You got the title. You got the team. You got the raise. And somewhere between the promotion email and the third quarter, work stopped feeling like yours.
That feeling has a name, and it is not laziness. Kimia Penton runs a global PMO inside a Fortune 10 company, holds a master’s in organisational psychology, and tours as a singer-songwriter. Offered a promotion or a six month paid sabbatical tomorrow, she takes the sabbatical.
In this episode of ProductiviTree she makes an argument that cuts against most burnout advice you have read: long hours are not what breaks people. Lost agency is. Which means the fix is not a holiday. It is a different set of decisions, made while you still have the job.
Here is what you get from the next 45 minutes with her: the real test for whether your tiredness is recoverable, the two things to put in place now so that stepping down is even an option, and what emotional regulation looks like in a meeting that is going badly. Read this before your next promotion conversation, because the decision is easier to make before the offer is on the table.
Burnout without overwork: the definition people get wrong
Kimia is clear that physical burnout is real. Work excessive hours for long enough, ignore your body, skip rest, and you will break. “We’re humans, we’re not machines,” she says.
Then she points at the hole in that story. Look at the people you consider the best in their field. Most of them work long hours. Most of them are fine.
Her own example makes the point better than a study would:
“I would happily be in the music studio all week. I would pack my lunch so I wouldn’t have to take breaks. I would leave the studio feeling refreshed and recharged, not tired at all, because it’s what I love, it’s part of being in alignment with who I am, and I’m there by choice.”
Same hours. Opposite outcome. The variable is not the clock.
In her reading, what exhausts people is conformity. You stop recognizing yourself because you have bent too far around something outside you. Then she gives the actual risk profile:
“If you’re feeling stuck, you don’t have agency, you’ve been doing this long term in a situation that feels hopeless to you, you’re doing something you’re not passionate about, you don’t feel valued, seen and heard in your role, then you’re gonna be hurting yourself in the long run and you’re at the highest risk of burnout.”
Read that list again as a diagnostic. Stuck. No agency. Hopeless. Not valued. None of those four items is about workload. All four are about control.
This is why a week off rarely fixes anything. You come back to the same role with the same ceiling, rested and still trapped. Sustainable productivity is not a question of how much you can absorb. It is a question of how much of the work is actually yours.
You dislike the job, and the bills are real. Now what?
This is the part most career content skips. Telling someone to quit and find themselves is advice for people who can afford it.
Kimia does not give that advice. Her position is firm: never leave without a backup plan, a support structure, and a plan. The single exception is medical. If a doctor is involved and your health becomes urgent, you intervene on your own behalf, and nothing else ranks above that.
For everyone else, she sets out a sequence, and the order matters.
First, use every channel you actually have. Find allies. Find sponsors. Collaborate with colleagues. Speak up professionally about what needs to change. Most people skip this because it is uncomfortable and slow, then conclude the organization is immovable.
Second, move inside before you move out. In a large organization, there is usually far more room than people use. If the problem is one team’s culture or one direct manager, make it known you are open to other opportunities and let your network move you. You keep the salary, tenure, and relationships.
Third, if it is genuinely toxic and you can bring no positive change, start looking outside while you are still employed. Her reasoning is practical rather than moral:
“It’s much harder to find work if you’ve just upped and left and your resume looks blank for a very long time.”
She says that with direct experience of being judged for a gap. She took time off to have two children back to back and found the market harsh when she came back.
Her warning for anyone in the middle of this: keep your emotions in check. “Don’t do something sudden to jump out of the frying pan into the fire.”
Wellness apps, on-site gyms, and the root cause nobody touches
Santi put the contradiction to her directly. Companies answer burnout with meditation rooms, nap pods, and apps. As an organizational psychologist inside a large company, how does she sit with that?
She answered without the corporate hedge:
“I personally have given up on our wellness app.”
Her objection is that the app became one more thing to learn, navigate and tick off. Same with the on-site gym. At what time, exactly, is she getting there during the work week?
These programs are well-meaning, and some are research-based. They also target the symptoms. The questions she thinks actually move the needle are harder to answer in a town hall:
- Are we giving our teams autonomy, agency and meaningful work?
- Are we developing our leaders?
- Are we giving honest, performance-related feedback?
- Do people see that performance issues get dealt with?
- Do they see leaders they aspire to be like?
Underneath it, she shares why she went into organizational psychology in the first place. Most of our identity is tied to work, whether or not it should be. “What do you do?” is the first question a stranger asks. So the quality of the work, the fairness of the pay and the honesty of the leadership land harder than any perk.
Her one-line summary is worth putting on a wall in any HR department:
“Your culture is your best retention strategy.”
Company culture or team culture: which one actually wins
Santi pushed on something most employees know from experience. A company has an official culture, and then it has a thousand micro-cultures, one per team. Which one is real?
Kimia’s answer: it should come top down from the C-suite, and in practice it is set by your team leader or the VP of your segment. They interpret the corporate vision in their own style, and they directly impact your week.
Which leads to the filter she now applies to every role:
“I personally will never join a team, no matter how good or lucrative the role might be, how exciting the title might be, what the paycheck might be, if I am not aligned with the leader.”
She is careful about who gets to use that filter. Early in a career,, you take what is there, build a network and a reputation, and do your best in the situation you have. The leader test is a privilege that arrives later, once the interview is genuinely a two-way conversation. Her advice is to use it the moment you earn it.
For organizations, the implication is uncomfortable. If the team leader is the culture, then performance management and development for people leaders is the whole ball game. Hold them to standards. Give them executive coaching. Promote them for how they lead, not only for what they deliver.
Emotional regulation, the leadership skill nobody teaches
Kimia calls emotional regulation part of self-mastery, which is the spine of both her book and her music. In practice, it starts with knowing your own triggers and knowing how you react before the reaction arrives.
Skip that work and two things happen. You build a reputation nobody wants to follow. And you damage relationships, because a sudden, unconsidered reaction produces a reaction in the other person, and the thing escalates. “Nothing good comes from the escalation.”
She credits Brené Brown’s Atlas of the Heart for the useful part: naming what you are actually feeling in the moment, then communicating it in a way that gets heard without turning you into a doormat.
She is not arguing for never raising your voice. In a 20-year career, she has escalated about five times, all of them to protect a project team member from bullying or someone who was out of line. The move is specific: end the call, say we will regroup when you are under control, and move on.
The cost of doing that is often what people miss. If you become known as reactionary, nobody takes you seriously unless you are reacting.
Is staying calm just being soft?
Santi brought the contrarian view on purpose. Plenty of people say this is soft, and that soft people do not get things done. Calmness is one of the 16 elements in his 4 Productivity Vectors framework, so the challenge was worth making properly.
Her answer was the strongest moment in the episode:
“It takes a lot more strength to remain soft. It is much easier for me to elevate, cuss someone out, be disrespectful, act like a toddler.”
Then she named the assumption people make about her:
“I’m five foot two, I’m soft spoken, and I’m quite smiley, and I’m quite agreeable. But under that there is a very fierce and resilient soul that is not a doormat for anything, and my no is no.”
She can hold a boundary all day without losing her cool, because she has learned to be objective. The no is a clear no. You can take her at her word. In her view, that takes more discipline than flying off the handle, and it gets things done faster than walking in and ruffling feathers to look strong.
Santi agreed and said, in his own words, that he has never trusted a leader who was panicking or shouting, and he does not expect to. To him, that is a sign of someone who cannot lead.
Conscious unbossing: why 52% of Gen Z refuse middle management
Santi brought two numbers to the table. Robert Walters found that 52% of Gen Z professionals in the UK do not want a middle management role, and 69% call it high stress and low reward. People are turning down promotions they spent years chasing.
Kimia’s read is that the system itself stopped working:
“The amount of responsibility and pressure and stress is not matched by the amount of autonomy or pay or benefits that go with it.”
She gives Gen Z credit rather than a lecture. Those of us who grew up inside hustle culture can learn something from a generation that wants a holistically integrated Life. She adds the obvious caveat that wanting the luxuries without the work is not realistic either. The credit goes to anyone who pauses and asks the right question before accepting: if I take this role, at what cost to my health, my relationships, my family?
Two further observations from her, both worth sitting with.
Leaders tend to promote people who are like them. So even as a high performer, the opportunity may go to whoever gets along and does not challenge the room. Whether these systems are genuinely equitable is still open.
And in her own circle, and in what she keeps reading, mid-career women are becoming the largest group of people simply leaving. Friends call her to say they have given notice because they need a reset. She frames it as a culture shift, with hustle culture finally being seen for what it costs in marriages, families, and well-being.
How to climb down the ladder without wrecking your income
This is the practical core of the episode. Santi asked the hard version of the question: where do people who climb down actually go, and what else do they land on?
Kimia says the something else has to exist before you need it. Two things make it possible.
1. Do not let the day job be your only identity
“Do not have your day job as your only outlet and your only identity. Don’t have that as your only network and your only expertise, your only role.”
Keep developing somewhere else, so you have an option. The point is not a side hustle for the income. It is a second place where you are competent, known, and useful.
2. Do not expand your expenses with every raise
Her second rule quietly decides whether you have a choice at all. Every time the title grows, the lifestyle grows with it, and the exit closes a little further.
“If you’re already maxed out where you are and you’re dependent on this role, you’re taking away your own financial freedom. You’re taking away some of your own agency to make change.”
Stepping down hits your identity and your bank account at the same time. You can only prepare for one of those two with a spreadsheet.
3. Build the pathway in parallel, years early
She gave her own worked example. She is an adjunct professor at a local university and teaches a course every Friday night. She gives up her Friday nights now, on purpose, because she wants to move into teaching later.
“I’m already creating that pathway for myself. So I have the credibility, I have the network, I have the expertise, I’ve tested it out to see that I love it.”
Note what that buys her beyond the credential. She has tested the next thing and confirmed she enjoys it. Most people discover that after they jump.
And the part about what people will think
Santi named the real obstacle, which is not money. A senior woman stepping back is still judged by recruiters and by other leaders. Kimia’s answer reframes who is actually watching:
“Most likely they’re probably thinking, lucky her, lucky him, they found a way to get out of the rat race, but they don’t have the courage to say it.”
Her test before you spend any more energy on the audience: are you in a performance space, are you looking for someone’s approval, or are you too tied to the title? People always have opinions. They are not walking in your shoes.
AI: more meaningful work, or just more output?
AI was sold as the thing that would take the boring work away. In many companies, it has become the thing that multiplies output instead.
Kimia traces the dissatisfaction to uncertainty and to rushed implementation. Organizations jump into AI transformations without asking whether it is the best-fit tool, the right use case, or what the value actually is. They also skip buy-in from the people who will do the work and who are quietly wondering whether their jobs will survive the project.
Then the second-order effect lands. Those people burn out on the transformation project because the tool is only as good as the requirements and training you feed it, and they are running their day jobs in parallel.
Her question for any leadership team is the one worth answering out loud: is the intent to free people up for more meaningful work, or to reduce the workforce? Employees can tell the difference, and pretending otherwise damages trust more than the honest answer would.
On the creative side, she is blunt. She loves AI for the manual things it automates and refuses it anywhere near her voice, her violin, or her songwriting. She quoted a friend who is an artist, who put it better than most position papers:
“I want AI to do my dishes and my laundry and pay my bills and be my personal assistant. I don’t want it to create art for me.”
Quickfire round with Kimia Penton
Most overrated career advice: asking your direct manager for performance feedback. They may not have the skill, and the feedback may be biased. Get it from a trusted advisor or mentor who wants to help you grow. If that is your manager, good. If not, their opinion doesn’t define you.
Corporate buzzword to ban: “let’s take this offline”, with “let’s circle back” close behind. Her view: solve it now; that is what the meeting is for. Santi added why it stings. It is often a polite way of dismissing someone’s opinion in the room.
A song that teaches more about leadership than a business book: her own, Red Flag, about dropping blame culture and looking at your own patterns first.
Promotion or six-month paid sabbatical: sabbatical. Side projects she could finish uninterrupted, family overseas to see, and health and fitness to reset.
Finish the sentence: your job title is not “your identity.”
Where this sits in the 4 Productivity Vectors
Two elements of the framework run through this conversation.
Ownership. Kimia’s version of burnout is an agency problem. Stuck, no say, no route out. That is the Ownership vector failing, and no amount of time management repairs it. It is also why sustainable productivity starts with who decides, long before it gets to how you plan your week.
Calmness. Her emotional regulation argument is the Well-Being side of the same coin. Composure under stress is a performance skill, and Santi’s position after 20 years of watching leaders is that panic and shouting are disqualifying.
Santi’s two takeaways from the episode: work has to be enjoyable, because we spend too much of Life there for it to be otherwise. And you do not need to be an A-hole to be assertive.
Three things to do this week
Run the four-question diagnostic. Am I stuck? Do I have agency? Do I feel valued? Is this long-term and hopeless? Answer honestly on paper. If three of the four land badly, the problem is the role, not your calendar.
Look at the last raise. Did your fixed costs rise with it? Every euro of lifestyle you added is a euro of exit options you removed.
Give one evening to the thing that is not your job. Not as a hobby. As the pathway Kimia described, with the credibility and the network attached. You want it tested before you need it.
Frequently asked questions
Can you burn out if you are not working long hours?
Yes. Kimia Penton argues that burnout tracks lost agency more closely than hours worked. People who feel stuck, unheard, and without a route out are at highest risk, even on a normal week. People who work long hours on work they chose often finish energized.
What is conscious unbossing?
It is the trend of professionals turning down promotions into people management. Robert Walters found 52% of UK Gen Z professionals do not want a middle management role, and 69% describe it as high stress and low reward.
How do I step down a level without losing my income?
Prepare two things in advance. Build a second area of expertise, network outside your day job, and keep your expenses flat as your salary rises. Then build the next pathway in parallel, the way Kimia teaches one evening a week years before she plans to move into it full time.
Is staying calm at work the same as being soft?
No. Kimia’s position is that holding a boundary without losing your temper takes more discipline than escalating, and gets results faster. A clear no delivered calmly is still a no.
Listen to the full episode
Kimia Penton leads a global PMO inside a Fortune 10 company, serves as president of the PMI Dallas Chapter, teaches at the college level, and holds a master’s in organizational psychology. She is also a touring singer-songwriter and violinist with two albums, and has performed at stages including TEDx and SXSW. Her book Power, on Purpose: Where Authenticity Becomes Radical Leadership introduces the REAL framework: Reclaim, Embody, Align, Lead.
- Kimia Penton: kimiapenton.com
- Kimia’s music: kimiapmusic.com
- Kimia on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kimiapenton
- Power, on Purpose
- Robert Walters, conscious unbossing research
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