Can Passion For Your Work Drive Burnout? With Jon Jachimowicz
The Anxious Achiever
Managing Passionate Employees
Jon advises managers to supervise passionate employees closely to prevent overwork and encourage recovery.
Can loving your work make burnout more likely? In this episode, I sit down with Harvard Business School professor Jon Jachimowicz to talk about the downside of passion at work. Jon shares why passion isn't something you either have or don't have, but something that rises and falls over time. We also talk about why passionate employees often overwork, skip recovery, and become vulnerable to burnout, how organizations unintentionally exploit passion, and why leaders need a better strategy for helping people sustain meaningful work over the long term. Tune in to rethink what it really means to follow your passion without sacrificing your well-being.
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In this Episode, You Will Learn
00:00 Why following your passion isn't always the path to sustainable success.
04:00 How Jon's own loss of passion inspired his research.
09:00 Why passion can become one of the biggest drivers of burnout.
12:15 How passionate employees unknowingly skip recovery and overextend themselves.
15:00 Why do client and societal expectations trap high achievers into overperforming?
17:00 How do workplaces systematically confuse extroversion with passion?
23:15 Why performing passion can become emotionally exhausting.
27:15 How managers should lead passionate employees differently.
31:00 Why organizations often exploit passionate workers without realizing it.
35:15 Why current promotional career paths are broken for passionate workers.
39:15 How can companies help employees sustain passion?
43:45 The 3 different types of burnout and why they need different solutions.
45:30 Ways to recover when burnout comes from a loss of self-efficacy or cynicism.
Resources + Links
Get a copy of my book - The Anxious Achiever
Watch the podcast on YouTube
Find more resources on our website morraam.com
Follow
Follow me: on LinkedIn @morraaronsmele + Instagram @morraam
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