One of the findings of the 2023 Work in America™ Survey was that Workplace stress remained at a concerning level, with 77% of workers having reported experiencing work-related stress in the last month. Further, 57% indicated experiencing negative impacts because of work-related stress that are sometimes associated with workplace burnout. This burnout is not just due to having too much work.
And as leaders, we are responsible to address this situation. The question then is what we can do to change this and create conditions for the team to deliver high performance without the overwhelm or burnout.
The insight
One lever we have in changing this situation, is our ability to frame reality for our teams. We can do that through questions we ask or expectations we set.
Frames are also focusing mechanisms. How we frame a situation determines our roles within that situation, and helps us focus on a specific aspect of the reality. When done well, we can identify the frame that gives us the most autonomy and agency to act and create a meaningful impact.
When we feel that we have agency and autonomy, our feeling of overwhelm and burnout reduces significantly. When this happens, we can bring our full cognitive and creative capabilities to the situation that not only increases the possibility of high performance but also improves overall engagement.
Ask Questions that create Agency, not anxiety
So, the kinds of questions we ask (frames we create) have a direct and significant impact on both, the overall performance of the team and their overall wellbeing. This helps us to not only deliver high performance today but also maintain our ability to do so consistently and over long periods of time.
“How might we” questions are open ended and ensure that we have the autonomy and the agency to solve any given problem that comes after this statement.
Same things happens when we use “What needs to be true, in order for us to” questions to framing any problem that otherwise seems too difficult to solve.
This framing gives us agency to find out what we need, in order for us to make an impact.
Set expectations that eliminate ambiguity
Framing our expectations clearly (focusing on things we have agency over and the autonomy to do something about) removes overwhelm from a delivery point of view.
“We are expected to deliver X by Y and at Z quality under x cost because ” is a good frame which clearly sets out the expectations from the team.
This kind of framing usually has a deliverable, a timeline, a quality component, role component, a cost component and clarifies why we need to deliver this.
There is no ambiguity or confusion about what is expected.
Curate technology deliberately
Technology is playing an ever-increasing role in how we do our work. And it is super difficult and exhausting to keep pace with the changes in technology.
As leaders, it is better if we tested all new technology first, to determine which technology is better for the team to deliver on our expectations and only ask them to use that technology and not the other way around.
When we create an expectation of using the right tool for the right situation, we are helping our teams to avoid having to make that decision and hence reduce the decision fatigue and / or technology fatigue.
This frame helps the teams to deliver high performance without having to worry about learning and using technology for the sake of learning them, which wastes time, energy and takes away attention from what is most important.
Share information just-in-time, not just-in-case
We are generating and consuming information at a pace which is unsustainable and it often leads to FOMO or Fear of Missing out, which in turn leads to overwhelm and a sense of always trying to catch up.
As leaders, we need to play a balancing act between sharing information that is relevant and useful to our teams vs sharing information that creates overwhelm for our team.
We need to share enough so that the teams can deliver high performance and not too much that they feel overwhelmed.
The best result is when we, as leaders, share information just-in-time for our teams such that they get what they need while not getting drowned in information.
By deciding what to share and when to share it, we are again creating a frame which allows us and the team to focus on the most relevant information that is critical to deliver high performance in any given moment.
What does all of this mean for us:
We need to think more carefully and be more intentional about the cognitive experience we are creating for our team. This is harder than it sounds. Most leadership training focuses on what leaders should say, not what their words do to the mental state of the people who receive them.
George Lakoff’s foundational work on framing establishes that language does not simply describe reality — it constructs the reality that people then respond to.
When we use language loosely — drifting between priorities, introducing technology without context, sharing information indiscriminately, asking questions that close rather than open — we are not just communicating poorly. We are constructing a reality that is cognitively hostile to the performance we are trying to enable.
Beware of narrow framing
There is also a counterargument worth naming. Tight framing also has the potential to create rigidity. If we define the frame too narrowly, we create a different kind of problem – our teams execute efficiently on the wrong thing, or that stop surfacing important signals because the frame doesn’t seem to allow for them.
Creating the right frames is a core skill that we need to develop as leaders.
The disciplines above are not about controlling the frame — they are about making the frame visible and shared, so that the team can contribute to refining it.
The goal is not compliance with the leader’s model of reality. It is a shared model that the team can navigate together.
Conclusion:
Leadership is the art of shaping how people interpret and respond to reality.
We can do this through the environments we create (Culture – Epigenetics vs Genetics), the questions they ask (Framing), the expectations they set (expectations as focusing frames), language we use to communicate (language as conceptual frames) and the signals we amplify (leading to improved sense making).
When these frames are clear, teams stop reacting to noise and start focusing on what truly matters. And that is what enables sustained high performance without burnout and / or overwhelm.
Invitation
So, before your next team meeting, I invite you to try this: review what you plan to share, ask, and expect, and ask yourself honestly —
Am I about to reduce the signal load for my team, or add to it? Am I creating clarity, or am I outsourcing the work of prioritization to people who don’t have the context to do it?
I invite you to be intentional about the kind of frame you are creating, within which your team will live and perform in.
