INSIGHTS
Burnout Is a Design Problem: What HBR's Framework Gets Right, and Where HTM Would Take It Further
Theodore Issacs CMC, MBA, MSc (Oxford)
Burnout Is a Design Problem: What HBR's Framework Gets Right, and Where HTM Would Take It Further
Practice Note
A response to Daisy Auger-Domínguez's "Burnout Looks Different Across the Org Chart", and what closing the gap between diagnosis and governance actually requires.
Harvard Business Review published a piece, Burnout Looks Different Across the Org. Chart Watch for These Signs?, on April 3, 2026, that deserves more than a passing share. Daisy Auger-Domínguez, Global Chief People Officer at a fintech company, author of Burnt Out to Lit Up, and an advisor to executive teams and boards, makes an argument that HTM has been making from a different direction: burnout is not a personal failing to be managed with better boundaries and more resilience training. It is, in her words, usually "a design failure," not a personal one.
To be clear at the outset: HTM has no working relationship with Auger-Domínguez, and this piece is an independent response to published, publicly available work, not a joint or coordinated view. It is also worth being precise about the distinction in field, because the convergence that follows is more interesting for being unprompted. Auger-Domínguez writes as a Chief People Officer; her discipline is HR and people strategy, built from two decades inside Google, Disney, Moody's, and VICE Media, and her prescriptions are aimed at individual leaders managing their own teams. HTM's discipline is business transformation, change management, and major programme management; our argument is built from programme governance and delivery failure, not HR practice, and it is aimed at boards and programme sponsors, not at the individual leader trying to self-diagnose. Two different fields, arriving separately at the same structural conclusion, is a stronger form of validation than either piece could offer on its own, and it is exactly because there is no connection between the two that the overlap is worth noting.
The overlap itself: Auger-Domínguez's framework — burnout takes a different shape at each level of an organisation, driven by power, proximity to decision-making, and exposure to unresolved tension rather than workload alone — is sharp, well-observed, and lands on the same governance argument HTM has set out from its own, entirely separate direction. It also stops exactly where governance work needs to begin. This piece sets out where her framework lands with real precision, where it leaves a gap, and how HTM's service architecture — the Leadership Risk & Resilience Diagnostic (LRRD) in particular, but not only the LRRD — would be used to close that gap in practice.
Where the Framework Lands With Precision
Auger-Domínguez organises burnout into four distinct patterns, each tied to a specific organisational position rather than a generic stress response.
Early-career employees experience what she calls invisible overload: ambiguity paired with low control. The exhaustion is not from the volume of work but from the constant, silent labour of decoding unwritten rules; who actually has authority, how fast is fast enough, whether asking a question signals initiative or incompetence. Performance can remain high while disorientation quietly accumulates underneath it, which is precisely why it goes unnoticed for so long.
Mid-career managers experience compression: responsibility handed down without a corresponding increase in authority; "responsibility without authority" is the phrase she uses, and it is doing real work in her argument. Managers sit between senior leaders pushing for outcomes and teams asking for protection and clarity, absorbing pressure from both directions with nowhere structural to put it. Her observation that flexibility without guardrails does not reduce work but simply lets it leak into evenings and weekends, with availability quietly becoming a proxy for commitment, is one of the more precise diagnostic details in the piece.
Executives experience something closer to sustained value conflict: she borrows the term moral injury from Jonathan Shay's research on combat veterans to describe what happens when leaders are repeatedly asked to act against their own values under conditions of chronic vigilance and isolation. Whatever one makes of importing a term with that specific clinical lineage into a corporate context, the underlying observation is sound and consistent with the governance argument HTM has made elsewhere: performance can remain high while integrity, not stress tolerance, is the thing actually eroding.
Founders and mission-driven leaders experience what she frames as identity collapse: the point at which the leader and the organisation become indistinguishable, so that stepping back feels like abandonment rather than recovery. Her prescription is telling: governance and advisory structures that challenge the founder rather than reinforce them.
Two things about this framework are worth stating plainly, because they are not small observations. First, the causal claim, that burnout is driven less by workload than by power, decision proximity, and unresolved tension, is a structural claim, not a psychological one, and it is the same structural claim that underlies HTM's own case for treating leadership wellbeing as a governance matter rather than an HR matter. Second, her prescriptions are almost entirely structural, not therapeutic: decision rights, priority limits, recovery built into operating cadence, redistribution of emotional labour. Nowhere in the piece does she recommend a resilience app or a wellness stipend. That discipline is rare, and it is right.
Resolving the Four Levels Into Three Domains
Read against the architecture underlying the LRRD, the four patterns Auger-Domínguez describes are not four separate phenomena. They are four points on the same underlying scale, expressed through Autonomy, Competence, and Relatedness, the three domains Self-Determination Theory identifies as foundational to sustainable human functioning, and which HTM's diagnostic is built to measure directly rather than infer anecdotally.
Early-career overload is a Competence-and-Autonomy compression: low role clarity paired with low decision latitude. Managerial compression is the same compression at higher stakes, decision latitude compressed further by accountability that has outpaced it, plus a values-alignment strain that shows up as her observation that it is hard to commit to a plan you do not understand or believe in. Executive value conflict is Autonomy's values-alignment sub-domain under sustained pressure, compounded by a Relatedness failure, isolation at the top, and the absence of anywhere safe to think out loud. Her own prescription for executives, trusted peer forums for confidential sense-making, is in substance a Relatedness intervention, whether or not she frames it that way.
Founder identity collapse is worth resolving carefully rather than treating as a fourth, separate construct, because it is not one. It is the most extreme expression of the same two failure modes seen at executive level: total Autonomy boundary collapse, where no separation remains between the person and the role at all, combined with a specific form of Relatedness failure, not merely isolation, but the absence of anyone structurally positioned to challenge the leader's judgement. That is exactly what her own recommended fix addresses: governance and advisory structures that push back. The construct did not need inventing. It needed the existing domains taken to their limit.
This matters beyond academic tidiness. A framework with four unrelated failure modes needs four different interventions designed from scratch. A framework that resolves cleanly onto three measurable domains means a single, repeatable diagnostic instrument, administered consistently across every level of a leadership population, can surface all four patterns Auger-Domínguez describes, and track whether they are improving or worsening over time, which her framework, for all its diagnostic value, has no mechanism to do.
The Gap: A Framework for Looking, Not a System for Knowing
This is the piece's real limitation, and it is not a criticism of what she set out to do. Auger-Domínguez has written a diagnostic lens for individual leaders to apply to themselves and the people around them; a genuinely useful one. Her closing questions are good ones: which decision keeps getting delayed and who actually has the authority to make it; where has availability become a substitute for performance; what is consuming more energy than its impact justifies.
But a lens applied by an individual leader, however well-designed, is not organisational intelligence. It depends entirely on the leader in question having the self-awareness, the honesty, and the psychological safety to apply it accurately to themselves, which is precisely the capacity that compression, isolation, and identity collapse erode first. Asking a burned-out executive to correctly diagnose their own moral injury using a magazine framework is asking the affected instrument to calibrate itself. And there is no mechanism in the piece for a board, a programme sponsor, or an oversight committee to know, at an aggregate level and on a recurring basis, where in the organisation these four patterns are currently concentrated, whether they are worsening, and what that implies for the initiatives the leadership population is responsible for delivering.
That is precisely the gap HTM's Leadership Risk Intelligence platform exists to close; not by replacing the framework, but by instrumenting it.
Related Services
Leadership Risk Intelligence
Our LRRD diagnostic can be deployed at the outset of any strategic engagement to profile the leadership team's resilience and capacity for transformation.
Speak to a Partner
Discuss how our Strategic Business Consulting practice could support your organisation.