Soft Skills & Career Development for IT Pros

TW07 The Burnout Equation: Why Smart IT Teams Break — and How to Build Ones That Don’t

August 5th, 2026

9:30am - 10:45am

Level: Introductory Intermediate

Heather Wilde Renze

CTO | Angel Investor | Author

I’ve burned out twice in my career. Both times, I missed the signs -- because I was too busy fixing everyone else’s problems. If you’ve been in IT longer than a few months, you probably know the feeling.

In this session, we’ll talk openly about burnout in tech: the real causes, the hidden signals, and the organizational habits that create “hero culture” and grind people down. I’ll share the frameworks I use today with engineering teams, founders, and CIOs to spot risk early, reset expectations, and build workflows that support humans instead of steamrolling them.

This isn’t a therapy lecture. It’s a candid, practical look at how to build teams that can actually survive the pace of modern IT work. You’ll learn how to communicate boundaries without feeling guilty, design work rhythms that reduce cognitive overload, and create your own “personal runway” so you never wake up one day and think, “Something’s not right.”

By the end, you’ll walk out with a set of tools you can use immediately -- for yourself, your team, or your entire department.

You will learn:

  • The three most common burnout triggers in IT environments and understand how to spot them early.
  • About communication patterns and boundary-setting techniques to use with managers, stakeholders, and end users.
  • How to build a personalized resilience plan that reduces overload and improves long-term performance for you and your team.