What changed? Burnout in Sports
by Kelly Lewis, Vice President at TurnkeyZRG
Like many HR and DEIB practitioners, I’ve followed the conversation about employee burnout more intently in recent years. Through academic literature and firsthand accounts, I have found the discussion regarding burnout to be a topic on everyone’s mind. We all know that sports is not a 9-5 career. It has never been, and unfortunately, with the growing entertainment and community-centered offerings, it realistically never will be. Hence why this ever-increasing phenomenon has perplexed many executives.
The growing need to expand innovation, reach, and impact has been at not only the forefront of the sports world, but spans industries. Within sports, these advancements have dramatically impacted the fan experience, but unfortunately have had some unintended consequences on employees and their well-being. Some would suggest that these innovations are equally great for employees; I agree. From expanding their knowledge of scope and impact to having an opportunity to be intentional with diverse hiring and development, employees have the increasing opportunity to benefit from these changes. But when you dive deeper, going beyond face value, we start unveiling factors that have impacted working conditions beyond the hours.
Within the last decade, our teams have increasingly experienced growth. Utilizing the TIDES report, I will illuminate the change within personnel over specific periods. I cannot confirm the response rate and accuracy of the data, as the information presented comes directly from the leagues to UCF. Though I have yet to find any information within the TIDES reports illustrating that any team failed to be counted within the data, I have selected to use the NBA for this brief case study for a few reasons. I have spoken with several members of the NBA at the team and league levels to corroborate that they have historically received data from all 30 teams as a league (even despite Canadian laws sometimes complicating matters). As the number of Chief Diversity Officers’ roles and functions has grown across the industry, the NBA was the first to establish this CDO in 2014 and has grown representation in this department at every team, yielding a natural increase in headcount. Additionally, the increase in sports and business analytics, digital content, community relations, training facilities, acquisitions of different entities (i.e. Esports), and more there have been other factors yielding additional growth. While the NBA data will be the focus of analysis, they are not the story’s focal point.
The TIDES Reports breaks down demographics between the league and the teams. Concentrating on Teams, TIDES focuses on five main categories of front-office officials: Chief Executive Officers & Presidents, General Managers, Team Vice Presidents and above, Senior Management, and Professional Staff. While there are some variations between leagues, in conjunction with more specifications of data categorization, these categories remain true. Utilizing the NBA 2022 data, I want to level set the categorization of titles used throughout the analysis. Please see their descriptions below:
• Presidents and Chief Executive Officers - These positions include team presidents, chief executive officers, chairmen, vice chairmen, and some chief operating officers. This category consists of the individuals in charge of team business operations.
• General Managers - President or Head of team basketball operations
• C-Suites - refers to executive-level managers, such as chief financial officers, chief operating officers, and chief information officers
• Team Vice President – Vice presidents within both the Business and Basketball Operations
• Senior Management - The Senior Management category includes individuals from Manager to Senior Director level within team leadership
• Professional staff - Team Professional Staff category includes individuals under the Manager/Senior Director level within each organization but does not include administrative assistants
Before we dive into data, I want to emphasize that C-suite data is relatively new. 2022 is on the second year this category has been explicitly showcased. Previously, this category was aggregated into the Vice President and Above Category.
National Basketball Association Team Employee Tides Report Analysis:
Over the last decade, the NBA has seen a significant uptick in staff size from the professional staff to Vice President level and above leaders. It should be no surprise that the President/CEO and General manager level has remained relatively stable. Both roles are seen as the heads of their respective enterprises where the only individuals above them are owners. Because we don’t have historical data to demonstrate the distinct change within the C-suite, our analysis will focus on the collective VP positions and below. From 2012 to 2022, we saw a 100% increase in the number of Vice President and above roles; however, within senior management for that same timeframe, we saw a rise of 253%.
Similarly, professional staff that falls under the supervision of senior management – thus under Vice Presidents—increased from 1137 to 4013, translating to over 250% increase. While a significant part of the change occurred between the 2012-2017 timeframe, there has still been a consistent uptick between 2017 and today. This brings about the question: if there wasn’t COVID-induced effects on staffing levels, would we see the percent change from 2017 to 2022 increasing further? The answer is probably yes. The 2022 reports illustrate the increase in 2019, following a decrease in 2020, before somewhat stabilizing to the current numbers. While one could begin to speculate how much more we would have grown or why there is such an uptick in staff, that’s not the focus of this article. The question we are answering is: what are the implications of such changes?
Burnout:
Coined in the 1970’s by American psychologist Herbert Freudenberger, the term “burnout” was used to describe the consequences of severe stress and high ideals in “helping” professions. The term was initially used to describe the state of being of Doctors and Nurses, who often would push themselves to the point of exhaustion, listlessness, and an inability to cope. Nowadays, the term has been adopted beyond the medical field. According to the World Health Organization, burnout is characterized by depletion in three areas: psychological or physical energy, a sense of connectedness to your work, and professional self-efficacy or professional confidence.
Burnout and job satisfaction are not the same. Notably, burnout is not about disliking one’s work or the lingering feeling of outgrowing one’s job responsibilities. Burnout is the inability – not lack of desire—to conjure the physical and mental ability to engage in the work one cares about. In the 1996 Harvard Business Review, one Executive (Vice President) described the feeling as “I just can’t seem to get going…I can’t get interested in what I’m supposed to do. I know I should get rolling. I know there’s a tremendous amount of work to be done. That’s why they brought me in and put me in this job, but I just can’t seem to get going.”
Burnout across executives and managerial levels has been rising well before COVID. And for many of you reading, the sentiments of this executive may ring true to some days, months, and even years you’ve experienced. This experience of fatigue has continued to manifest itself in different people, industries, and time frames. What has remained constant is the identifiable characteristics of burnout and the breeding grounds for it.
The Breeding Ground:
When it comes to burnout, research has shown that employee burnout is a problem with the company, not the person. Citing competitive conditions and managerial duties as breeding grounds for burnout to persist, dating as far back as the ‘90s. “Researchers have observed this type of exhaustion among many professionals… it is not unusual among executives and managers, and it is more likely to occur under competitive conditions than in a stable market.” They note: “(o)ne problem with managing people is that such a focus creates unending stress for the manager. The manager must cope with the least capable employees: the depressed, the suspicious, the rivalrous, the self-centered, and the generally unhappy.”
According to Christina Maslach of the University of California, Berkeley, Susan E. Jackson of Rutgers, and Michael Leiter of Deakin University, burnout has six leading causes:
Unsustainable workload
Perceived lack of control
Insufficient rewards for effort
Lack of a supportive community
Lack of fairness
Mismatched values and skills
In 2022 McKinsey Health Institute found that when asked about aspects of their jobs that undermine their mental health and well-being, employees frequently cite the feeling of always being on call, unfair treatment, unreasonable workload, low autonomy, and lack of social support. Similarly, Deloitte found that most employees (83%) and executives (74%) say they’re facing obstacles when it comes to achieving their well-being goals—and these are primarily tied to their job. Referencing a heavy workload or stressful job (30%) and not having enough time because of long work hours (27%) as two leading causes.
Employers tend to overlook the role of the workplace in driving employee mental health and well-being, engagement, and performance. Deloitte uncovered that specifically, C-suite executives fail to have an accurate pulse on their employee’s perspectives of company care. 56% of employees think their company’s executives care about their well-being, while 91% of the C-suite think their employees believe they care about it.
Effects:
Within the Harvard Business Review’s The Big Idea Series: The Burnout Crisis, the research surveyed 1500 people from a gamut of countries, industries, and seniority levels in 2020, and the results were shocking: 88% said their work life was getting worse; 56% allude to their job demands have increased; and 55% of all respondents didn’t feel they had been able to balance their home and work life, with 53% explicitly citing homeschooling. Even with this data specifically referring to life in the summer of 2022, these sentiments remain true.
Deloitte found that more than three-quarters of the C-suite (76%) said that the pandemic has negatively affected their well-being, and less than half rated various dimensions of their health as “excellent” or “good.” Despite burnout affecting all employees, burnout within the management sub-segment of the workforce is the most concerning. This group is directly responsible for leading teams of others, ultimately opening up the organization to potentially more threatening effects and risks.
In Gallup’s Manager Burnout Is Only Getting Worse, surveys conducted in 2020 and 2021 found that the percentage of managers who report being burned out "very often" or "always" was slightly higher than that of individual contributors in 2020; the gap widened considerably in 2021. Only 25% of managers in 2021 strongly agree that they can maintain a healthy balance between work and personal commitments. A March 2021 survey by the Society for Human Resource Management found that more than 40% of U.S. employees felt burned out from their work. The problem was particularly acute among women, with nearly half reporting feeling that way. Development Dimensions International's Global Leadership Forecast 2021 reveals that almost 60% of leaders reported they feel used up at the end of the workday, which is a strong indicator of burnout.”
Forbes found that in 2022, 55% of all PTO went unused. And a recent Sorbet survey revealed that even for those employees looking to take a refresher, there is guilt for using PTO. The work culture significantly influences this guilt. 24% of respondents indicated they don’t feel comfortable asking their manager for time off, and 31% of employees said that when working from home, they think it’s difficult to ask for time off. And from an equity standpoint, women and younger generations are using significantly less than others.
Solutions
The road to combatting burnout is going to take much work. Especially since sports and entertainment do not lend themselves to some quick fixes based on literature. Due to games and concerts, there are few workarounds in the long hours or solutions to minimize the ever-evolving fast, paced nature of our work. Nevertheless, as an industry, there are things we can do to shift the culture to one that involves inclusion, wellness, and belonging. To better illustrate tangibles, I have spoken with Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer Esu Ma’at, who will share some insights into how his executive team has begun to put people and their well-being at the center of everything the organization does.
To hear more from Kelly, click here.
ABOUT TURNKEYZRG
Founded in 1996, TurnkeyZRG is a highly specialized talent recruitment/executive search firm filling C-level, senior-level and mid-management level positions throughout sports, entertainment and media. Over the past 25 years, TurnkeyZRG has filled more than 1,400 positions throughout sports, entertainment and media. TurnkeyZRG helps teams, leagues, stadiums, arenas, theaters, college athletic departments, events, sponsors, agencies, media companies, private equity companies and other clients identify, recruit and hire the very best management talent. Turnkey now benefits from ZRG’s global footprint, full array of industry practice groups, data-driven, analytical search tools, and technology investment in changing the way executive search/talent recruiting is done. TurnkeyZRG becomes a tech-enabled disrupter of the prior executive search model. For more information about TurnkeyZRG, visit www.turnkeyzrg.com.