Insurance industry burnout is real — especially for managers. Most of them have a lot of balls in the air at any given time. Staring at a never-ending list of compliance duties can easily lead to insurance account manager burnout if left unchecked. Or, a growing backlog of follow-up tasks can leave a sales manager feeling overwhelmed. Meanwhile, work gets bottlenecked, keeping the team from reaching its potential.
Burnout doesn’t just affect work performance — it shapes overall well-being. It creates a pervasive sense of exhaustion, cynicism, and ineffectiveness that can impact a person’s emotional state as well as motivation on the job.
Let’s first look at how burnout affects managers in more depth — especially those in the insurance industry. Then, we’ll explore the best strategies for addressing it.
The Problem of Manager Burnout
Managers stand at a higher risk of burnout than other employees. They’re juggling a huge assortment of balls, often dealing with myriad unrelated tasks that don’t leverage their strengths. Often they spend two days per week on the tasks of an individual contributor and one full day on admin, in addition to their management duties. This leaves them too overtaxed to effectively manage their team, which can cause confusion among direct reports due to lack of feedback and guidance.
Those in the insurance industry are especially prone to burnout. In the Liberty Mutual 2025 Independent Agents at Work Study, 51% of respondents said they felt burned out and 57% reported feeling exhausted both mentally and physically. And 87% of agents say their workload has grown over the past year.
Licensed insurance account manager burnout is a major industry pain point, we’ve found. Clients have high expectations, workloads can grow unwieldy, and the cost of a single mistake is high. When managers reach burnout, they’re more likely to look for a more supportive work environment elsewhere. While 39% of agency employees have considered finding a new job, burnout doubles their likelihood of leaving, the survey found. So, reducing their stress level before it leads to burnout — or addressing the problem if it already has — is critical.
So, how to prevent burnout as a manager (or for the managers on your team)? This begins with delegation skills, as we’ll discuss next.
Best Practices for Taming Manager Burnout
Burnout isn’t inevitable, even when companies are busy. Deploy these strategies to calm manager burnout and keep your team productive.
Utilize My Leadership Delegation Focus Matrix
As a leader, you can use this tool to evaluate how you’re spending your own time. But don’t stop there — walk your managers through how to use the Leadership Delegation Focus Matrix too. By doing so, they can reclaim 10–20 hours per week and increase their effectiveness by 25–35%.
This tool helps a manager break down their duties into four quadrants:
- Those to automate or eliminate
- Those to systematize and hand off to someone else
- Personal growth activities
- Their core priorities that drive the company forward
Then, they can work to protect their time for Quadrant 4 activities — their highest-priority tasks. The goal is to remove all tasks in the left two quadrants from the manager’s to-do list by automating, eliminating, or delegating them.
Set aside a few moments each week to check in with managers about their priorities. If they’re taking on activities outside of the right two quadrants, offer a gentle nudge to reprioritize.
Hire an Executive Assistant for the Manager
Focus on putting people into support roles to handle responsibilities that don’t require the manager’s skill set. By offloading some of the duties that don’t play to their strengths, you can help managers tame their schedule and reduce overwhelm. In turn, you’ll help ensure they stay with your company for the long term.
Essentially, a good executive assistant (EA) can act as an operations manager for a specific function. While the department manager focuses on interpersonal duties, the EA can keep daily operations running smoothly. And they can protect the manager’s time for their highest priorities. A good EA will check in routinely with the manager to find out the types of weekly and daily support they need.
Filter Out Repetitive Tasks
Help managers filter out recurring tasks that they don’t actually need to do themselves. For example, an EA can help simplify the manager’s role in meetings by taking responsibility for scheduling, note-taking, and follow-up. The EA can schedule staff meetings, take notes during them, and send a summary of the meeting and action items to the team. Then, they can check in with each person about next steps, sharing reminders like these:
- What deliverables they’re responsible for
- When they need to complete them
- What the definition of “done” is for those tasks
Then, everyone will be on the same page and the manager won’t have to do all of this single-handedly. During the meeting, the manager can outline a clear workflow with specific timeframes and deadlines for project deliverables to keep everyone on track.
The EA can use a note-taker too during meetings to streamline this task and help ensure accuracy. Utilizing a product like Plaud or Claude, they can generate an outline of key topics, points, and agreements made.
Streamline Employee Evaluations
A lot of managers have to do periodic evaluations with employees. Choosing a standard questionnaire template to use for each assessment will make the process easier. This will also help ensure fairness, focusing on the same points for each employee. Then, managers can focus on analyzing performance data and preparing key points.
A note-taker tool can be extremely useful here as well. Managers can use it to generate key takeaways from the meeting with their direct report. As they help the employee create a personal development plan, this tool can also provide a succinct list of action steps.
Offload Report Compilation
Most managers don’t mind looking at reports, but they hate compiling the data. They’re relationship people first and foremost, so drafting technical reports feels tedious and difficult. Those two areas of work each use a different side of the brain and a completely different skill set. A manager might be good at analysis; they can infer conclusions from the data and come up with recommendations. But enlisting someone else to gather data and compile the reports will help reduce overwhelm.
The manager can specify what format they want the report to be in, noting which data to include. The EA can then take it from there. After reviewing the data, the manager can jot down key conclusions and recommendations, then ask the EA to put them in narrative form.
Get Support for Compliance Tasks
When your focus is scattered and you’re trying to keep up with every aspect of the business, important things can fall through the cracks. An EA or virtual assistant (VA) can help you stay compliant—here’s how.
EAs and VAs are excellent at keeping documentation in order. Put them in charge of following up with clients to get forms signed, inputting data into your system, and similar tasks. When busy managers try to handle these things on their own, they might procrastinate or just run out of time to do them. And usually, they’re not as detail-oriented as a virtual assistant or EA — or they don’t have the time for that level of attention to detail.
Instead, let the EA or VA own these tasks. Give them checklists of compliance duties to work through, creating different lists for common situations like onboarding clients or renewing policies. Managers will feel less stressed, and fewer balls will get dropped.
Use Automated Tools for Certain Tasks
Smart tech investments can help combat insurance industry burnout, according to the Liberty Mutual survey. Tools that help streamline communication with customers are especially helpful, it found. Tools that facilitate real-time binding or self-service options can also help pare down a packed taskload, letting managers focus on core priorities, the survey report notes.
As mentioned, automated note-taking tools can reduce unnecessary work for managers (and their assistants). I’ve begun using automated tools to streamline my own work. With the podcast I’ve started recording, I use the tool Plaud to pull key highlights from conversations with guests. My executive assistant, Xie, will then use them in social media posts. The tool flags key points pretty well, so neither of us have to sift through the entire interview to find them.
Scale a Healthy Culture
Your company culture plays a huge role in mitigating burnout as well. Scaling a healthy culture centered on strong relationships, wellness, and mutual support will help relieve overwhelm. Create an environment where people can ask for help when they need it. Showing appreciation for managers’ work will also reduce stress, so let them know the value they bring to your company.
As you take action to reduce managers’ overwhelm, you’ll help prevent burnout and let them contribute at a higher level. In turn, they’ll get more from their team, since they’ll be functioning as a leader rather than just treading water. Share strategies for how to prevent burnout as a manager as well, like unplugging from technology after work, and make sure you don’t contact them with work requests during their down-time. By taking these steps, you’ll foster a far more motivated and engaged workforce.
Want to talk more about how an executive assistant for a manager can help tame overload? I’ll be happy to discuss how our clients have enhanced their whole team’s performance by bringing an EA on board. Book a discovery call to get the conversation started!