PIC No. 26:
• Title: The Burnout Challenge: Managing People’s Relationships with Their Jobs
• Authors: Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (Nov. 15, 2022, 272 pages)
• Management Bucket #9 of 20: The Team Bucket
Welcome to Issue No. 26 of PAILS IN COMPARISON, the value-added sidekick of John Pearson’s Buckets Blog. This blog features my “PICs”—shorter reviews of helpful books—with comparisons to other books in my 20 management buckets (core competencies) filing system.
“It might be good if I got hit by a bus.”
Just when you thought you knew a few things about burnout—and how to fix it—along comes an extraordinary book from Harvard University Press. Someone on your team MUST read The Burnout Challenge: Managing People’s Relationships with Their Jobs, by Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter.
Confession! I skipped to Chapter 6, “Rewards,” to get a taste of the book—and immediately found value. “Understanding what gratifies and what irritates regarding rewards can save workplaces a great deal of time and trouble.” The authors warn, “People do not automatically embrace reward systems. To resonate with people, it is important that awards or celebrations fit with other aspects of their lives and have credibility.”
I wish I had known this, when I led Christian Management Association (now CLA) and we inaugurated the "Annual Meatloaf Award!” (It could have been a tad more meaningful, I now realize.)
Example: The authors spotlight a university department’s annual spring picnic for the staff. When the staff admitted the event was rather ho-hum (perhaps bordering on irritating!) the new department chair probed further. The result: “…the money was spent on some new carpeting in the staff lounge and one of the employees volunteered her nearby apartment for what turned out to be a more pleasant and delicious lunch for everyone.”
Brilliantly combining research with mini-case studies, the authors raise the red flag about today’s workplace. Chapter 1, “Working in the Burnout Shop” is must-read. Gratefully, these two psychologists (Christina Maslach is the cocreator of the Maslach Burnout Inventory) allocate more pages to the solutions than to the problems—but don’t skip their thoughtful and alarming diagnosis of our workplaces. Oh, my. "Quiet quitting" is the least of your worries.
“Rewards” is one of six mismatches that create burnout issues. “In recent Gallup polls, majorities of American workers rate their jobs as mediocre or bad. Globally, the situation is even worse, with only 20 percent of employees reporting that they are engaged with their jobs.” And in Britain? “The only thing they associated with more unhappiness than working was being sick in bed.” (Hmmm. Plan A or Plan B today? Yikes.)
The six mismatches are Workload Overload, Lack of Control, Insufficient Rewards, Breakdown of Community, Absence of Fairness, and Values Conflict. “Poor alignment in any one of these six areas increases the risk of burnout.” Worth the price of this book is the “Assessing Your Own Relationship With Work,” a 30-item assessment in the appendix. With five questions for each of the six mismatches, the authors invite you to score yourself on three levels:
[ ] JUST RIGHT. “If things on a given dimension are just right…”
[ ] MISMATCH. “If a certain dimension is incompatible with your preferred way of working…”
[ ] MAJOR MISMATCH. “If a quality is a major departure from your ideals…”
Example: A statement in the “Values” section reads, “The potential of my work to further what I care about.” What response would you check?
In defining burnout, the authors describe it as a “triumvirate.”
• Crushing exhaustion
• Feelings of cynicism and alienation
• And a sense of ineffectiveness
They add, “The burnout syndrome occurs when people experience combined crises on all three of these dimensions, most of the time. They feel chronically exhausted; they have withdrawn mentally, socially, and emotionally from work; and they have lost confidence in their capacity to have a constructive impact.”
When a team member seems to be experiencing burnout, does your shop help or hurt the situation? The section on “Blaming the Victim” is must-read also. If your organization has created a “culture of fear” so that any legitimate push-back on workload is seen as “whininess or evidence of personal weakness,” there are ways you can fix this dysfunction without stigmatizing team members. (Did I mention…must-read?)
There's so much more:
• “Remember that popular saying…about people working in adverse conditions: ‘If you can’t take the heat, then get out of the kitchen.’ It is helpful to help people cope by figuring out how to adapt to the heat. But why not also figure out how to turn down the heat to a more reasonable temperature?” (Read “It’s the Canary and the Coal Mine.”)
• The four significant psychological factors highly relevant to job-person match: psychological safety, fairness, meaning, and positive emotions.
• And finally…these two thoughtful authors deliver an insightful eight pages on the difference between “equality” and “equity.” The example: the design of public restrooms at large venues. Also, read about the universally hated “distinguished service award” and why administrators missed the deeper impact (issues of moral mismatches, such as fairness and values).
• And speaking of fairness where employees working under unfair conditions “quickly develop a high degree of cynicism,” I’d suggest you also read a contrarian view on fairness in Dennis Bakke’s Joy at Work: A Revolutionary Approach to Fun on the Job (see Book #21 in Mastering 100 Must-Read Books). Bakke believes that “Fairness or justice means treating everyone differently.”
SING ALONG! The authors mention a workers’ song from the 1800s which I had to google! Enjoy this one-minute ditty performed by Pete Seeger, “Eight-Hour Day.” Or—depending on your job mismatches, you may prefer Johnny Paycheck’s "Take This Job And Shove It” (7.5 million views), or Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” (58 million views!). Whoa! People hate their jobs!
And…who would have expected a book on burnout to include the classic John F. Kennedy aspiration to put a man on the moon (and bring him back safely!)? In the chapter on values, the authors note “that Kennedy’s communication of this objective featured four ‘sense-giving’ aspects that enabled NASA’s employees and the many contractors they engaged to see stronger connections between their daily work and NASA’s space exploration purpose." Another must-read chapter!
Oh, my. There’s so, so much here—like the consultant (high salary in a low ethics firm) who told his wife, “It might be good if I got hit by a bus. I don’t want to die, but I’d like to be injured long enough that I’d have to stop working for a while.” (What are the team members in your “burnout shop” telling their families and friends?)
This is required reading. Who on your team should read this book first?
PAILS IN COMPARISON: Reading this book reminded me of several other must-read books in the Team Bucket, plus other buckets/core competencies.
[ ] Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done, by Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton with Anthony Gostick (read my review)
[ ] Road to Flourishing: Eight Keys to Boost Employee Engagement and Well-Being, by Al Lopus with Cory Hartman (read my review)
[ ] The Carrot Principle: How the Best Managers Use Recognition to Engage Their People, Retain Talent, and Accelerate Performance, by Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton Gostick (read my review)
[ ] Blind Spot: The Global Rise of Unhappiness and How Leaders Missed It, by Jon Clifton (read my review)
[ ] Remote, Inc.: How to Thrive at Work . . . Wherever You Are, by Robert C. Pozen and Alexandra Samuel Gostick (read my review)
[ ] Necessary Endings: The Employees, Businesses, and Relationships That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Move Forward, by Dr. Henry Cloud (read my review)
To order from Amazon, click on the title for The Burnout Challenge: Managing People’s Relationships with Their Jobs, by Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter. Listen on Libro.fm (7 hours, 48 minutes). For more book reviews, visit John Pearson’s Buckets Blog and subscribe to Your Weekly Staff Meeting. And thanks to Harvard University Press and Fortier PR for sending me a review copy.
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