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Stop Guarding Your Best People. Let Them Go.

Writer: Eric Jones
Eric Jones
3 days ago
2 min read

Your best person does not need another wellness benefit.

They may need you to stop requiring them to be available.

A longer weekend will not repair three years of ignored warning signs. A resilience workshop cannot compete with an unmanageable workload. And “take Friday off” is not recovery when Monday’s crisis is waiting in the inbox.

Christine Lindebak learned this the hard way. After years of allergy attacks, hospital visits and epinephrine, she left her corporate role. Within weeks, the physical symptoms disappeared. It took three genuine months of sleep, food, walks, play and no pressure before her nervous system settled.

In hindsight, she did not need to quit. A sabbatical might have been enough.

Notice

Gallup identifies unfair treatment, workload, unclear communication, weak manager support and unreasonable time pressure as root causes of burnout, mostly within leadership’s control.

  • Watch for physical, emotional and behavioural signals.

  • Ask what the workload is costing, not only what it is producing.

  • Treat “I’m fine” cautiously when the system rewards endurance.

Employees who feel unfairly treated are 2.3 times more likely to experience high burnout. Those who feel strongly supported by their manager are about 70% less likely to burn out regularly.

Isometric paper-and-ink illustration of a team redistributing responsibilities while one person steps away to rest

Repair

A sabbatical is intentional leave from routine work for more than two months. Harvard Business School research found that people often need six to eight weeks before they feel like themselves again. Two weeks may pause the calendar. It rarely clears the nervous system.

  • Offer a protected two- or three-month leave.

  • Guarantee a thoughtful return path where possible.

  • Build coverage before the person leaves.

About eight in ten employees in formal sabbatical programs return to their original employer. The organization also discovers where it is dangerously dependent on one person.

Practice

McKinsey finds structural changes (workload, staffing, autonomy, hours and communication) outperform individual wellness programs. Combine systemic change with resilience support, and the effect roughly doubles.

  • Design work so recovery is possible before crisis.

  • Normalize rest before symptoms become emergencies.

  • Let people return with a healthier pace and rhythm.

Global engagement is now 20%, and only 34% of employees are thriving in their overall lives. Burnout is not a character flaw. It is often a relationship and design failure.

That is the heart of Roxanne’s Return on Relationship philosophy: performance grows when people are treated as whole human beings.

What might your strongest person discover if you stopped guarding their time?

What might your organization learn if it trusted the team to carry the work?

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