Confirm Co-founder and CEO Josh Merrill was quoted in Business Insider in a widely-read piece examining what Jacinda Ardern's high-profile resignation as New Zealand's Prime Minister tells us about burnout — and how leaders and employees alike can recognize when it's time to step back.
When Ardern announced in January 2023 that she no longer had "enough in the tank" to continue leading New Zealand, the global response was a mix of admiration, concern, and recognition. Here was one of the world's most visible leaders acknowledging something that millions of employees and executives struggle to say out loud: the tank is empty.
Business Insider reached out to Josh Merrill and other experts to explore what Ardern's decision reveals about burnout — how to identify it, what causes it, and why stepping back, when the moment calls for it, can be the right leadership decision rather than a failure.
Josh's perspective, shaped by years of building performance management systems and thinking deeply about how organizations extract value from people, focuses on the correlation between burnout and suboptimal outcomes. Burned-out leaders and employees don't just suffer — they make worse decisions, miss important signals, and often cause downstream damage that compounds long after the burnout is recognized.
The piece also touches on why organizational systems so often fail to detect burnout before it becomes acute. Traditional performance reviews are backward-looking snapshots, not real-time sensors. By the time burnout shows up in a performance rating, the damage is already done. Building systems that give managers and HR leaders earlier visibility into signals of disengagement and overextension is a core part of what Confirm is designed to do.
Read the full article: Jacinda Ardern Shows Burnout Is Still Going Strong — Business Insider
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