Burnout to Breakthrough: Motivating Employees with Leadership Tools That Work

by Ina Catrinescu

You’ll never think about productivity the same way again! Are your employees feeling exhausted, cynical, or just tuned-out? Do they frequently check their phones in meetings, and seem especially uninterested to hear about the next important organizational change? Are they working harder but getting less done? Ill too often or for too long? These are some of the classic warning signs of disengagement. In a perfect world, work should do so much for us. It should lend us purpose and a sense of meaning, offer us structure and stability. But invariably, something goes wrong—many employees have to pull themselves over the fence each day at a job that is burning them out. Employee engagement and burnout were declared in a state of “crisis” and the biggest concerns for employers in 2017. And we are right to be concerned. Disengagement comes at the yearly cost of $550 billion to the US economy. But it’s not just our economic prosperity that’s at stake. The study presented in Burnout to Breakthrough shows an alarming correlation between disengagement and the following three health depression, obesity, and suicide. Here, Ina Catrinescu draws on cutting-edge neuroscience, and integrates social psychology and organizational science to reconsider accepted narratives, connect past developments with contemporary concerns, and examine specific management practices within the context of this workplace crisis. She redefines how we understand work and idleness. And the best part? The same turnkey solution that can aid disengagement and burnout is responsible for unleashing our creativity. Are you ready to get your employees thirsty to create, their minds tickled, and their hearts racing? Then Burnout to Breakthrough is the right book for you.

Genres: Leadership, Nonfiction

231 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 25, 2018

Reviews

[Thomas Edmund · Rating 4 out of 5]

Burnout to Breakthrough is a strange tome, it begins with a short autobiography, a role-play between "workforce" and "poor" before launching into the material proper.

What the book covers exactly is hard to summarize, probably the main body of the work is critiquing the status quo of the workplace, in a thorough and confronting way. Other parts focus on the psychology of burnout and work, and a historic review of management styles.

Overall the piece is very handy for challenging mainstream management practices, however perhaps slightly light on the advice for what to actually to - aside from talking about empowering employees and accepting valid feedback the book left a little to be desired in terms of practical steps.

[Robert Bogue]

Everyone has a backstory. You do. I do. Every author I meet does. Everyone I read has some sort of a backstory that has led them to where they are today. That’s certainly true of Ina Catrinescu. She relates part of her childhood from the former Soviet Union in Burnout to Breakthrough: Motivating Employees with Leadership Tools That Work. She has a unique perspective on the “chains” that bind us. Having moved from the socialist world to the capitalist world, she’s seen firsthand how both worlds have the capacity to demoralize and demotivate people. One was enslaved to an immutable dogma, and the other is tethered to a rat race.

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[Aaron Strouse · Rating 2 out of 5]

At my current work I am working to improve engagement through operational excellence. I was hoping to gain more insight to this and also combat my burnout at times.

This book spoke of general concepts that plague the work place and used stories to describe them in detail but never touched on counter measures to implement things. Also, I found it redundant at times within each chapter. Probably could have been shorter and more to the point.

Maybe this book is a thought provoking book. If you want to learn about the reality of the work place. Read this book. I did enjoy learning about some things I did not know and it was refreshing to read. Hopefully you can take away something which I did but I wanted more.

[Virgil Mitrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not only timing, but time is everything

[The Endless Unread · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book gives examples of problems in the workplace but no countermeasures whatsoever. What is the point of this book? It's a self-help book that doesn't actually help.

[Anne Marie Carey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strange read. At times feeling like an obscure and random collection of ideas to show the difference between viewpoints of the employer vs. employee, but didn't seem to pull too much of it together by the end...or at least not in a way that the book title might suggest was the objective of the book. Still found some bits here and there that sparked some interesting thoughts.