Burned Out and Managing Multiple Generations? What Leaders Get Wrong About Generational Conflict at Work with Kristin Scroggin

About this episode

Cait Donovan and Kristin Scroggin discuss the complexities of workplace burnout and generational conflict, challenging leaders to rethink their approach to employee engagement.

Workplace burnout makes a lot more sense when you stop blaming generations for the survival strategies they were trained to carry. Kristin Scroggin, founder of genWHY Communications and a leading voice on generational communication in the workplace, joins Cait for a candid conversation about workplace burnout, generational conflict, and what happens when the career you worked so hard to build starts taking more than it gives back. This conversation gets to the uncomfortable heart of burnout at work: success can look impressive from the outside and still feel impossible to sustain from the inside. Kristin’s story shows how resentment, exhaustion, decision fatigue, and disconnection can become burnout symptoms long before someone is willing to name what is happening. What changes when resentment becomes information instead of shame? What becomes possible when you stop treating capacity like a personal failure? Cait and Kristin also look at workplace burnout through the larger forces shaping today’s teams. Generational conflict, employee burnout, leadership burnout, and workplace culture are all tied to the same bigger question: are we building work systems that people can actually…

People in this episode

Host: Cait Donovan

Guest: Kristin Scroggin

Topics covered

• workplace burnout
• generational conflict
• leadership
• employee engagement
• workplace culture

Keywords

• burnout
• generations
• leadership
• workplace culture
• employee engagement
• Gen X
• millennials
• Gen Z

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: genWHY Communications

More episodes of FRIED. The Burnout Podcast

• 350 Episodes In: The Burnout Story I Haven't Told in a While, a #straightfromcait episode · June 7, 2026 · 30 min
• The 4 Behaviors of A Toxic Workplace a #straightfromcait episode · May 31, 2026 · 9 min
• Toxic or Just a Bad Fit? How to Tell the Difference at Work with Leanne Elliott of Truth, Lies, & Work · May 24, 2026 · 55 min
• We’re Expecting the Wrong Things From Leaders And It’s Causing Leadership Burnout: A #straightfromcait episode. · May 17, 2026 · 12 min
• Why Giving Your Best Employees More Autonomy Sometimes Backfires (And What to Do Instead) A #straightfromcait Episode · May 3, 2026 · 12 min
• The Career Structure That's Actually Burnout-Proof (And Why More Execs Are Moving to It) with Ilana Golan · April 26, 2026 · 1h 2m