What Burnout Denial Looks Like
And why it led us to change the way we think about rest.
Last week, I was meeting with one of the up and coming leaders of our organization, reviewing her department’s performance and her plan for the year. As we talked through things like the emotional toll that operating in a COVID-19 environment had taken on her team, I brought up a touchy subject.
About half way through last year, she got a job offer. A really good job offer. She was approached by a government funded organization (read: big salary & more stability) to take a huge remit (read: supervising & training 1,000 social workers) with a big fancy new title. She turned it down. They came back and said we really want you, think it over again.
While I am confident that our organization provides one of the most dynamic innovative and pioneering environments in the social sector in our city, and probably even the world, I could give her none of the things the other organization had offered her. Instead, I offered her a month off, as a break. At the time, she turned it down stating:
“I am not burnt out. I am really not…”
Of course you already know the end of the story, she stayed. We rejoiced. She accomplished amazing things in a challenging environment and has incredible potential to grow even further. Despite her achievements, I was curious on how she was feeling 6-months after turning down such a job I asked her:
“Do you regret not taking that job?” Her reaction did not surprise me.
“No, of course I don’t regret not taking the job. I love it here. This is my life’s calling. But I was burnt out. I just didn’t know it. I was in denial.”
It’s interesting that the Mayo clinic also lists being more engaged with your job as a risk factor for burnout. Unsurprisingly, “helping professions” and jobs with “low degrees of control” are also high risk for burnout. Nearly all of our staff fall into at least one of those categories and COVID-19 has exacerbated many of those factors.
Last summer, I myself had a truly brutal few weeks. I was covering for my boss for maternity leave. (Anyone who says a CEO’s job is not hard…need only do it for 6 weeks to know the truth). It seemed I was constantly putting out fires. We had very complicated cases, had to cancel most of our fundraising events which put questions around our income, and we were facing a “third wave” of COVID-19, which put pressure on staff and clients alike. The stress was so great that I got sick, I hurt my back, and let’s just say…I could have been a better colleague.
As soon as my boss returned from her maternity leave, I took a week off. I deleted work email off my phone and completely shut down. However, when I returned to work the following week, nothing seemed better. Everything was still frustrating. Everyone else was still doing things wrong. Of course, it was everyone else, and not me, right? I was exhausted, and it was as if I had never even taken a week off. My constant frustration at work started seeping into my home life, which was when I knew that I had to do something different.
The Mayo Clinic has a long list of questions to ask yourself, if you think you are experiencing burnout including:
- Have you become cynical or critical at work?
- Have you become irritable or impatient with co-workers, customers or clients?
- Do you lack the energy to be consistently productive?
- Do you find it hard to concentrate?
- Do you feel disillusioned about your job?
I could answer “yes” to all of the above, and knew that just taking a week off of work was not going to cut it. However, I am lucky that I work at a place that puts high value in the wellness of its staff, and we all pitch in to help out if another is struggling. I put my hand up to say I was struggling and needed a break. So I decided to take a month of leave.
I decided in my month of leave I was going to accomplish 10 goals, like write a novel, read 20 books, spend tons of time with my kids, and reorganize my entire home. Spoiler alert: I did zero of these things in my month of leave. But I had a lot of downtime, I let myself watch bad TV, I answered 6-months of personal emails and I spend some real quality time with my family. I even dusted off my journal and wrote a few entries. I found that what I needed more than anything was to just not be busy.
In his podcast Lead to Win, in the episode “Why Every Leader Needs a Sabbatical” Michael Hyatt talks about the benefits of rest, which he calls essential for our well-being. He lists five good reasons that everyone should take a sabbatical.
- To recharge physically and emotionally- you are more tired than you think.
- To slow down and enjoy being.
- To connect with your sense of purpose.
- To get clarity on your priorities and goals.
- To get on the same page as your spouse.
When I got back to work a month later, I was more patient, more kind, more understanding, and frankly more effective. Our leadership team started reflecting on our own experiences with burnout, we realized after about 5-years in our jobs, we each started hitting a wall. We started asking ourselves “what more can we do to support our staff?”
We are blessed to have several talented pro bono resources available for our staff including coaching, individual counseling, team counseling. However, sometimes those things are not enough. Sometimes, you just need a break. Our leadership team decided to launch a sabbatical policy for all staff who had served at least 5 consecutive years. However, it was not as straight-forward as we originally thought.
We have dozens of employees who have already served 5 years or more and an operational model which is thinly staffed and highly dependent on having enough people to go around. We have licensing requirements which mean that we must have a certain ratio of staff to clients on the floor at all time. If one of those staff is on sabbatical, it literally means others have to do more. Our staff is 95% female so we already have a lot of maternity leave cover, flexibility requirements for caring for aged parents or any special family needs. Taking people out for another month is complicated.
However, we were committed to giving this benefit to our staff, so we spent months working with the various department heads trying to find a workable solution which would not burden the teams more (exactly the opposite of what we are trying to achieve) but still bring the incomparable benefit that taking a sabbatical would have on our staff, and by extension the mental health of the whole organization.
We settled on:
- One extra week sabbatical leave to use within 12-calendar months of the employee’s 5th year anniversary;
- Can be paired with an additional two weeks of annual leave to be taken as a total of three week of leave at once;
- Not to be used during the same year as the employee has taken another extended leave (e.g. adoption leave, maternity leave, etc.); and
- Only one person per department can take sabbatical leave at any one time.
It’s not perfect, but it’s a start. As one of our CORE strategic pillars is building capacity, we must continually challenge how we think about building capacity in our people, systems and infrastructure.
I hope that by sharing our journey as an organization and my personal journey, we can inspire others, even cash-strapped NGOs like us, to think differently about rest. I would love to hear about how your organizations have faced burnout. Please feel free to reach on LinkedIn.
About Mother’s Choice. Mother’s Choice is a charity serving the many children without families and pregnant teenagers in Hong Kong. Follow Mother’s Choice on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook or at www.motherschoice.org.
Follow Rebecca Brosnan here or on LinkedIn.
