We have now completed one-third of 2025. How are you doing with your New Year’s resolutions? How about your corporate resolutions?
It’s around this time each year that I have observed that such resolutions have slipped away. However, with CEOs, general managers and other executives, what I see is entropy, which is typically mis-characterized as burnout.
Failure to frame burnout through the lens of entropy tends to place blame on those who are experiencing stress, and generally doesn’t lead to the root causes of that stress. Entropy in a business context means systems, culture or energy naturally degrade over time without intentional effort.
Burnout is always one of the human outcomes of that degradation. Put simply, where organizational entropy increases, personal energy decreases.
Symptoms that typically fall into the definition of burnout include cognitive overload, frustration with endless and growing demands on one’s time, exhaustion from inefficiency, growing detachment from purposeful work, anxiety, reduced productivity, friction with co-workers and an overall sense of helplessness and lack of progress. Unchecked, this malaise becomes infectious, and not only undermines your resolutions; it can destroy your enterprise.
When these symptoms emerge, too often leaders react by telling their people — and themselves — to “buck up” and work harder, thereby putting virtually all their focus on their people. In that regard, it’s tempting to see burnout as personal weakness, or poor time and workload management. However, such judgment is almost always short-sighted in that it fails to address the root causes producing the symptoms of burnout.
This is where the concept of entropy is helpful. When we look at burnout through the lenses of entropy, we begin to identify root causes. Some of the more typical ones I have seen over the years include:
• Cultural drift from clearly articulated purpose, mission and values.
• Strategic misalignment that fosters wasted time, money and loss of an overarching sense of accomplishment.
• Lack of clarity regarding goals, roles and priorities that cause decision fatigue.
• Overcomplexity that has created unclear processes and bureaucracy.
• Poor communication that feeds uncertainty and misunderstanding.
• Clunky and outdated technology and systems that create mental fatigue.
These sources of entropy are root causes that can — and must be — addressed and resolved. They may indeed require us to work harder but taking them on — and solving them — provides leaders with the right focus for that hard work. More importantly, that focus sends an essential message: Burnout is acknowledged as a symptom of an organization suffering from entropy, not one with inherently unmotivated people.
Eliminating, or at least reducing entropy will resolve burnout sustainably, and restore energy in your people. Here are some tips for addressing entropy:
• Streamline or kill redundant processes. Consider using value stream analyses to identify improvements in operational effectiveness and efficiency.
• Clarify key roles. Look for ways to assure that each of these are well-defined in terms of expectations regarding what they will — and will not — be responsible for. Strive to reduce or eliminate scope creep.
• Reconnect key roles to shared purpose. Make sure every important function and position aligns with the company’s purpose, mission and values.
• Reset your focus on your customer. Tighten up key aspects of your unique value proposition.
• Address how decisions are made. Where necessary, create new decision frameworks.
• Set boundaries on how work is assigned. Establish new norms and dialogue on how delegation of work is to be done.
• Provide support for mental and workplace decluttering. Improve the physical environment to allow for better work habits and workflow.
It is critically important that, as leaders, you recognize that burnout is a systemic energy drain caused by wasted effort, continual context switching and work that is misaligned creating high-friction environments. Each of these can be fixed. Your job is to recognize the real reasons your corporate resolutions seem to be slipping away. You’re not failing. You’re just operating in an environment where entropy has quietly crept in. Your challenge is to discover where your system is leaking energy — and repair the leaks.
Reframing burnout as entropy is empowering. It moves the conversation from “I’m burned out” to “Something around me is draining energy — and I can fix it.”
Richard Tyson is the founder, principal owner and president of CEObuilder, which provides forums for consulting and coaching to executives in small businesses.