At the end of 2021, I experienced something that I had never experienced before – a complete burnout event. In the past, I had gone through phases where I worked really hard, hustled and needed a vacation or felt exhausted, but I had never let my body get to the point of burnout.

The truth is, I didn’t quite know what that meant, but at the end of 2021, I came face to face with it:

  • Exhaustion
  • Fatigue
  • Negativity
  • Fragility
  • Apathy
  • Crying every day
  • Feeling like I was losing my mind

Here I was in an EVP role, living the career success I had worked so hard for, and I was miserable. I didn't want to do it anymore. So I made the difficult decision to leave my corporate job.

I'm sharing this because this isn't just my story; it's happening to a lot of women at the top. Now that I'm on the other side, I wish I had done things differently to prevent getting to this level of burnout, but at the time, I felt like I was on an island.

So in today's newsletter, I want to talk about this phenomenon – women finally getting to the top and then deciding it's not worth it.

I'm going to focus specifically on the support piece because I think that's probably the most important, but if you want to dive into the topic more broadly, check out my recent podcast episode where I unpack the three key areas you can focus on to ensure this doesn't happen to you.

With that said, let's dive in…

For every new woman Director, 2 leave

A couple of years ago, I ​wrote a Forbes article on this very topic​. For every woman who becomes a director, two leave, meaning women are reaching senior leadership and leaving faster than they're arriving, and it's stalling progress at the top. No wonder the number of women in senior leadership seems to be capped at 30%.

The key reason: burnout. And I want to acknowledge that burnout has multiple causes, including overworking, lack of support, and misalignment, but today I'm going to focus on one that is most fixable and most overlooked: support. We need support at work and support at home. And many women are lacking support in both of these areas.

When women are doing extra work in the office (women tend to do more unpaid work like DEI, mentoring and volunteering), and then going home to be the default parent, the volunteer, the lunch maker, and the playdate coordinator, it can feel like you're drowning.

At some point, you ask yourself, “Is this even worth it?”

If I had a nickel for every woman I met who was putting everybody else ahead of herself, I would be a very rich lady!

The result is a whole lot of high-achieving women who aren't very happy. And when this goes on for too long, many of them will make the difficult choice to leave the career they've worked so hard to build. And frankly, that's a shame.

What “no support” actually looks like at the top

Maybe you're experiencing this right now and know exactly what I'm talking about, but when they say it's lonely at the top, they're not joking, especially for women.

Often, we're the only executive in our friend group and the only woman at the table. Yes, you may have amazing colleagues and great friends, but if they don't understand your unique experience and you don't have anyone to get real advice from, you're probably feeling a level of isolation right now.

The reason this especially impacts women is that most men have networks of other men who are also senior leaders. Most of leadership is men, so there are simply many more of them to create connections with. As a result, they have someone to get support from, confide in, commiserate with, and get real advice from when challenges come up.

On the other hand, women tend to solve everything on our own. We work twice as hard and put in the hours, but at the end of the day, we're racing home to take care of the family. It's highly unlikely we're taking Friday morning to golf with the guys because we already had to take a morning off for the kids' doctor's appointments, so we miss out on the support piece that makes managing challenges in senior leadership or balancing work and life easier.

The higher up you go in leadership, the smaller that trusted circle becomes, until eventually you might not have anyone.

And it can become obvious when you ask yourself these questions:

  • Do you have a single colleague who you can be 100% honest and vulnerable with at work?
  • Do you have people professionally who will tell you the truth instead of what you want to hear?
  • Do you have a support network you can go to for real advice when you're feeling overwhelmed with a work challenge?
  • Do you have people in your life who actually get what it means to be a woman in leadership?

When I think about the women who are thriving as execs, they can answer ‘yes' to these questions.

What does support actually look like?

What many people don't realize is that you don't need a huge network to have support – you need one or two of the right people. These should be people who actually understand your job and have some shared lived experience.

But while you don't need a ton of them, you do have to go find them intentionally, because unlike our male counterparts, we aren't surrounded by women just like us at the top.

Right before my burnout, I was in a peer group. However, they were all men except for me. While they could advise me on my work challenges specific to my function, they couldn't relate to what I was going through: balancing a baby, two other kids, and everything else with being a busy executive. They simply weren't dealing with the same challenges I was. And I'll admit, I felt really lonely, even with this support.

When I became an entrepreneur, I had a whole new set of challenges that I wanted to talk about with someone. Again, I had no support and no network of people like me. I can remember my husband asking me to talk about literally anything other than my business, and that's when I knew I needed to go out and find these people!

If you were to look at my support network now, you would see that I have a really strong network of women who I can go to for pretty much any challenge. But guess what? They did not come and find me. I had to be really intentional about building this network and creating new friendships with people who I could relate to and learn from. And sometimes this meant investing real money to get in rooms with women I wanted to know.

And if I have one regret, it's not having been more intentional about creating this when I was in my executive roles. I have no idea if I would have ended up leaving anyways, but I can almost guarantee I would have stayed longer.

This is part of the reason I'm so passionate about creating this for women now, because having a small, close-knit group of peers at your level isn't a nice-to-have- it's often the difference between women who stay and thrive in senior leadership and women who eventually burn out and leave.

This is also why I built The Table: An intimate group for women at the VP and C-level who want to find their people. I realized that I've been really great at supporting women who are in director and senior director roles, and even first-time VPs. But once women are in VP and C-level roles, I didn't have any way to help them thrive in their roles and get the support they need.

If this is you and you're looking for your people, and you're a woman who is already a VP or C-level executive, reach out to me on LinkedIn or reply to this email. Let's talk about whether the table is right for you.

Until next time friends… ✌️💜

Katy