Collaborate, Customize, Commit: A Three-Pronged Approach to Combat Burnout

Sophia Zaia | December 2023

This is an excerpt from Breadth and Depth, the PowerLabs newsletter. Sign up below to get the next edition in your inbox.

I recently wrote to you about the factors that generate workplace burnout. I personally find this research helpful because I have contributed to conditions that led to burnout in the past, without realizing I was doing so.

The Causes of Burnout

As leaders, we can set the stage for burnout in our workplaces unaware, simply because we don't know its causes. Overwork is the most infamous culprit, but research has found that a lack of autonomy or other conditions are frequently the ones to blame.

When we misattribute the cause, we may end up blaming the person experiencing burnout. In the words of burnout researchers Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter, authors of The Burnout Challenge: Managing People’s Relationships with Their Jobs, people often treat burnout as "a sign of weakness, failure, and incompetence, no matter why it occurred."

When things are not going well in a workplace, there tends to be a lot of finger-pointing and blaming of specific other people or groups. Put-downs such as "the workers don't have what it takes" or "the bosses don't know what they are doing" are all too common. While it may be easier to cast blame or responsibility on individuals, this limits what questions are asked and what answers are given. This person-only point of view is typically adopted regarding burnout, and also regarding its opposite, work engagement, which is often perceived solely as an individual inclination toward enthusiasm or commitment… This tendency to focus on the person rather than the situation turns out to be a basic feature of human perception and understanding. (emphasis mine)

Seeing burnout as an individual problem only undermines our ability to adequately address it in our workplaces. People experiencing burnout are like canaries in a coal mine. They may have been the first to sound the alarm, but their burnout results from an incompatibility between their needs and the workplace environment, rather than something uniquely flawed about them as individuals.

According to Maslach and Leiter, the six primary causes of burnout fall under three dimensions:

Capability: This includes your (1) workload, and the degree of (2) autonomy you have as you confront challenges at work.

Social: This includes social recognition and (3) rewards, as well as (4) community, including your relationship with your colleagues, supervisor, and any constituencies you work with. Negative social interactions drain people's energy, and burnout can be contagious.

Moral: We do our best work when the work environment feels (5) fair, due to the "presence of respect and impartial processes," and our (6) values are aligned with our goals and means for achieving them. This dimension can be harmed by compassion fatigue or the moral injury of having to do things that conflict with our values.

I wrote more details on the six causes of burnout here.

Solutions to burnout

Maslach and Leiter recommend a three-pronged approach to addressing workplace burnout, which you can remember as the three C's: collaborate, customize, and commit.

Collaborate

To find solutions that will truly work for everyone, it's important to consider the perspectives of everyone on staff as you evaluate the problem and design interventions. This is in lieu of top-down prescriptions or plans made in isolation by senior leadership or HR.

You can check for people/workplace mismatches on the six dimensions of burnout using collaborative tools such as the Maslach Burnout Inventory and Areas of Worklife Survey. These staff-wide surveys can be administered externally (by third parties such as PowerLabs) or used internally. If you decide to use them, check out this article for ways to do so ethically.

Customize

Maslach and Leiter do not recommend one-size-fits-all solutions because the causes and potential paths to address burnout are unique to each workplace (and may be specific to a given team or role). Instead you can use the insights from your collective conversations to design an approach that fits your context.

Here are some examples of ways organizations could address burnout caused by a lack of autonomy.

Manage for Commitment Instead of Control

Command and control is an outdated approach to management that focuses on compliance instead of increasing ownership. This can lead to surveillance and micromanagement, such as telling people exactly what to accomplish and how to get there rather than providing support and latitude for creative problem-solving.

Under this management style, the people doing the work don't have decision-making power. They are expected to "follow orders, not make suggestions," and the predictable result is they deliver "minimum acceptable performance," as described by Harvard Business School professors J. Richard Hackman and Richard Walton.

An alternative approach is to manage for commitment, a style that pushes authority downward to involve the people doing the work in decisions that affect them.

Involving people in decision-making can improve decision quality, increase commitment to the plan, and build an organization's strategic capacity.

P3 Lab, a multidisciplinary research institute at Johns Hopkins University, defines strategic capacity as "the ability of an organization or movement to adapt to changing power dynamics in ways that help it move closer to achieving its goals… [built by] making choices around two big areas: the ability to learn and adapt your resources to meet the moment."

P3 has identified eight components of quality decision-making that can build the strategic capacity of an organization. These are in place when:

  • The organization tries to engage people from across the organization in decision-making

  • People feel authentically involved when invited to participate in a decision-making process

  • People at all levels are involved in developing organizational and campaign strategy

  • The organization has transparent ways to decide who is involved in decision-making

  • People have a clear understanding in advance of how decisions will be made in moments of uncertainty

  • People feel comfortable with how decisions are made

  • People can see how decisions are connected to the organizational mission and longer-term strategies

  • People at all levels feel comfortable with disagreement and dissent

Learn more about strategic capacity and get an assessment and debrief workshop guide.

Managing for commitment also involves a coaching approach—listening to direct reports and helping them uncover solutions rather than jumping to giving advice or orders. Learn more about why a coaching approach is better than command and control.

These two things together (decision-making involvement and a coaching approach) help increase autonomy, which the experts say reduces the likelihood of burnout.

Commit

Maslach and Leiter stressed the importance of sustaining the effort over time and being ready for occasional bumps along the way that may require adjustments. This need to sustain the effort is part of why designing your solutions collaboratively is so important—if people see the value of the goal, they will be more willing to keep trying, despite roadblocks.

The Role of Leadership

Leaders are uniquely responsible for addressing the causes of burnout because they are positioned to move initiatives forward and give them the backing, priority, and resources they need for success. But I want to be clear—leaders don't need to accept all the blame for workplace burnout. Many of us have worked in burnout shops our entire careers and may not know another way is possible. Nor do leaders need to confront the challenge alone. In fact, according to Maslach and Leiter, the strongest solutions are found collectively.

Everyone experiences workplace issues from a different vantage point. Therefore, every individual can provide unique perspectives on what's not working and potential solutions.

I also want to acknowledge that these things are easier said than done! They may involve challenging, slow-going work, and you may need to bolster support around yourself for the journey ahead. Setting attainable goals, including focusing on a few small wins early on, can help people see what is possible and boost morale.

To close:

Our overall goal should be to design better job environments that will produce better job outcomes at all levels. When the relationship between workers and their workplace is functioning well, then the former will thrive, and the latter will succeed—truly a win-win situation. (emphasis mine)

If you want to read the book to learn more about the roots of workplace burnout and potential strategies to address it, you can find it here.

If you'd like support to reduce burnout in your organization, contact [email protected].

Sophia Zaia is an Associate Consultant at PowerLabs where she specializes in improving the effectiveness of staff and volunteer teams. 

She has experience both leading and coaching self-managing volunteer teams, mid-level teams and senior leadership teams at the Sunrise Movement, on Jessica Cisneros' 2022 campaign for Congress, and in the fossil fuel divestment movement. 

She directed the Sunrise Movement's distributed voter contact program in 2020, resulting in more than six million phone calls made and more than one million postcards sent through efforts organized by a self-managing team of fifty-plus volunteers in their teens and early twenties. You can read more about it here and here.

Do you want to work together?

PowerLabs helps changemakers make change - internally, organizationally, and in the world - using an approach grounded in the sciences of teams and motivation. Thousands of organizers worldwide use our methods to design and wage high-participation, high-commitment campaigns that build power and win.

We have a few spots available for coaching and consulting clients. A little info about our experience and our specialties is below. Email [email protected] if you’d like to explore working together.

Randall Smith has worked with dozens of organizations to use evidence-based approaches to building high-commitment, high-participation member-powered campaigns. He has coached and advised organizers to:

  • Develop and run a campaign that resulted in 600 visits to Congressional offices and a day of action with 700 events. The campaign led to the passage of legislation in both the Senate and the House and garnered support from 70% of incoming first-year members of Congress.

  • Build a political education, skill-building and action program that created hundreds of student walkout teams.

  • Create dozens or hundreds of member teams advancing the organization’s strategy in their community.

  • Build their organization’s capacity to adapt, learn, innovate and win in complex and uncertain environments.

Organizations he’s worked with include Free Press, IfNotNow, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, Missouri Organizing and Voter Engagement Collaborative, Movimiento Cosecha, Showing Up for Racial Justice, and Sunrise Movement.

Randall is available to coach, advise and consult on building strategic capacity and developing organizing programs where members take on significant leadership and responsibility.

Sophia Zaia is a former Distributed Director at the Sunrise Movement. In 2020, she led a phone bank program with fifty volunteers aged 12-early twenties across six teams, who organized thousands of volunteers to make six million dials and send one million postcards for progressive candidates. She also served on the senior leadership team at Sunrise, where she supported leadership teams at Sunrise as they aligned on their purposes, goals and work practices.

She is currently supporting an organization focused on voter registration to improve their team effectiveness and increase the scale, impact, and leadership development capacity of their organizing program.

Sophia is available to coach, advise and consult on:

  • Improving team structure, decision-making, and other areas to make it more likely that the team achieves its purpose, contributes to the growth and learning of team members, and gets stronger over time,

  • Personal growth, effectiveness and leadership, and

  • Distributed organizing programs that build self-managing teams of volunteers that reach their goals, contribute to the leadership of volunteer leaders and have fun in the process.