, pointing out that biology can make a bonded team reject a new hire without anyone realizing it, and that childhood trauma can permanently rewire how someone reads neutral feedback. Leanne doesn't argue. She acknowledges the limits of what organizational psychology can change and makes the case for cross-disciplinary collaboration as the only honest path forward.

One of the more useful reframes here is the difference between a toxic work environment and a bad fit. Real toxicity is behavioral. Workplace incivility rarely looks like explosive conflict. It looks like withheld information and subtle undermining that compounds quietly until mental health and psychological safety have eroded completely. Frequency is what turns friction into toxicity, and self awareness is what makes it possible to catch before it spreads.

The conversation gets pointed on manager training and workplace burnout. Managers have the single largest documented impact on employee health and performance, receive almost no formal training, and remain the first target when things go wrong. Work burnout and employee behavior are treated as individual failures rather than systemic ones, and that framing lets organizations off the hook. The future of work depends on whether organizations are willing to teach pro-social skills to everyone from day one, not just the people who end up with direct reports. That's not a small idea. It just hasn't been treated like one.

Episode Breakdown:
00:00 Introduction: Building a Top Global Business Podcast
06:02 The Role of Occupational Psychology in Workplace Wellbeing
11:52 Psychosocial Risk Factors and Organizational Culture
17:59 Toxic Work Environment or Bad Fit? How to Tell the Difference
24:07 What Workplace Incivility Actually Looks Like
36:48 Manager Training, Burnout, and Who Carries the Burden
45:00 Self-Awareness at Work and the Power of Feedback

Connect with Leanne Elliott: 
https://oblonghq.com/
https://truthliesandwork.com/
https://www.instagram.com/truthlieswork/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/meetleanne/

Connect with Cait:
Cait Donovan is a keynote speaker, author, and host of FRIED: The Burnout Podcast, specializing in burnout, mismatch, and sustainable performance at work. She partners with corporate leaders, teams, and professional associations through keynotes, workshops, and leadership sessions that treat burnout as data, not failure, to help organizations reduce burnout without blame or shame and build healthier, high performing cultures.
To bring Cait to your organization or event, book an inquiry call here: https://bit.ly/bookcait
Learn more about Cait’s speaking work: https://www.caitdonovan.com/speaking
Short on time? Watch this 3-min video: https://bit.ly/caitdreel2025

Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

If you're a leader who's exhausted, this one's for you. Cait Donovan, host of FRIED: The Burnout Podcast has spent over a decade coaching leaders through burnout — and the pattern is clear: expectations have skyrocketed, but support hasn't followed. In this episode, she draws on real stories, her upcoming book *The Match Move*, and 10+ years of field research to break down exactly what belongs on a leader's plate and what doesn't.
Key Topics Covered
- Why leaders are burning out at unprecedented rates and why it's not their fault
- The growing gap between what leaders are expected to be and what they're actually supported to do
- Why burnout and stress are biologically contagious and what it means when leaders hit their limit
- A real story about a manager who said "no" and changed an employee's entire understanding of leadership
- The four things leaders ARE genuinely responsible for: workload, clarity, resources, and culture
- The things leaders are NOT responsible for: being a therapist, life coach, nutritionist, or sleep consultant
- The "match/mismatch" framework from the upcoming book *The Match Move*
- Why working on your own alignment isn't selfish, it's true leadership

If you're in a leadership role and you're running on empty, this episode is your permission to stop carrying what was never yours to carry. Host of FRIED: The Burnout Podcast has worked with over 60 companies — Fortune 500s, nonprofits, startups — and coached hundreds of leaders and teams through burnout. In almost 350 episodes, one pattern has emerged above all others: we are asking leaders to do the impossible, and then wondering why they're breaking.

In this episode, she maps out the dangerous gap between rising leadership expectations and stagnant organizational support — and explains why that gap is the single biggest driver of leader burnout today. You'll learn exactly which responsibilities belong to leaders and which don't, hear a powerful real-world story about a manager who modeled healthy boundaries, and be introduced to the "match/mismatch" framework from her upcoming book, *The Match Move*.

Whether you're a senior executive or a first-time manager, this episode will change how you think about leadership, capacity, and burnout culture.

If you could use this type of support for your leaders, book a call with Cait today:
https://caitdonovan.as.me/inquiry

Cait is available for keynotes, leadership retreats, offsites, nonprofit conferences, workshops, ongoing advisory work and more.

Workplace burnout makes a lot more sense when you stop blaming generations for the survival strategies they were trained to carry.

Kristin Scroggin, founder of genWHY Communications and a leading voice on generational communication in the workplace, joins Cait for a candid conversation about workplace burnout, generational conflict, and what happens when the career you worked so hard to build starts taking more than it gives back.

This conversation gets to the uncomfortable heart of burnout at work: success can look impressive from the outside and still feel impossible to sustain from the inside. Kristin’s story shows how resentment, exhaustion, decision fatigue, and disconnection can become burnout symptoms long before someone is willing to name what is happening. What changes when resentment becomes information instead of shame? What becomes possible when you stop treating capacity like a personal failure?

Cait and Kristin also look at workplace burnout through the larger forces shaping today’s teams. Generational conflict, employee burnout, leadership burnout, and workplace culture are all tied to the same bigger question: are we building work systems that people can actually survive?

With Kristin’s humor and research as the guide, this episode challenges leaders to think differently about Gen X burnout, millennial managers, Gen Z in the workplace, and the future of work. The real leadership reset starts when organizations stop asking why people are disengaged and start paying attention to what their behavior is trying to tell them.

Episode Breakdown:
00:00 Generational Conflict in the Workplace
03:05 Burned Out at Work: Kristin’s Breaking Point
06:04 The Burnout and Resentment Journal
11:51 When Success Turns Into Burnout
21:07 Why Different Generations Clash at Work
32:24 Leadership Burnout and People Manager Burnout
40:06 The Leadership Pipeline Crisis Ahead

Connect with Kristin Scroggin:
http://www.genwhy.com
http://www.instagram.com/genwhycommunications
http://www.linkedin.com/kristinscroggin
https://share.google/zdHigxST7Ltqwrc4Z
 
Connect with Cait:
https://caitdonovan.com/resentment-journal 

Cait Donovan is a keynote speaker, author, and host of FRIED: The Burnout Podcast, specializing in burnout, mismatch, and sustainable performance at work. She partners with corporate leaders, teams, and professional associations through keynotes, workshops, and leadership sessions that treat burnout as data, not failure, to help organizations reduce burnout without blame or shame and build healthier, high performing cultures.
 
To bring Cait to your organization or event, book an inquiry call here: https://bit.ly/bookcait
Learn more about Cait’s speaking work: https://www.caitdonovan.com/speaking
Short on time? Watch this 3-min video: https://bit.ly/caitdreel2025

Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

Autonomy can be the silent mismatch that drains a team long before anyone names burnout.

Leadership and autonomy are often treated as simple: give people more freedom and they will do better work. Cait Donovan offers a more useful frame. Autonomy works when it matches the person, the role, and the responsibility in front of them. When there is an autonomy mismatch at work, the result can look like poor performance, low employee engagement, or workplace stress that has gone unnamed for too long.

This episode looks at autonomy and burnout through three practical lenses: time autonomy in the workplace, decision-making autonomy in leadership, and process autonomy at work. Does someone need more control over their schedule? Are they ready to make bigger decisions and carry the accountability that comes with them? Do they need clearer systems, or do rigid processes make their work harder?

Cait makes the case that employee autonomy needs are not the same from person to person. For leaders, the work is to notice the difference before autonomy and workplace stress start to affect trust, energy, and team performance. What would change if leaders treated autonomy as a matching conversation instead of a perk?

Episode Breakdown:
03:12 Types of Autonomy: Time, Decision-Making, and Process
05:55 The Importance of Matching Autonomy Needs
09:11 Reducing Friction and Chronic Stress in Workplaces

Connect with Cait:
Cait Donovan is a keynote speaker, author, and host of FRIED: The Burnout Podcast, specializing in burnout, mismatch, and sustainable performance at work. She partners with corporate leaders, teams, and professional associations through keynotes, workshops, and leadership sessions that treat burnout as data, not failure, to help organizations reduce burnout without blame or shame and build healthier, high performing cultures.
 
To bring Cait to your organization or event, book an inquiry call here: https://bit.ly/bookcait
Learn more about Cait’s speaking work: https://www.caitdonovan.com/speaking
Short on time? Watch this 3-min video: https://bit.ly/caitdreel2025

Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

Portfolio careers may be one of the smartest paths to financial stability in the future of work. In this episode, Cait Donovan talks with Ilana Golan about why the old career model feels less secure than it once did and why more people are questioning the idea that one company or one title can carry their whole professional identity. As the future of work keeps shifting, this conversation offers a grounded look at what it takes to build resilience, authority, and choice.

Cait and Ilana unpack the deeper tension underneath career change, especially for people facing workplace burnout. What happens when the role that once defined you starts to drain you? How do you rebuild when your energy is low and your sense of possibility has narrowed? They explore how portfolio careers can create more flexibility, more confidence, and a stronger foundation for long-term stability.

This episode also looks at identity, reinvention, and the value of small experiments that help you test what fits before you make a major leap. Cait and Ilana talk about community, adaptability, and why building your own economy may be one of the most practical responses to the future of work. If you have felt stuck, overextended, or unsure what comes next, this conversation offers a fresh and realistic way to think about career growth, burnout recovery, and what becomes possible when you stop treating your work life as a single-track path.

Episode Breakdown:
00:00 Portfolio Careers and the Future of Work
06:11 Barriers to Portfolio Careers and Burnout Recovery
20:13 Career Resilience, Adaptability, and Financial Stability
25:54 How to Create Your Own Economy
37:05 Career Experiments, Uncertainty, and Reinvention
49:04 How to Build a Portfolio Career That Fits Your Life

Links
http://www.leapacademy.com/cait 
Follow Ilana on Instagram 
Connect with Ilana on LinkedIn 

Connect with Cait:
Cait Donovan is a keynote speaker, author, and host of FRIED: The Burnout Podcast, specializing in burnout, mismatch, and sustainable performance at work. She partners with corporate leaders, teams, and professional associations through keynotes, workshops, and leadership sessions that treat burnout as data, not failure, to help organizations reduce burnout without blame or shame and build healthier, high performing cultures.

To bring Cait to your organization or event, book an inquiry call here: https://bit.ly/bookcait
Learn more about Cait’s speaking work: https://www.caitdonovan.com/speaking
Short on time? Watch this 3-min video: https://bit.ly/caitdreel2025

Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm