Retention & sustainable performance consulting
Keep your best people at their best.
Burnout rarely announces itself. It looks like your most reliable leader getting a little quieter each quarter. Brightwork Leadership helps companies redesign the conditions behind burnout so you can keep the strong leaders you already have.
The slow fade
It doesn't look like collapse. It looks like your most dependable people fading in place.
The recruiter calls first
Burned-out high performers rarely complain — they have options. One day they take the call, and replacing them costs one-half to two times their salary by Gallup's conservative estimate, before you count what walks out with them.
Long before they leave, they've left
The expensive stage isn't the resignation — it's the invisible year before it, when your best person is still on payroll but has stopped bringing you their best. Disengagement is burnout's down payment.
Perks haven't fixed it
Because perks don't touch the causes. Wellness apps and pizza Fridays can't fix overloaded plates, unclear priorities, absent recovery, or managers who were never taught to see the signs.
The approach
Burnout is a system problem, not a willpower problem.
We don't teach your people to be tougher. We fix the way their work is designed — and train their leaders to keep it fixed.
Workload by design
Capacity told truthfully, priorities made unmistakable, and a kill-list for the low-value work everyone knows shouldn't exist.
Managers who see it coming
Burnout has early signals. We train leaders to read them and act months before the resignation letter — the single highest-leverage skill in retention.
Recovery as an operating norm
Recovery that depends on individual willpower loses to workload every time. We build it into how the team actually runs — norms, not slogans.
Every cohort ends with a capstone: your leaders present their sustainable-team operating plans — workload redesign, the kill-list, recovery norms — directly to senior leadership. You don't get a report about the change. You watch it.
The Quiet Burnout — Executive Brief. The pattern, the warning signs, and the three questions to ask your leadership team this quarter. Eight pages, no form to fill out.
Read the brief (PDF)Programs
Company-sponsored. Burst-format. Measured, not motivational.
Start here · Detect
Detect: the two-week burnout read
One anonymous, research-grade survey across the teams you're watching, read back to you in the room fourteen days later. Where the risk sits, what's driving it, and an honest call on whether it's worth doing more. The fee credits toward an audit within 90 days.
$2,500, fixed
Full program details →Diagnostic
The Burnout & Retention Audit
Anonymous survey plus confidential listening sessions across your teams, synthesized into a findings-and-priorities report presented to leadership. Know where you're actually leaking — before the exit interviews tell you too late.
from $7,500
Full program details →One-day workshop
The Quiet Burnout
A working session for your leadership team: the system view of burnout, the early signals your managers are missing, and the audit questions you can start asking Monday.
$8,500
Full program details →Flagship cohort
The Sustainable Leader Program
A 12-week cohort for up to 12 of your people-leaders: workload design, early-signal reading, recovery norms, peer pods, 1:1 coaching — closing with the operating-plan capstone presented to senior leadership.
$48,000 per cohort · up to 12 leaders
Full program details →Open cohort
The Sustainable Leader Program — Open Enrollment
The same 12-week program with seats sponsored by multiple companies — ideal when you have one to three leaders who need this now, with a cross-company peer network built in.
$5,500 per seat
Full program details →After any cohort, the Alumni Circle keeps it running: quarterly masterclasses and a facilitated peer circle for your graduates, $6,000 per company per year. How it works →
About
Operator, not outsider.
Brightwork Leadership was founded by Faye Bonomo, who spent 18 years inside high-intensity technical industry — most of it at a Fortune 500 industrial technology corporation — as a product manager, marketing director, and builder of teams that didn't burn out.
The name is a promise. On a ship, the brightwork is the metal that stays bright because someone deliberately maintains it. People are no different — and hoping they stay bright is not a maintenance plan.
Faye Bonomo · Founder
- Built and led a 17-person team to 95%+ engagement, three years running — engagement is burnout's opposite pole, and this is the receipt.
- 18 years in demanding technical industry — instrumentation, flow measurement, industrial products. Ran the teams, hit the numbers, kept the people.
- Led teams through acquisitions and organizational change without losing them.
- Workshop design and facilitation as a career-long craft — not a slide deck.
Next step
Start with a conversation.
Thirty minutes. Bring the names you're worried about losing — or just the sense that your best people are running on empty. We'll tell you honestly whether an audit, a cohort, or nothing at all is the right next move.
