Not every exhausted team is dealing with the same problem, according to Nicholas Mukhtar, and business owners who treat all burnout as one issue tend to apply the wrong fix.
“I’m seeing it as a twofold thing,” Mukhtar said. “There’s a generation of leaders getting very burnt out, and a generation of new employees who are, and I say this carefully, contributing to that burnout.” The two groups are exhausted for different reasons, and a wellness program aimed at one won’t touch the other.
Senior leadership fatigue traces back to a specific work model, Mukhtar said. “You have a generation that was first in the office and last to leave,” he said. “That’s how I came up: you work, and you keep working. And then you have a generation that doesn’t see it that way.” Younger employees are operating from a different assumption about what visible effort is supposed to look like day to day, not rejecting effort altogether.
That distinction shows up most clearly when Mukhtar asks clients to separate the two patterns out loud. A team that’s uniformly tired, regardless of age or tenure, is usually dealing with workload. A team where senior staff describe the exact same complaint about junior staff, and junior staff describe the exact same complaint back, is dealing with something else entirely.
The diagnostic test Mukhtar uses with clients is simple: is the fatigue showing up as a general complaint across the whole team, or specifically as friction between people at different career stages who seem to be talking past each other. The second pattern, in his experience, points to a generational mismatch rather than a workload problem, and it shows up most often in the loyalty numbers. “The constant complaint is that loyalty is harder to find than it used to be,” Mukhtar said. “Work ethic and longevity look different now.”
Business owners who misdiagnose the second pattern as the first tend to respond with the wrong tool, adding perks or flexibility without addressing the actual expectations gap driving the friction. Nicholas Mukhtar’s advice is to separate the two before assuming either.
The distinction also changes who needs to be in the room for the fix to work. A workload problem gets solved by adjusting staffing or deadlines. A generational mismatch gets solved by getting the specific people in friction with each other talking directly, which is a different intervention than most HR policies are built to handle.