Welcome to The New Ambition - This is Going to Take All Of Us

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"I've been noticing something’s wrong."

It’s wonderful that this leader was fully supportive of their team member taking time to recharge. But here's what struck me immediately when I heard that sentence: they’d been seeing the warning signs and said nothing. And I’d wager the reason wasn’t because they didn't care, but that they didn’t know how to bring it up.

This is the default we're living in. Good managers see their people struggling but don’t ask “how can I support you?”. High performers burn themselves out while their leaders watch from the sidelines.

The research backs this up. Gallup's 2025 State of the Global Workplace report shows that manager engagement declined significantly year over year, with managers experiencing the sharpest drop in well-being. Gallup believes we’re caught in the middle, managing more and changing executive expectations, while navigating the pressure of leading (and protecting) teams through increasing - let’s call it - uncertainty.

There's clearly a gap between what people need and what they're getting. And leaders are flaming out in the middle.

I’d also wager that most of us can see the problem; hell, 66% of us report we’re feeling some level of burnout, but we’re less confident in how to address it. So people are breaking. The cost? Teams that operate in constant low-level stress, leaders who feel helpless, and talented high achievers are burning out because they don't know how to ask for help, and their leaders don’t know how to talk about what they’re seeing.

Dr. Amy Edmondson, the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, has spent decades researching psychological safety. Her work finds that teams perform best when people feel safe to voice concerns early. In her recent Harvard Business Review article "What People Get Wrong About Psychological Safety," she emphasizes that psychological safety isn't about being comfortable—it's about being real.

Too many of our workplace conversations happen too late—after the crisis, after the breakdown, after someone amazing quits.

Ambition

Here's what I shared with that exec, and the room full of event leaders here at edUcon: Psychological safety isn't one-directional. Managing up is an act of leadership. We have an opportunity to encourage our leader to adopt a “see something, say something” approach by letting them know it’s support we’d welcome.

The new ambition is building safety from every direction—creating systems that support people before they break, where conversations happen before crises, and where asking for support is valued as a strategic collaboration.

Imagine workplaces where team members actively manage up about their sustainable success. Where saying "this is unsustainable" is as normal as saying "I need more budget for this project." Where managers and our team members collaborate on make-sense solutions before crisis management is even needed.

It’s not just about reducing burnout rates, it's about improving work outcomes. When we address stress before it becomes distress, we can potentially recalibrate before there’s a crash. And an important added benefit, we all lead healthier lives.

Everyone wins. Teams are more engaged, managers are more effective, and we give our colleagues what they want as much as a paycheck - human support. Wellhub's 2025 research shows that 88% of employees say wellbeing support is as important as their salary.

GO|DO

The Anti-Burnout Conversation (ABC) is a framework I originally developed to help guide healthy (but potentially uncomfortable) conversations. Originally, I’d thought of it as a tool for leaders to bring into their 1:1s as a structure for healthy “safe-space” conversations on wellness with our team members. Then I realized, it works as a tool to help us manage up, too. Here's how to use the ABC framework to manage up for your own sustainability:

ACKNOWLEDGE the reality upward: "I want to give you visibility into something I'm noticing about my own capacity and stress level. I know you care about the team's wellbeing and success, and I want to be proactive about managing mine."

BUILD understanding by sharing specifics:

• "Here's what I'm experiencing..." (using the three burnout dimensions as your guide: energy, mindset, efficacy)

• "Here's what’s contributing..." (specific projects, competing priorities, processes, or ways of working that don’t work)

• "Here's what good support looks like for me..." (options for improvement, with considerations for each option)

COLLABORATE on sustainable solutions:

• "What's your perspective?"

• "Which option works best for our goals so I can maintain high performance within the boundaries of my considerable time, talent, and energy?"

• "What else would you need from me to make this shift work?"

It would sound something like this: [Acknowledge] "I want to have a conversation about managing my workload sustainably.

[Build understanding] I've been noticing some early warning signs—I'm thinking about work constantly, even on weekends, and I'm realizing I need to recalibrate before it becomes a bigger issue. The cause of this pressure is the current expectation to manage three major projects simultaneously, along with the shortened timelines we've been working with.

[Collaborate] What would help me most is either extending one of the deadlines by two weeks or identifying which project we can deprioritize temporarily. What's your take on this? How can we solve this together?"

The key: Frame it as strategic workforce planning (by the way, that’s exactly what it is), not a personal failing (by the way, it’s not). You're helping your manager understand how to get your best work - and the “rightest” outcomes to support the company’s priorities - sustainably.

Get In There

• Research worth a listen: Harvard Business Review's Women at Work podcast "Managing Up, One Conversation at a Time” covers that when we manage up to build alignment, we’re much more likely to be viewed as strategic.

• Understanding the cost and cause of work stress: Wellhub’s 2025 State of Work-Life Wellness Report finds work stress the most common cause of decreased mental wellness (yes, even over inflation and AI worries).

• Read “The Right Kind of Wrong” from Dr. Amy Edmondson if you’re looking for a step up and forward from “fail fast” on your road to learning from experiences good and bad.

Finally, a word. THANKS. For being here, and for being a part of a movement we deserve. It’s going to take all of us to make the workplace a better place. And we’ll do it together. Have feedback for me? Reply to this email - I read every response.

P.S. If you're a leader ready to build sustainable success for yourself and your team, I work with executives on strategy and operations that scale without burning people out. Grab time on my calendar or reply to this email if you'd like to explore how fractional support could help.