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.
‘So what is it that you actually do?’ – Stories from a coach and facilitator with a niche job title (Part 2)
I offer coaching, facilitation and consultancy in a wide range of contexts with people in very different situations. But there are some common themes that arise for many clients – these include:
*Burnout and compassion fatigue
*Finding it difficult to express themselves or state their needs
*Feeling stuck in a ‘freeze’ response
*Working out ‘who am I now, and where next?’
*Creating community and finding places where they feel a sense of belonging
These challenges can show up in different ways and different situations, and it’s not always obvious at the outset that these are things that might need some attention. Sometimes, the reason a person comes to coaching is that they’re stuck with a specific issue in the workplace, difficulty communicating with someone in their life, needing support to make life decisions, or because they feel that they need some space to focus on improving their wellbeing.
But when we get below the surface, a lot of the themes that come up for people are human experiences that so many of us share in common. As a species, we’ve evolved to survive and thrive through cooperation, and we can be motivated by a need for belonging. That’s part of the reason that the relational aspect of any good coaching can be so transformative, and it’s also why I often find myself focusing on relationships, communication and what’s going on psychologically, emotionally and somatically in relation to them, regardless of what specific issues a client has come in with. Underneath a fear of speaking up and asking for a specific need (or want) to be met is often a belief such as ‘I’m too much’, ‘I’m not enough’ or ‘I mustn’t risk rejection’, which was likely a result of interactions with significant people earlier in life.