Why Good People Burn Out in Good Organizations: Jess Pettitt Interviews Me About Mismatch

Preorder Mismatch (out October 27, 2026): https://caitdonovan.com/mismatch

"I just, for the first time, realized that I'm not actually in a toxic workplace. I'm just in a bad match." From an email a coaching client sent me.

For almost three years, a woman in one of our UNFRIED coaching cohorts kept calling her workplace toxic. Then she listened to my episode on what "toxic" actually means according to the research, and she sent me that email. Nothing about her job changed that weekend. What changed was the story. The blame and the finger pointing dropped, and a much more useful question showed up: where's the mismatch?

That question is the whole book. Burnout isn't a personal failure, and it isn't always a bad company. It's a symptom of a mismatch between a person and the place they work, and it's not the only symptom. My new book, Mismatch: Why Good People Burn Out in Good Organizations, comes out October 27, 2026, and this week my friend Jess Pettitt, Hall of Fame speaker and author of Doing Good Better, turns the mic around and interviews me about it.

We talk about how a book about burnout stopped being about burnout, the cold email that turned into a book deal, why somebody could have built me a utopian workplace and I still would have burnt out, and the Mismatch Index I built so organizations can find the gap without ever weaponizing the results. We also get into why there are zero books on how to be a better employee, why leaders are being told to act like therapists, what it would look like to stop top-downing and start middling out, and why the one page I'd keep from the whole book is about interoception. (Yes, pee when you need to pee.)

Key Topics Covered:

How a book about burnout became a book about mismatch, and why mismatch underlies all of our people problemsThe cold email that turned into a book deal, after I'd self-published my first bookBurnout as a party of one: when you're the solopreneur and also the boss you should be blamingWhy a utopian workplace wouldn't have saved me, and how the coping mechanisms that made me successful (hello, hyper-independence) turned on meBurnout, attrition, disengagement and quiet quitting as symptoms of the same mismatchThe Mismatch Index: an assessment that shows which part of the gap is systemic, which part is leadership, and which part is you, and why companies only ever see aggregate resultsWhy we default to blame, and why every book on the shelf is about being a better leader and none are about being a