Whose job is it to prevent burnout?
I've been thinking a lot about the challenges my coaching clients share with me. Among them are unreasonable expectations, long hours and competition over scarce resources, real or perceived. It's clear overwhelm and burnout are widespread concerns among those committed to building a more just and sustainable world. We all know people who have quit their jobs seeking more balance or chose to retire earlier than they’d planned. Perhaps you also know a few who have left the social sector altogether.
On a recent Co-generate webinar on burnout, the host polled the 800+ social sector participants on the chief causes of workplace pain they experience. Their responses:
Feelings of overwhelm--not enough time (54%)
Perfectionism (39%)
Overwork—routinely working outside normal work hours and feeling exhausted (38%).
Indecision (30%)
Unrealistic timelines/deadlines (25%)
The burnout phenomenon is partly the result of the pandemic’s Great Resignation and Great Retirement (of Baby Boomers) and the labor shortage they led to. It’s also the result of decades of social sector organizations and leaders ignoring systemic oppression in their workplaces. We now know that unaddressed oppression fuels unhealthy organizational dynamics such as overwork from perfectionism, a sense of urgency and other characteristics of white supremacy culture. A paradigm shift is needed to transform how the work of social and climate justice is being done, as we’ve learned over the last few years. Additional insights include the following:
A January 2023 Chronicle of Philanthropy article, “Here Come the Nonprofit Unions,” documents the growing trend for nonprofit employees (mostly younger ones) to organize themselves into labor unions to bargain collectively for better working conditions, higher pay and putting the “walk” in the “talk” of diversity and equity initiatives. Such social justice organizations as the Southern Poverty Law Center and Amnesty International have gone through unionization, generally not without pain for all parties, as described in the piece. Decades ago, I left a highly dysfunctional nonprofit workplace after five years. I was not surprised when I later learned that the staff had succeeded in forming a union to raise and standardize salaries and address egregious workplace issues.
In an August 2022 piece in Stanford Social Innovation Review, “The Upside of Nonprofit Burnout,” author John Hagan writes that it’s time for a sector-wide reboot of how we do social change work, including abandoning the 20th century notion that “time is money.”
Addressing his remarks to social sector boards and executives, he says, “Perhaps our 21st-century mantra should be 'time to think is more precious than money.' Give people time to develop a real solution to a problem, and revenue will follow. Too many nonprofits have this backward—grow revenue first, then we’ll solve the problem. It’s too easy to create an illusion of success with successful fundraising.”
This January 2023 piece in FastCompany, “Four Leadership Trends to Watch in 2023” argues that, after decades of focusing on such organizational benchmarks as revenue growth (in for-profits) and mission impact (in non-profits), it’s time for leaders to recognize their responsibility to prevent toxic workplaces: “Now, organizations are also responsible for taking care of the physical and mental well-being of their employees,” says David Rock, cofounder of the NeuroLeadership Institute.
His argument: “Over the past three years, we’ve all been through intense collective experiences: a pandemic that disrupted our sense of safety in so many ways; repeated tragic episodes of police violence and mass murder; a war in Ukraine; an insurrection in the U.S. Capitol and more. This combination of both discrete and prolonged experiences has left us trying to recover from something called collective trauma—which goes beyond immediate bodily reactions to trauma and includes our memory of traumatic events that we discuss or recollect as a way to make sense of what we’ve all experienced. This has exacerbated burnout, challenges in accessing mental health, and prompted many people to reevaluate what’s important in their lives.”
Rock emphasizes the importance of workers feeling psychologically safe at work. A key to achieving this is to understand that every person’s brain works differently and design for this “neurodiversity.” Next time, I’ll share some other strategies for leaders and others to transform themselves as they strive to make a noticeable dent in the big challenges facing our planet and society.