Leadership in Mental Health – The Mental Health Minefield

Leadership in Mental Health Burnout

Did you know that Burnout is now an official category of Psychological diagnosis, known as Occupational burnout?

Today we are going to look at what exactly is burnout (particularly in the workplace) and how we can be resilient to it.

Firstly, let’s look at what burnout is.

‘Burnout is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. Burnout refers to phenomena in the occupational context and should not be applied to describe experiences in other areas of life.’

Drivers of Burnout are:

1. Excess stress is mediated by long hours. Fatigue and work compression as well as the intensity of the work environment
2. Loss of meaning at work (from decreased support, increased responsibility, without autonomy and flexibility)
3. Challenges in institutional cultures: perceived lack of peer support and professionalism)
4. Problems with work-life balance

‘The world breaks everyone and afterwards many are strong at the broken places

Ernest Hemmingway

Burnout Signs and symptoms:

1. Emotional Depletion – feeling frustrated and finding it hard to deal with others at work.
2. Detachment/Cynicism – being less empathetic with others, detached from work, seeing objects/sources of frustration
3. Low personal achievement – experiencing work as unrewarding, ‘going through the motions.’
4. Depersonalization – thoughts and feelings seem unreal or do not belong to oneself.

Okay, now moving on to what we can do in the workplace to help with burnout.

Let’s chat about resilience?

‘Resilience is the ability to know where, how and when to use your energies to improve things for yourself and how to recruit help in that endeavour.’

There are 3 layers of workplace resilience:

1. Individual resilience – managing throughout life
2. Interpersonal/ team resilience – Designing jobs around employees needs
3. Organisation resilience – Organisation design

Skills to build resilience for the workplace:

1. Guard your thought life
2. Know when to ask for help
3. Work-life balance
4. Practice healthy inter-dependence with others
5. Attend to physical and emotional health
6. Know when and how to say NO! Put boundaries in place

Skills to build workplace TEAM resilience (Rehm):

1. ‘Elbow room’ for decision making
2. The opportunity to learn (ability to set goals and accurate and timely feedback)
3. Variety in the content and pace of work
4. Mutual support and respect
5. Meaningfulness
6. A desirable future

In summary – what is resilience?

1. Bouncing back
2. Adapting under pressure
3. Thriving despite or because of pressure
4. Being strengthened or improved by adversity
5. Positive emotions
6. Emotional flexibility
7. Positive response to change
8. Ability to foster good relationships
9. Control over own workflow
10. Ability to establish a sense of community at work

Watch the FREE WEBINAR below as we discuss these points in more detail.

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