There's No 'I' in Burnout

This was the title of a recent newsletter by Johnathan and Melissa Nightingale at Raw Signal Group, a Canadian leadership consultancy.

Whilst the whole piece is worth reading, a lot of it’s power is captured in those five words. You could write them in giant letters on every internal HR memo on mental health. 

And there have been a lot of these memos recently.  Widespread pandemic burnout has been extensively covered in the press and it’s likely a topic of discussion in your workplace.

Those five words are an important reminder that when we do discuss it, burnout is almost always an organisational issue.   Although, as the newsletter acknowledges, some may not want to see it that way.

‘When someone on your team says they're burning out, it's a little bit tempting, in your inside voice, to feel like you've identified a person who can't cut it.’

But actually, when someone tells you they’re burnout out, what they’re really telling you is:

‘This is a company that burns people out."

It’s likely a problem that requires structural solutions, not a mental health webinar or a yoga class.  

This is evident from the Maslach Burnout inventory, a psychological assessment of burnout as defined by the World Health Organisation.

As Cate Huston recently summarised, according to this framework, the six causes of burnout are:

• Lack of control
• Lack of reward
• Absence of fairness
• Lack of community
• Conflict in values
• Work overload

Most of these factors are outside the control of the individual employee.  

So if burnout is an issue on your team, listen carefully to those signals.  Don’t focus on the individual, and try and work out where the organisational pressures are and what role you can play in alleviating them.