Burnout: A Personal and Collective Reckoning

What our burnout tells us about our organizations

My first experience with burnout was a long time coming, coinciding in timing and substance with Anne Helen Petersen’s 2019 viral article,“How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation.”

I was several years into working at the nonprofit that supports the B Corp movement, and we were growing quickly under the escalating visibility and demand for B Corp Certification. For six of the first eight weeks of 2020, either my wife and I were on the road for work, squeezing in quick catch-ups while trading off solo care of our 2-year-old. We struggled to open our mail, submit reimbursement for therapy, and take our car into the shop. No matter how we tinkered with cutting back, trading off, or outsourcing pieces of our lives, the anxiety and perpetual behinded-ness just kept mounting, as did the accountability and pressure of work.

Then came the pandemic.

In March 2020, I truncated a flimsy attempt at a sabbatical because of COVID-19 to start a new role at B Lab U.S. & Canada overseeing the B Corp community. It was a dream job. For over five years I’d been pouring all I had into the B Corp movement, and it appeared to be paying off.

Then, in December 2020, it came to a screeching halt.

I hit a wall that I’d been racing to at top speed for months (or maybe years?). As my team pushed hard to engage the U.S. B Corp community in the 2020 elections, I decided to walk away.

“Burnout and the behaviors and weight that accompany it aren’t, in fact, something we can cure by going on vacation. It’s not limited to workers in acutely high-stress environments. And it’s not a temporary affliction: It’s the millennial condition. It’s our base temperature. It’s our background music. It’s the way things are. It’s our lives.” — Anne Helen Petersen

It’s been four years since this experience.

In that time I’ve had a sabbatical, another child, two new roles, and a few more grey hairs. After leaving B Lab, I continued to see burnout manifesting around me: burned out parents entering middle age, burned out front line caregivers, burned out trans folks waking up every day to a barrage of news bludgeoning the psyche. Burnout and its symptoms haven’t gone anywhere. The challenges of burnout continue to be endemic to companies just as they are endemic to many nonprofits.

None of us are immune to the internalized impacts of American capitalism.

However, beyond individual burnout we need to discuss the ways that the burnout of people in social impact work is a microcosm for what is happening in our organizations and movements. Since initially writing about the ties between personal and organizational symptoms of burnout, there’s a growing list of writers and thinkers speaking to the systemic origins. As we enter a period of increased challenges for organizations committed to driving forward change, this conversation is critical.

Over the next few posts I’ll explore the anatomy of burnout, looking at symptoms, root causes and interim solutions. In the interim I would love to hear from you: Are you and your organizations prepared to sustain the work for the years ahead? How can you know if your team might be on the path to burnout? And what are you doing to prepare?