“The tsunami and the team” – Burnout and overwork in in-house creative teams

About the Event

In-house creative leaders have always dealt with too much work and not enough resource. That’s not new. What’s new is that the ground keeps moving.

Workload was already unsustainable. Then came the restructures. Then came AI—not just as a tool to figure out, but as a question about whether in-house creative functions have a future at all.

There’s no moment of stability to recover in, because there’s no moment of stability. And through all of it, your team is still expected to produce good work, stay motivated, and not fall apart.

Burnout in that context isn’t a failure of resilience. It’s a rational response to an irrational situation. And the people who can actually do something about it are the leaders in the room—not by fixing the tsunami, but by giving their teams enough clarity, stability and control that people can still do good work and stay intact.

In this session, we will be joined by Inside Out Advisor, Creative Leader and Coach, Michael Storey, who will look at what’s actually driving burnout in in-house creative teams right now—and what leaders can do about it that makes a real difference.

Themes covered include:

• Why the standard burnout model doesn’t fit what’s happening right now
• The specific ways in-house creative teams are exposed—beyond workload
• What burnout actually looks like before it’s obvious, and who’s most at risk
• What you’re probably doing that makes it worse—without realising it
• The actions that change conditions rather than just cope with them
• What it looks like when you get this right
  

Benefits of attending

This Mastermind gives you the chance to work properly on something you’re probably already dealing with.

In one focused hour, we’ll look at

• What’s actually driving burnout in in-house creative teams right now
• What you might be doing that makes it worse without realising it
• What useful action looks like when the conditions won’t stay still. 

You’ll leave with a clearer picture of what’s happening and some concrete things to do, not a complete toolkit, but enough to make a real difference.

About the Mastermind

Our Inside Out Masterminds give in-house creative leaders the chance to go deeper on the challenges they’re living with every day with a speaker who’s been in the room and knows what the job actually involves.

About our speaker

Michael Storey has spent nearly 30 years inside the creative industries—as a practitioner, studio leader, creative and branding head at FTSE100 level, and more recently as a consultant and advisor to global brands. He’s led in-house creative teams through exactly the conditions this session covers, and he’s seen the same pressures repeat across enough organisations to know what’s structural and what’s fixable.

He’s also a trained coach—qualified through an ICF-accredited programme—which shapes how he thinks about people under pressure, not just performance and output.

If you want someone who’s done this job at scale and will give you approaches that work within real constraints, this is worth an hour of your time.