Stop the spread
Some of the leaders I coach think their burnout just affects them. That’s understandable. When we’re miserable, we focus on our own frustration first. Yet, burnout and the emotions around it are contagious.
One of my professors once told a story of a job he had raising money for a senior center. He knew he had to leave, he said, when one day one of the residents fell asleep, face-first, in a bowl of cereal. The staff couldn’t stop themselves from laughing about it. Including him.
The stress and exhaustion of caring for elderly people had taken its toll. As a group, staff had distanced themselves from their clients and depersonalized the care they were providing. They had become cynical, jaded, and callous.
In other words, burnout had become central to the organization's culture.
How did this start? Most likely, it started with one or maybe a handful of people who had become disillusioned and frustrated in their work. Gradually, their burnout spread to affect everyone else.
Burnout spreads in this way because of the structure of the human brain. We’re social creatures, after all, and our brains have adapted to the task, using what are called mirror neurons.
Mirror neurons were first identified in monkeys in the 1990s. Studies conducted by neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti found that the neurons in monkeys that lit up when holding or eating a peanut would also activate when a human experimenter did the same.
Humans have similar structures in their brains, as well, and they’re extraordinarily important. Mirror neurons bind people together by helping them attune their emotions with one another. They also allow for social learning to take place, allowing us to mimic the behaviors of others.
Mirror neurons are great things when they help spread positive emotions, bond children and caregivers, or help us learn language. But they can just as easily spread toxic emotions and promote antisocial behaviors.
This phenomenon is called emotional contagion, and if you’re struggling with burnout, we can take three lessons from it.
First, your burnout doesn’t end with you. Chances are, if you’re feeling burned out, your frustration and cynicism is probably leaking out to other members of your team and organization.
Second, your burnout likely doesn’t start with you, either. That is, your burnout might actually have originated in the frustrations of others within your organization, and you've caught the bug, too.
Third, we need to see burnout as systemic, not individual. That means we need to help leaders notice how the patterns in themselves connect to patterns in their workplace, distance themselves from those patterns, and, over time, find ways to heal those dynamics for themselves, their colleagues, and the people they serve.
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