Third sector burnout: How can we build sustainable services and treat helping professionals as people first?
For leaders and managers in charities and public services.
Across the charity and public sectors, many professionals are at their edges, resources are strained, and the divide between leadership and frontline teams is widening. Staff are often asked to stretch caseloads and boundaries to breaking point. Words and phrases like ‘burnout’, ‘dehumanising’, and ‘taken for granted’ dominate conversations with exhausted, disappointed workers.
Charities and not-for-profits being asked to do more with less is not a new phenomenon. But the pressures have intensified, and a crucial aspect of how this plays out is the way that those in the driving seat choose to allocate resources, design workloads, and communicate with their staff. The picture can look bleak, but there are choices to be made and space to be taken: re-imagining how we work together to bring about sustainable, meaningful change for service users and the workforce alike.
Essential Skills for Socially Conscious Leadership - Using the Seven Cs Model to Drive Change
In recent years, there’s been a cultural shift in many parts of the working world, from top-down, ‘command and control’ leadership to more socially conscious, collaborative approaches to leading teams. For some, this may still be seen as a fluffy optional extra or an invite to waste precious time by crowd-sourcing decision making processes. But I’d argue that developing leaders who are emotionally intelligent, skilled communicators with good boundaries and socially conscious values is a necessity, not an option. Even now, it’s often still the case that career paths can involve becoming proficient in a specific role, then being promoted into a leadership role on the strength of experience that may or may not require good people skills. If organisations don’t invest in supporting emerging leaders to develop the relational skills necessary to support healthy, happy, successful teams, they risk their people’s wellbeing, the quality of their work and the potential for innovation and creativity. So, what are these skills and why are they important?
Preventing burnout: Coping Strategies for Witnessing Atrocities
If we’re deeply impacted by what we’re observing in the world and moved to try to be part of the change, we must have opportunities to pause, process and get back out there in any way we can. The same is true whether we’re campaigning against systemic violence, leading a project that poses a risk of vicarious trauma or considering how we engage with and communicate about the information we’re able to access round the clock via social and traditional media. Let’s explore how we might prevent burnout, overwhelm, normalising what may once have shocked us, and feeling frozen with guilt or shame.