Your Attachment Style Is Making You Burned Out
The way you relate to other people may be the key to staying engaged at work
When psychologist Michael Leiter gets called in to consult for a company that wants to reduce burnout in its employees, his options for advice are typically limited. Reducing staff workload, the most obvious answer, is rarely a possibility.
So instead, he focuses on another way to ward off the exhaustion, cynicism, and loss of productivity that define burnout: teaching employees to get along better.
Plenty of research has shown that the quality of our relationships at work makes a huge difference in how happy and productive we are. One Gallup survey, for example, found that employees who have a best friend in the office are 50% more satisfied with their jobs and seven times(!) more engaged with them.
But it isn’t always easy to keep things so positive. For many people, the social demands of office life — the small talk, the performative Slack chatting, the theoretically optional but secretly mandatory happy hours — are more exhausting than enjoyable. And, as Leiter notes, there’s a “small but persistent” group that has such a difficult time getting along well with co-workers that they cross over the line to rudeness or even abuse, especially in settings that…
