Boundaries as Leadership Infrastructure

Twitter
Boundaries as Leadership Infrastructure

Lauren explains how clear boundaries reduce burnout and support sustainable, regulated teams.

Lauren shares how clear boundaries serve as vital leadership infrastructure, helping regulate teams, reduce anxiety, and prevent burnout. She explains how predictable limits build psychological safety and support creativity and sustainable performance, while unclear boundaries lead to over-availability, resentment, and exhaustion.

She also offers practical guidance on system-level boundaries like response times, recovery periods, escalation protocols, and shared agreements, encouraging leaders to start by tightening just one boundary to support long-term sustainability for both themselves and their organizations.

Sign up for the University of Pennsylvania Behavior Breakthrough Accredited Course

Learn about the Staff Sustainability System a proven system to reduce burnout at the root

Resources:

Clockwork by Mike Michalowicz
Gino Wickman

Other related resources from Five Ives:

Blog Post:

Podcast:

Our Online Programs:

Subscribe to our mailing list and find out more about Stress, Trauma, Behavior and the Brain!

If you’re looking for support as you grow your organization’s capacity for caring for staff and the community, we would love to be part of that journey.
Schedule a free discovery call and let us be your guide

As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.

---

Transcript:

Lauren Spigelmyer: We're talking about boundaries today and how when you have a lack of limits or unclear even limits, how that is going to really propel your team into burnout, a little bit of resentment, some reactivity. But the good news is I am going to talk about some ways that leaders who stay in or are aware enough to help themselves get back into a regulated place are more adept at designing boundaries that help to protect like the safety of the people, just like safety, like psychological safety and their energy and their mental capacity and all of that collectively helps to stabilize the team as a whole and that moves us towards the mission. So, boundary is super important, but they have to be super clear too. So, let's talk about that. They are honestly one of the the most significant organizational stabilizers. So, let's talk about why they're so important and why they are a part of the piece, a piece of…regulated systems. If you want to have an organization, you're to run a business with people who are regulated, who maintain emotional control, work through conflict, communicate well, resolve problems, problem solve creatively, think creatively, produce vision support. Like, all the things that we want and need in an organization involve regulated systems and regulated systems need boundaries. And that's because what boundaries do, healthy boundaries, clearly communicated boundaries, they set limits. They give predictable edges. And sometimes people don't like to feel like they're inside of boxes, but what their nervous system does like is a predictable edge. And they may cross over the edge and that may or may not be okay, but at least they know where the edge is. If they don't know where the edge is, they will always be in fear or anxiety that they're getting too close to the edge or have crossed it or maybe the opposite, but the nervous system is able to stay in a more regulated place, access more regulated place, and just remain in a neutralized, calm space when the limits are known. If people have to kind of guess at the boundary line, or the boundary has been set in an unclear way, that anxiety comes into play. There's some confusion, then resentment builds, and ultimately you arrive at burnout. So , it seems like a relatively easy thing to put in place to prevent some of the things from happening that we really don't want to happen.

Lauren Spigelmyer: Also in leadership, especially in the Western world, like here in the United States, and I think it's even more so on the East coast, you'll see when there's a lack of boundaries, there's almost like an over availability and it's a really obvious sign of a stress pattern in an organization. So, there's almost this expectation of leadership might be over available. But then there's this expectation that staff are over available too. So, it's always on culture. You always check your messages. You always check your emails. You have to respond on the weekends or on Friday night or whatever, whatever it is. And maybe no one's saying that, but because there's such a lack of boundaries, that's the assumption. Which really increases anxiety because you feel like you can't ever just relax or disconnect from the work because you feel you have to always be on. So. What happens then too, is this stress and resentment builds and then leaders have to absorb some of that stress instead of containing it. And they could have just contained it from the very beginning if they had set clear boundaries. I think, too, what happens is to make up for the confusion, then we make ourselves overly available. And as a leader, might make us think that others will think that we care more if we are kind of always available or always on. And I think that employees think that if they are always on, that they... care about their work a lot. And you can care about your work and still have boundaries. It's the lack of care for self that becomes the problem.

Lauren Spigelmyer: When your boundaries are unclear, they start to erode. And there are some warning signs to this. When there is frequent and regular communication outside of work hours or weekends, that becomes like a normalized thing, normalized pattern, normalized thing. And when one person does it and there isn't a clear boundary around it, especially if leadership is doing it, then the unwritten expectation is that we all have to. Also, you'll see when conflict comes into play and there needs to be anything that's escalated, it's unclear how to resolve the conflict. It's unclear how or when or where or why to escalate. And when staff constantly live in a space and a culture of an organization where they are unsure when to rest, or even if rest is truly allowed, burnout is going to to impact them and impact the organization. See a lot of turnover, see quiet quitting, the exhaustion. Even if people love their job and don't want to their job, they love the work they do and they even love the organization. The reality is like their physical body can only handle so much. You have to rest. The nervous system has to go back to equilibrium or we get stuck in these, like, stabilized, dysregulated states. And I wouldn't say stabilize is a good thing. More so meaning that you get stuck in these dysregulated states, whether it's like a heightened dysregulated state or disconnected dysregulated state, and it becomes your stable state. It's not stabilizing. It's actually very, like, quite the opposite, but because your body and your mind and your nervous system gets so used to functioning in that upper or lower zone, it just becomes normal to function all the time. So, this is where people say like high functioning survival. It's high functioning upper tier of the nervous system. People can produce well and look like they have it all together, but the reality is like internally, inside their system is burning out, whether they want to address that or see it or not. It's happening. It's just how our cellular systems work.

Lauren Spigelmyer: So, what we want to do is we want to reframe boundaries because boundaries will protect people's capacity, mental capacity. It will also reduce anxiety and in doing so and having clear boundaries and communicating them clearly, it begins to increase trust if trust was at all eroded. And it's a sustainable model because again, if you are always on and you're not resting and you get stuck in that state, you're bound to at some point crash and burn. That's just the truth and the situation. So how do we... set boundaries, name boundaries, have boundaries, create boundaries, and frame it in such a way that we care about our work in this organization, but we care more about you as human beings. And the ironic thing is when you do have boundaries, especially like work hours and weekends and things like that, if people aren't always on and they actually have time to rest, they can produce more, faster. They have greater mental capacity. they have greater access to creative thinking. If they are always on, they don't have the ability to rest and kind of reset to kind of like refill themselves to do that work well. So, they'll end up spending more time doing a task because they have such drained mental capacity. But if they had just rested, they would have been able to move through that faster. We think about like, literally think about, if you've seen, the diagrams or videos or anything like the neurons and the synapses, like, shooting off and firing and wiring together. Think about like if that cellular network was like underfed, under slept, under hydrated and how the cells would almost become like pruney or like dried out vines or like just like, yeah, I'm trying to like think of this visual, like what's the best visual? Almost like a piece of dried fruit even. So, it becomes all wrinkly and it doesn't function well and it doesn't fire, continue to fire well, cause it needs the rest, the hydration and the food. But if it plumps up and it has more energy inside of it, it's gonna fire, fire, fire, fire, fire. And the wiring's an electrical magnetic happenings in those cells are gonna happen much faster much better ultimately without leads to it's just greater mental capacity I could just you think more clearly you think faster your problems all better. So going off a little bit of a tangent there, Scientifically, that is why boundaries are so important and why protecting people's energy is so important why allowing people to rest is so important,

Lauren Spigelmyer: So, what does it look like to have boundaries at the system level? like here are some buckets around where you would maybe set boundaries with system level support. Response time expectations and being so realistic about that and being, like, duly realistic like, okay, what's the response time during business days and hours and, like, what's the response time on the weekend? Hopefully no response time unless an emergency and hopefully we recognize like what truly is an emergency. Also, protected recovery time and honestly recovery time embedded even if just microdoses into the day itself, into the routines of the day. Because you can't just go eight, nine, 10 hours, even seven hours and just burn it out and do that five days in a row. You need protected recovery time embedded in the day. So, what does that look like for your organization? What does that look like for your team? And how does it become a routine and a natural kind of preventative habit? When there's conflict, when there's a breakdown of communication, when there is a need for escalation, very explicitly clear escalation protocols. What are your SOPs? If you don't even know what SOP is, that's probably a problem to begin with. SOP, standard operating procedures, like what are the steps? When I first started my consulting firm a couple years ago, many years ago, one of the first things I, I can't remember the books, I think like Gino Wickman, I think. Clockwork and what else does he write and some other SOP based books and business practices I often thought about, I'm creating all these things and I'm bringing on some freelancers and I'm hiring some people to do some part-time work and I'm starting to share these things with them. I need SOPs, need, like, models where I can teach them how to do this without always being present. And if they leave for other work or get ill or I get ill that everybody has access to... these systems that explained how to do things so that anyone coming in could pick up and learn the work quite quickly and be able to do it really well. So, there were lots of organizational files of like, here's a system for this and here are the steps for this and here's the video for this and here, so that everyone knew where to go, how to do things and we could recover quickly when there were breakdowns. Also, really, this is a big one I feel like is missing at the system level is shared agreements around boundaries. It's not just the leadership creating the boundaries and enforcing them and no feedback, no collaborative creation, getting feedback on certain things, asking how we're doing with them, asking them to co-create them. A lot of those things are helpful because once we forget what it's like to be in their role, so we give them the opportunity to participate in all of that.

Lauren Spigelmyer: Ultimately, what I would encourage you to do is kind of think about where are your weaknesses in your team or organization? Where can we tighten up the boundaries? Do I even have boundaries? Where do I have boundaries? Maybe even listing this out of like, here are my current boundaries. Here are some places I think that we need boundaries. When I go back and I look at my list of like here are my current boundaries, do I need to like circle any of those, tighten them up a little bit and know that clear is kind, unclear unkind. So, clear boundaries communicated well. It's not just about enforcing them and catching people. It's about, I care about you as a human being, and I'm this boundary for you and for me so we can sustain this work and we can move towards the greater mission of what we're doing. So ultimately, pause for a second and just think about some of the systems level, team level, organization level boundaries that need to be set or need to be cleaned up and then move from there to your own leadership. What boundaries are you modeling in the organization, but maybe even in your own personal life that are affected by work? Or maybe the better question is what boundary are you failing to model? And then think about if you had to work on one boundary right now, whether it's personal or organizational or team level systems level, what boundary do you think would most support long-term sustainability for you or the organization? And maybe it's one for both. Maybe it's one for you. Maybe it's one for the organization. Tackling all of them at once, probably not a good idea. Definitely not a good idea. But starting with one, especially maybe one with self. and then moving into systems level or starting with system level and going to self, but picking one boundary to tighten up, to focus on, get some feedback on, co-create on, and then have very clear communication about. Ultimately, if you're like, I don't really know, I'm kind of stuck with this, I would use AI and have a conversation, a collaborative conversation back and forth with AI about, okay, I work in this type of entity, I'm in this type of role and here are some So areas that feel like we can improve. I'm wondering as a leader, if I need to tighten up any of my boundaries, if I need to set new boundaries for myself and for my system, can you help me come up with some types of boundaries that people set that are that lead well or where people often fall short with boundaries in this type of work and using the data that people have put out into the ethos to see where you might not even realize that boundaries are needed because you didn't even think about that area. So, it can be a good practice to just have a conversation back and forth with AI to determine where some boundary areas might be.

Lauren Spigelmyer: All right. If you're like, hmm, this is an interesting thought and conversation. I haven't really sat with boundaries at my personal or organizational level. Jessica and I are always happy to support this work. We love every level of like, tightening up things in the organization and leadership and in frontline to help build a system of sustainability. So, that is exactly what we did. We built the Staff Sustainability System. So, if you want to learn more about that type of work and how to bring that into your organization or how to integrate that into your own role, go to fiveives.com, F-I-V-E-I-V-E-S.com, backslash, nope, not backslash, well, I'm not gonna give you the whole URL code. Go to services and the first tab on services is the staff sustainability program. Plus, if you're on the main homepage and you scroll all the way to the bottom, you will see our on-demand resources and there are a handful of different on-demand resources there for different entities. Even a course that we have in partnership with the University of Pennsylvania that is running right now, next course will run this summer. And that actually talks a lot about boundaries as well, but specifically for educators and preventing burnout in education and mitigating the effects of challenging behavior. So, feel free to check out our Behavior Breakthrough Program in partnership with Penn that is on that homepage on the On Demand section.

Lauren Spigelmyer: When you listen to this today, I would genuinely love to hear and learn that you have paused after this episode and made an actual list of boundary areas or had a conversation with ChaiTPT or just took one actual step that is beyond just hearing the information and actually applying it. And if you desire, feel free to tell us about that in the comments below or message us through FiveIves.com. We'd love to hear. And until next episode, I'm Lauren Spigelmyer. Thanks for joining me.


Categories: : Emotional Regulation

© 2026 Five Ives