should I tell my bosses their efforts to support me aren’t enough and they might lose me?

A reader writes:

I work for a large, quickly growing international business headquartered in the United States. I’m in HR and often collaborate with finance. My work is challenging, exciting, and I feel valued as an employee. But that’s actually part of the problem. Not to accidentally quote Liam Neeson, but I have a particular set of skills that makes me very difficult to replace. I have strong job security, I’m paid well enough to support my family, I have decent benefits, and I love my coworkers.

But I have also been burnt out for over a year. Being neurodivergent and learning how autistic burnout differs from standard burnout has been a wild ride.

My managers (yes, plural) are actually very supportive and caring. I was able to sit down with them four months ago and express that I need extra support. The projects I’m working on are too much for me to handle on my own, and because no one else can do the work I do, I’m the owner, point of contact, and bottleneck for a series of projects that are simply never-ending. There is a plan for me to take FMLA to recover, I’ve found and invested in more supports to limit my sensory stimulation in the office, and I’ve been able to instill some boundaries around my work time, but it’s just not enough. They’ve been trying to hire either a junior or a manager to join our team specifically to assist with my job duties, and I trust that they’re doing their best, but this is a difficult job to fill. And the result is I still feel overworked and unprotected from executives, and my mental and physical health are still declining.

I have been working with my therapist about feeling guilty for considering quitting. I don’t intend to leave (a) before my current project concludes at the end of Q1 and b) until after my FMLA is concluded, but I also want to have a discussion with them about how they’re at risk of losing me.

I’ve been burned out for so long that I’m struggling to even put into words what would need to change in order for me to stay! I know I can’t demand executive behaviors or company culture change, and they are actively trying to hire support.

If I leave, so many of the company’s initiatives will come to a halt. I love the work that I do! There are projects and processes that I’ve built from the ground up that I have real pride in and result in really nice feedback from executives, but I haven’t had time to properly document how to replicate them.

I don’t feel like I can confide in anyone because we all report to the head of HR. And while I have every reason and past experience to trust that my bosses care about me and wouldn’t retaliate, I can’t afford to do anything to put my job in jeopardy. And I don’t trust that it’s any better anywhere else!

How do I have this conversation? Or do I just stay silent and commit to leaving?

The way your managers should be looking at this is that they can choose between you doing less work now or you doing no work not too long from now. As painful as they might find the first option, won’t the second option be worse, given how much trouble they’re having even hiring someone just to help you?

In other words, either they stomach pulling back on some of your projects now or they lose you altogether and then all those projects grind to a halt.

That’s the main contradiction I see in your letter that I don’t think you’re focusing on clearly: if you can’t pull back on your workload now because you’re indispensable, that makes it all the more urgent that they find a way to let you pull back on it … because otherwise you won’t be doing any of it.

Now, frankly, it’s okay if they lose you altogether! That’s not your problem to solve for them, and you shouldn’t feel pressured to sacrifice your health and well-being because you’ll be difficult to replace. That’s something they should have been planning for long before now — because you could leave for another job tomorrow, or fall down a well, or all sorts of things that make it terrible planning to have one person as a single point of failure for important work. The fact that they haven’t done that and instead have been content for you to feel it’s all on your shoulders to keep afloat —even when you explicitly told them it was too much — is not good. I understand that you like them and feel they’ve generally been supportive and caring, but that just means that you owe them good work while you’re there and reasonable notice when you leave; it does not mean you owe them your health or quality of life. That’s true in every job, and it is extra true in jobs where you’ve already given an unreasonable amount of yourself. (Ironically, though, giving an unreasonable amount of yourself tends to intensify people’s feelings of obligation rather than lessening them, because it makes you more personally invested in the work.)

So if you would rather not try to convince them they need to take things off your plate right now, that is okay! You can just quietly plan to leave at a time that makes sense for you, and you don’t need to put more energy into convincing them to change things.

But if you want to have that conversation, the framing to use is: “I’m at the point where I need things off my plate now and can’t keep waiting. I know that there’s no one else to take on some of this, but the choice is that we either remove some of it now — even if it means putting some projects on hold — or we end up in a situation where none of it gets done because the job won’t be sustainable for me to stay in.”

Of course, that assumes that a lower workload would solve for this for you. If your burnout is really about executive behavior or company culture, then you’re right that those things are highly unlikely to change. If that’s the case, this conversation may not be worth it, and you should just go ahead and quietly plan your departure. It’s hard to tell how much is that versus workload because you’re not even allowing yourself to consider that a lower workload is possible. (But again, your employer can have some of it done or none of it done, so a good manager will figure out a way to scale things back for you.)

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