Working It (Financial Times) · Financial Times

Working It live: How to get ahead without burning out

September 24, 2024·23 min·2 clips

Psychologist Audrey Tang reveals how to spot a colleague near breaking point and what resilient professionals have in common.

The setting is live. Berwick takes Working It to the FT's annual weekend festival at London's Kenwood House, where a familiar career question gets a more human answer. How do you get ahead at work while taking better care of yourself, noticing when a colleague is close to breaking point, and understanding what resilient professionals tend to share? Tang keeps coming back to behaviour. Stress and burnout can appear when someone starts acting against their own usual pattern. Baseline is the word that does the work. A colleague who normally hangs back may suddenly volunteer for everything. Someone usually engaged may stop putting a hand up and fade out of view. Silence can tell you something. The conversation gives real weight to withdrawal, especially among men, because keeping your head down can be mistaken for simply getting on with the job. That mistake matters. Someone can look fine and still be struggling. Berwick picks up the loneliness thread, connecting the workplace point to her own work on loneliness and to the awkwardness that can enter conversations about men. Tang avoids tidy gender boxes. The point is not that men behave one way and women another. It is that visible safety affects who feels able to speak. Leaders have a part to play. Support has to be available, known, accessible, and believable enough that people think they can use it. Modelling helps too. Tang says it can matter when leaders show they have used support themselves. The tone stays grounded. There is no miracle cure for burnout in this excerpt, just a sharper eye for changed behaviour and a kinder reading of what colleagues may be carrying. The live room changes the pace, with an audience question turning the conversation toward distance working, working from home, loneliness, and new members of staff.

As heard by us

A practical live conversation on ambition, burnout and the quiet workplace signals managers should not miss.

Working It brings career advancement back to a practical question: how do people keep progressing without running themselves down? In this live Financial Times session, Isabel Berwick speaks with psychologist and author Dr Audrey Tang about workplace wellbeing, resilience and…

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Why you'd press play

You want to spot burnout before it shows up in plain sight.

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