I used to manage a consulting team of 25 people. At the time, I had two young daughters, both competitive dancers who needed to be at the studio six days a week. Thanks to a great husband and friends who also had dancers, my carpool duties were one workday a week. Every Monday, instead of leaving the office around 5:30 p.m., I had to leave at 3 p.m. I could have snuck out quietly or scheduled a “fake” meeting every Monday afternoon. But I was the boss, so I wanted to use the opportunity to send a strong message about how we make work “work” in our lives.

So every Monday at 3 p.m., I would stand, wave enthusiastically and announce that I was off to drive the dance bus. Everyone knew that meant that I was reachable by phone, but they would have to talk loudly over the minivan full of tweens singing along to Taylor Swift. Or, they could find me back online after 8 p.m. But what was more important was that they knew I believed in using the flexibility of a consulting job to make time for what matters. They knew I was focused on adding value for clients, growing our business and working profitably; if those things were true, then more hours, more activity and more outputs were a waste of everyone’s time and energy.

I came to refer to this practice of broadcasting my departure as “leaving loudly.”

Today, my girls are grown and flown, my husband and I run our own consulting firm, and I don’t need to explain to anyone why I’m leaving early. Still, I try to leave loudly, modeling healthy, effective practices that help teams achieve amazing things together. Let’s talk about why leaving loudly is more important than ever and what you could incorporate into your leadership development programs to encourage it.

Why Leaders Need to Leave Loudly

The managers sitting in your training rooms are leading teams full of stressed, overwhelmed and burned-out people. Employees blame the workload, but most managers don’t see the real issue; there’s little evidence that a truckload of work is being produced. They need you to help them think differently.

It’s not the workload that’s wearing employees out. It’s the thoughtload. Thoughtload is the invisible tax on performance caused by rising cognitive demands, increasing emotional burdens and declining energy reserves. It’s all the things on top of the work that employees have to cope with. As the invisible tax of thoughtload increases, employees feel exhausted and managers feel perplexed at why. The reason is that the thoughtload is reducing productivity, quality, creativity and collaboration. Managers need your help to see this distinction between workload and thoughtload. And then they need your support to address it.

Lowering thoughtload requires focusing distracted attention, processing their triggered emotions and restoring depleted energy. Doing so liberates the mental space and the motivation to work more effectively. The truth is, managers have the highest thoughtload of anyone. And as managers carry that heavy load, they create a huge wake that makes their employees less effective and role models all the wrong choices.

What Leaving Loudly Looks Like

As a learning leader, you have an opportunity to help managers alleviate their thoughtload while modeling healthy behavior. We need to teach, coach, inspire and support managers in imposing boundaries on their thoughtload and enforcing them openly so others do the same.

We started with a story about work-life boundaries, and those can be very powerful: sharing when you’re leaving early to attend a kids’ soccer game, announcing a midday vet visit or broadcasting that you’re taking the day off for your mom’s birthday. But it’s more than that.

One opportunity for managers is to model healthy boundaries about what gets their attention and what doesn’t. That might mean explaining to their team why they declined a meeting invite, sharing a habit of starting the day by producing something rather than by opening emails or using set office hours for folks to pop in rather than having an open-door policy. Helping managers connect their attention to their unique value and showing them how to translate that into deliberate choices about what gets their attention and when is an essential starting point for modeling effective thoughtload management.

Thoughtload is more than just what’s sitting in our attention; it’s also about what’s triggering us and causing emotional reactions that can spread to others. The second way that managers need our help is to better recognize when they aren’t in the right emotional frame to be constructive and to leave loudly. We can help them with self-awareness, emotional regulation and productive conflict. We must support them with the language to share their emotional experiences vulnerably but without eroding their accountability. The more managers make it psychologically safe to set boundaries and process emotions, the more their teams will learn to do the same.

Finally, leaving loudly is about enforcing boundaries on how long we can and should work without rest, recuperation and reflection. So many managers are trying to sprint a marathon and their teams are trying to keep up. The result is more errors, reduced productivity and impacts on both physical and mental health. We need to educate managers about how the human machine works — that more isn’t better and that rest can boost productivity and creativity, not erode it.

That team I managed taught me so much about modeling healthy boundaries. Recently, I was talking with a member of that team. He’d been an intern in the summer of 2008 and has since become a highly successful author, speaker and culture expert. Of all the things I modeled as his first corporate leader, what he remembers is a day when we were all working on a difficult project with declining returns. I stood up and announced that we were stopping for an hour, and I was taking the whole team for ice cream. That’s what he remembers: that I modeled the importance of rest, of play, of connection. I’m glad we all left loudly that day.

L&D leaders have an opportunity to help managers understand that it’s not the workload that’s overwhelming people; it’s the thoughtload. Therefore, designing learning programs that encourage managers to set healthy boundaries benefits leaders, their people and ultimately, the entire organization.