Avoiding burnout …

There are a lot of questions being posed on edutwitter at the moment by teachers and school leaders asking about how to switch off, how to forget about work and relax, how to avoid burnout.

One of the most innovative thinkers on leadership development, Nick Petrie, is concluding a two year programme of research into how successful leaders maintain high levels of healthy and high performance and avoid depletion, despite significant pressure and stress.

For him, the most effective solution is simple. It is to stop working. But of course, we can't do that, both because we need the money and because we don't want to. Our work is important to us.

So we have to find a compromise.

For some, even that realisation - that there are two polarities; work and not work - is an instructive start, because then it becomes obvious there's a choice to be made about how to live and work in a way that strikes a healthy balance.

What Petrie has found is that there are five key factors that drive either an optimal experience of work or the sort of toxic experience that leads to burnout.

Values alignment - the question to ask yourself here is whether your current work aligns with your own most important values. And this isn't about the espoused aims and priorities of your work; the things your school or the school system overall says it holds dear. This is about its actual aims and priorities; the way it actually works and the impact it actually has. This is a really important consideration for people who work in schools at the moment, because there is quite a lot of window dressing going on, to say the least. What Petrie found backs up a lot of prior research: that when work and personal values are misaligned, people become frustrated, cynical, disengaged and susceptible to either leave or burn-out.

Intrinsic motivation - the extent to which your work supports a sense of being in control, being good at what you do, and being in connection with others is key driver for motivated you feel to do it. People who are motivated at work give a lot more than those who aren't, but - importantly - they also get a lot more back in return, including energy. On the flipside, when work is not motivating - when you have little or no sense of control, efficacy or connection - you may still give a lot but you will get very little back in return above and beyond a cheque at the end of each month. This kind of energy deficit is unsustainable and inevitably performance will decline and the risk of burnout will increase.

Balance between routine vs growth focus - there will some things you do at work that you could do with your eyes closed. You do a great job with these and are confident about your performance, but you learn nothing. When you spend most of your time on these routine tasks, you deliver results but you also plateau. You're just treading water. On the other hand, there are tasks that are new, innovative and maybe slightly scary. These involve some risk and lots of learning, and you're likely to fail quite a few times before you succeed. If most of your work involves this sort of activity, your confidence is likely to be low and your anxiety quite high, but you're growing and developing for the long term. There is an optimum balance between (or mix of) these two types of activity that drives your experience of work.

Risk of depletion - another key question to ask yourself is the extent to which you are working in unsustainable ways. The most important factors to consider here include how well you switch off at the end of the day, how preoccupied you are with work matters outside of working hours, how much you link your self-identity with your work, how you prioritise your own needs against the needs of your job or those you serve, and how much you engage in hobbies and activities other than work that recharge you. If you are good at these things - if you do switch off, are not preoccupied, and so on - then the research suggests that you can work hard without much risk. But if you are not so good at these things - if like many of those I work with in schools, you give too much of your-self to work, prioritise the needs of colleagues, students, Ofsted etc above your own needs, and so on - then you will be operating in the ‘red zone’ and need to adjust your course.

The earlier you do these calculations, the better. Your career can and should be a long game so you should learn how to play it in a healthy way.

If you'd like to discuss this more and perhaps explore whether coaching or other forms of support might help, please get in touch.