Leaders Who Last While Working with Humans

Burnout in 2025 hits different. The workload is heavy, sure. But that’s not what’s breaking us.

It’s the fact that every conversation feels like a transaction. Every meeting can feel like a pitch. Every interaction is another moment to brace yourself, smile politely, and perform. It’s giving relational poverty and it sucks.

For HR and Procurement leaders especially, vendor meetings can feel like one more sales gauntlet to run. For consultants like me and vendors like Vera, the pressure is intense to say all the “right” things, all day every day.

Personally, I think the answer to burnout isn’t fewer meetings necessarily… but more human ones. I propose that the right kind of connection actually gives us back time, clarity, and emotional bandwidth.

My conversation with swag expert and empathy ninja Vera Minot reminded me of something essential: when we treat vendors and clients as partners and humans, we’re rewarded with strategic insight, unexpected joy, and here’s the kicker… actual capacity in the tank.

Strategic Vulnerability as a Burnout Disruptor

Throughout this interview series, leaders keep naming it: burnout in 2025 feels isolating, overwhelming, and deeply depleting. I’m starting to believe one of the main culprits is a chronic overexposure to transaction-focused relationships.

That’s why my company’s burnout prevention framework includes a skillset called Strategic Vulnerability: practices that help leaders restore emotional and relational capacity, build trust, and prevent the kind of quiet disconnection that slowly burns us out.

Vera and I opened our conversation with a Strategic Vulnerability exercise we both use in vendor and client meetings: Love / Loathe / Suck / Superpower. It’s one sentence for each. What do you love doing? What drains you? What’s just not in your wheelhouse? And where do you shine?

This deceptively simple tool works because it lets us drop the mask, without crossing the line. Time and time again, that moment of grounded honesty is where real partnership begins.

When Clarity Feels Better Than Performance

After we share what we’re great at and what we suck at, it clears the path for a powerful question Vera often asks her clients and vendors:

“What part of your work are you great at, and where do you fall short? How do you handle that for clients like me?”

That kind of clarity is a burnout disruptor in and of itself. And it’s emotional intelligence in action.

Because here’s the truth: a vendor who can’t admit their own limitations probably isn’t a great match for a values-aligned leader. And a client who pretends to have it all figured out will miss out on the kind of support that actually lightens the load.

The Hidden Cost of Transactional Relationships

When we perform leadership, rather than lead from who we really are, we drain capacity without even realizing it. That performance mode shows up in meetings. In sales calls. In every interaction where we think we need to be polished, perfect, or “on.”

As we’ve seen in other interviews, like with CEO coach Terry Flores or leadership guide Diana Charbonneau, this pressure to perform is one of burnout’s sneakiest buddies. Add in a lack of clear communication, and the cost multiplies.

How much time, energy, and budget do we waste because no one said what really needed to be said on those calls?

When every conversation is transactional, we don’t just lose joy. We lose the information we need to actually prevent burnout.

What Real Partnership Looks Like (Even in a Swag Order)

At the beginning of new client relationships, Vera doesn’t just ask about branding and budget. She asks about communication styles, conflict recovery, and what “being let down” usually looks like in their world.

She radically acknowledges what we usually pretend not to know:

Mistakes will happen. And how we handle them matters more than whether they happen at all.

This kind of emotional fluency doesn’t just prevent drama. It builds real working relationships. Relationships where deliverables improve, misunderstandings drop, and teams actually enjoy the process.

One of my favorite moments from our chat was Vera’s version of a perfect kickoff question:

“Tell me what would chap your bum, so I can try really hard not to do that.”

If you’ve ever left a vendor meeting feeling depleted, you might try starting the next one with:

“This is what I