Why Procurement Professionals Get Burnout—And What to Do About It

There’s stress, and then there’s burnout: a state of mental, physical, and emotional exhaustion.

Increasingly, more workers report that they’re experiencing burnout. 66% of American workers feel burned out in 2025, according to Moodle. This number goes up to 81% for younger generations, citing that “they have more work to do and not enough time to do it.”

Tom Mills of Procure Bites experienced burnout firsthand while Head of Procurement at shoe retailer Clark’s. “About twelve years ago, I suffered from generalized anxiety disorder, which I learned was caused by burnout, because I was trying to do too many things. I thought that the way through it was to just work harder,” he says. “That experience is part of what led me to the frameworks and systems I teach today to procurement professionals.”

Burnout can manifest in your work life. Here are some ways you can set up your procurement team and your role to keep burnout at bay.

Why procurement teams are particularly prone to burnout

Procurement teams hold a heavy burden in an organization. Because most organizations expect procurement to be a service or support function, teams feel the pressure to be always on…even if their internal stakeholders inevitably pull them into a project at the very last minute.

Says Tom, “Ideally, procurement should be mandatory in any organization, but the reality is that we’re often a support function, and so we can feel this need to support stakeholders, whether they follow the proper process or not. This becomes a big time waster and energy zapper for procurement professionals, because you’re brought in too late to actually drive value and impact.”

Within procurement, Tom explains, there are often two responses to when internal stakeholders violate established processes:

1. Procurement as a tugboat: “The team will try to row out and help them to add some kind of process when there hasn’t been one,” he says. “This is a huge effort for the team and often requires last-minute work or long hours.”
2. Procurement as a blockade: “The team puts up a wall where they won’t help because an internal stakeholder hasn’t followed the process, or they make the stakeholder start over, which creates stress, tension, and a poor experience that reinforces that procurement doesn’t add value, which isn’t true,” he adds.

Neither of these experiences are great for procurement or for the rest of the team trying to get a deal finished or a new tool added.

How procurement professionals can prevent burnout for themselves and for their teams

We often think of burnout as a personal problem. While there’s certainly strategies and self-care you can do to help with burnout (more on that later), much of what causes it comes down to your organization’s processes and culture. 

Says Tom, “Procurement professionals underestimate how hard the role can be, because very often we are dealing with difficult conversations, whether that’s internally with stakeholders, or whether that’s supply relationships, and dealing with cost increases and negotiating it has an impact.”

Here are four strategies he recommends to set up procurement processes that won’t drain the team’s energy down the line:

Reposition procurement from reactive to proactive

Most procurement teams have a set process, but when an internal stakeholder deviates from it, they’re still left in a reactive position.

Instead, Tom advocates for a third approach when a stakeholder puts in a last-minute request. Rather than turn into a tugboat or a blockade, be the boat’s mast:

• Measure the impact of going without procurement in this opportunity. Does it really need your involvement?
• Assess your options. What can you actually do in the timeframe you have that will help?
• Solve only what can be fixed. Can you delegate a risk area to another part of the organization, like asking IT to help with data privacy or cyber security?
• Transition to adding value to stakeholders who have engaged you at the right time.

“If you follow that framework, you can limit the impact of the teams where they’re trying to force it, and instead focus on the teams where you can proactively add strategic value to their operations,” says Tom.

Implement a self-service framework for internal stakeholders

Do you need to be part of every opportunity that crosses your desk?

The answer may be no, according to Tom. “Very often, procurement falls into this trap where they feel like they must be involved for them to be doing a good job. But if you give stakeholders the right tools, templates, and advice, you can still help them without being directly involved.”

Setting up a self-service framework for certain low-risk requests can really help your team’s workload. “If you want to help a stakeholder, but you don’t have any direct time to do so, this can be the first point of call to automate some of these back-and-forth communications and explanations of the process,” says Tom. “It may not fully remove the request from your plate, but you can at least get further along the process and empower those stakeholders to move forward.”

Keep the lines of communication open

If your team is at capacity, let your stakeholders know.

“I think being really honest with your stakeholders in terms of your capacity challenges may seem radical, but it does make working together go more smoothly,” says Tom. “Very often we feel subservient, and that we just need to help at all costs.”

The same holds true for your teammates. If you’re feeling overwhelmed or that you’ve got too many plates spinning, say something. “We are so heads down sometimes, but actually speaking with your team to understand where your workload is can be so helpful,” Tom emphasizes. He recommends a regular stand-up where each team member can discuss their workload to make sure it’s distributed appropriately.

Even in a fast-paced organization, this type of connection is crucial. Connecting as people first shows your teammates that you care about them, and it’s what will hold your team together when things go sideways. If someone is struggling with burnout—or anything in their personal life, for that matter—they’re not going to deliver their best results anyway. 

Prioritize, prioritize, prioritize

“It might sound obvious,” Tom acknowledges, “But I don’t think enough teams have clear prioritization and planning for what they’re working on. The more you can plan ahead and get a good view of your workflow, the easier it will be when something does come in from left field.”

He recommends that teams spend time away from working on requests at certain checkpoints throughout the year—at least a week, if not longer—to understand the contract management landscape, including:

• What contracts are up for renewal this year
• Where the biggest spend activities are that needs the most support
• What opportunities exist for re-negotiation or spend optimization
• What teams require regular assistance and what is more of a one-off

“Once you know what’s coming down the pipe, you can be very clear what you will support, and what activities will go through self-service,” he says. This does double duty on focusing your team on what activities drive the most cost-savings and puts more institutional boundaries in place so your team can push back on last-minute or low-risk requests.

So you’re experiencing burnout. Now what?

Burnout is a common experience, but it can look different for everyone. 

For Tom, switching to a new role without procurement buy-in made every single conversation feel difficult. “I thought to myself, ‘I’ll just work harder,’ and that only got me deeper into the burnout cycle,” he explains. “It got to the point where I found myself in meetings not able to speak, or I’d have a panic attack before presenting, even though it was something I knew well. It really dented my confidence.”

Other symptoms of burnout might look like:

• A sense of exhaustion, dread, or irritability
• Struggling to focus, even on “easy” tasks
• Feeling detached or numb, like you’re going through the motions
• Physical symptoms like stomachaches, headaches, or muscle tension

While burnout often comes as the result from organizational issues, as we discussed above, there are ways you can stop the burnout cycle on a personal level:

Return to the fundamentals of self-care

Self-care is the first thing to be dropped when overwhelm hits, but doing so can only make it worse. If you haven’t taken any PTO recently, that’s a good place to start. But if you come back from vacation and it feels the same (or worse), it’s time to think deeper about your everyday habits that can set you up for success.

There’s a reason doctors constantly recommend a good night’s sleep, a healthy diet, and exercise—because taking care of our bodies should come first.

“When I was overwhelmed, I didn’t realize I had stopped running, I was eating poorly, and I was so worried I wasn’t sleeping,” explains Tom. “I had lost all of my coping mechanisms.”

In addition to a break from work, Tom also recommends finding a therapist you trust. “It sounds so cliché, but finding someone to talk to really helped me,” he says. “And what a cognitive behavioral therapist will do is they’ll give you coping mechanisms you can use as you deal with situations that arise, so they get easier. Learning and adopting those in my personal life and in my work life helped set up systems and discipline I needed to climb out.”

Separate work and personal life as much as possiblePart of what makes burnout so all-encompassing is that it feels like it’s impossible to take a break. But that’s exactly what you’ll have to do if you want to feel better. 

Tom advises setting very clear boundaries with working, especially with communication. It’s easy to fall into “oh, I’ll just check my emails after dinner,” and suddenly you’re working until 10 PM. Instead:

• Take your work email off of your phone on the weekends, and reinstall the app on Monday morning
• Do not log on to your work email, Slack or Teams, or CLM after 5:30 PM
• Set times that you check your inbox during the day so you’re not constantly trying to respond to emails or messages all the time. Turn off notifications when you need to focus.
• Only respond to emails that merit a response, especially if you’re just cc’d for visibility.

“This all sounds so simple, but you’d be surprised at how much discipline this takes,” laughs Tom. “But by creating these boundaries, it made people respect my time much more, and it meant when I came back to my emails, I could give a more confident, competent, and thoughtful answer.”

Consider the other elements of your life that might be contributing to burnout

Work can be stressful, but if there’s something major going on in your personal life—a move, a divorce, a new baby, lots of business travel, or other caregiving responsibilities—it can contribute to the “too much” feeling.

“When I first experienced burnout, I had just moved my family across the UK for this new role,” adds Tom. “So I had pressure at work, but I also had pressure at home, sorting out the bills, the unpacking, and so on. There was never any break.”

A toxic system vs. individual behavior

If you’re experiencing burnout, should you leave your company? Or procurement altogether?

That decision depends on you. “Sometimes, in a corporate setting, a business can make it feel like we owe them something. But at the end of the day, it’s just a contract in exchange for your time, and you have finite time on this earth,” he says. “If you’re in a job where you feel like all day Sunday you’re worrying about work the next day, then something’s not right. You’ll have to determine whether it’s something you can fix, or if the workplace culture is too toxic to stay.”

Tom ended up staying at Clark’s for six more years after his first episode with burnout. Between support from his HR rep, his manager, and his therapist, he was able to find work-life balance again. Looking back, he thinks of that moment as what led him to his current career path. Says Tom, “In a way, I am grateful that I was able to build these strategies that helped me break my burnout cycle, and I’m hopeful that by sharing these, I can help someone else that’s struggling, too.”

For more procurement insights from Tom Mills, check out the rest of his conversations with Ironclad:

• How to Maximize Your First 90 Days in a New Procurement Org
• Process Before Tech: Why the Fundamentals Matter for Procurement Teams
• The 3 Biggest Challenges Procurement Professionals Faced in 2025—and How to Address Them in 2026

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Ironclad is not a law firm, and this post does not constitute or contain legal advice. To evaluate the accuracy, sufficiency, or reliability of the ideas and guidance reflected here, or the applicability of these materials to your business, you should consult with a licensed attorney.