Burnout and the Mobilisation of Energy

By Annamaria Garden

Burnout and the Mobilisation of Energy is a radical new book. Its main objective is to help working individuals or organisations to get out of burnout and keep out of it. Further, it helps them to activate or mobilise energy.
If you are burnt out or on the slippery slope to burnout, this book will transform you. If your organisation is blocked in terms of energy, this book can transform your organisation.
It is based on research, theory and practice. It clearly describes what burnout is and what it is not. It is not depression, stress, depersonalisation or anxiety. It is, however, based on a key symptom: an extreme form of energy depletion.
Two concepts explain the core findings: a Gestalt concept called an ‘introject’, and another that Carl Jung called ‘enantiodromia’. These elaborate terms help us identify what burnout is, what causes it and how to get out of it.
The book also focuses on mobilisation of energy in the organisation. Using a psychological framework, it illustrates what happens when organisations get psychologically mixed up. This leads to a feeling of spinning wheels and crossed wires.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Jun 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781398401907

Annamaria Garden

Annamaria Garden is an independent organisational consultant. She has over twenty years’ experience in the field of organisational and personal transformation. She has experience running her own practice in London, gaining a reputation for being creative and leading edge. She has a PhD from MIT in Boston and served for nearly five years in the faculty of London Business School. She now lives in New Zealand and has authored five books.

Book preview

About the Author

Annamaria Garden is an independent organisational consultant. She has over twenty years’ experience in the field of organisational and personal transformation. She has experience running her own practice in London, gaining a reputation for being creative and leading edge. She has a PhD from MIT in Boston and served for nearly five years in the faculty of London Business School. She now lives in New Zealand and has authored five books.

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the memory of my half-brother, Mike McClennan.

Copyright Information ©

Annamaria Garden (2021)

The right of Annamaria Garden to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781398404007 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781398401907 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published (2021)

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd

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Canary Wharf

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E14 5LQ

Acknowledgement

The illustrations have, once again, been expertly done by Neil White.

Excerpts from Reading the Mind of the Organisation have been reproduced with permission from Taylor and Francis as have excerpts from How to Resolve Conflict.

Introduction

Once upon a time, a woman got out of bed and hit a wall. She could barely walk or talk because it used up her energy too much to do these activities. This woman, myself, was experiencing burnout. The phone rang and I knew not to answer it because I wouldn’t have the energy to speak. I crawled from my bedroom to the living room because I couldn’t walk.

What did I do with myself? I waited for the tiredness to go. I lay down for most of the day, every day. I was self-employed so I could choose what I did during the day. I went, occasionally, to an acupuncturist to try and get my energy sorted out. She made me feel worse so I stopped. I stayed lying down for about six months and then departed to live in the USA for another six months as part of my work. My time there went reasonably well, but I was still too tired. I went back to the UK, and by then had started to write my first book. I decided to do this because I couldn’t function as a full-time business consultant anymore while I felt the way I did. The book took me three years and it helped, but was quite tiring to do. Eventually, I ended up in hospital where they diagnosed me as having exhaustion from overload from overworking.

I stopped doing anything much because ‘anything’ was still exhausting me. I know, with hindsight, that the indignity of ending up in hospital triggered my subsequent wellness. But the diagnosis may have been inaccurate. Burnout, which I knew it to be, was not the same thing as exhaustion from overload. I was aware of this because I had done my PhD on burnout. I knew from this that burnout was more complex than overwork. It involved the latter but there was more to it than that. I knew it because I was still burnt out, even after years of not working too hard by writing my book.

I decided to draw together what I did know about burnout.

First, I had to know when and where the burnout process had started. For me, it was while doing an intensive 12-month MBA at Cranfield School of Management, UK. There, I worked doubly hard at everything. I subsequently went back to my MBA years to do my research for my PhD on burnout. I knew I would find burnout cases there. But, for me, it was the start of the process. By the end of the MBA, I was tired beyond compare. I went straight on to do an intensive PhD in management (specialising in organisational behaviour) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I worked like a Trojan for my first year, working seven days a week and often well into the night. I was feeling burnt out most of the time, hence my exploration of the concept of burnout in the first place. I found myself, one day in my second year, drawing up a daily 6-month calendar of what activities I would be doing on each day. I got to my birthday and halfway into writing activities in advance for the day, I realised I should be taking that day off. Then, I sat back and thought that the real problem was that I hadn’t given myself any days off at all. Was there pressure at MIT to work that hard? Only a little. No one else was working that hard. I redid the calendar, giving myself a day off a week.

However, this intervention didn’t work completely. It was good but I needed more.

By the time I got to the third year of my PhD, I was catatonic. Unable to fulfil the full requirements of a teaching assistant role, I couldn’t read a newspaper, only the headlines. If I read the whole paper, I would be tired for the rest of the day. What did I do? Lay down and rested. It took months to get my energy levels back, somewhat. I had taken to going to the movies once a week. That helped. I tried eating more nutritious food. That helped.

When I finally got up from my sick bed and started to function, I was a different person. I was no longer interested in becoming an academic. I wanted to be an organisational consultant, which I did become. I got through the rest of my PhD and went back to England, to be a consultant. This was only one day a week initially, as I had ended up at London Business School. After five years of the latter, however, I became a full-time consultant. I worked for individuals, groups and organisations focussing on the human side of organisations, not the business side.

Twelve years after returning to the UK, I was hitting the wall again. I was the person I described at the start of this book.

The question I had to ask myself was this. How come? How come I couldn’t stay out of burnout? Well, I have been out of it for 16 years now. I work very hard, just as hard as on my MBA or PhD, but I don’t get burnt out. I put into practice what I learnt on my PhD and various consulting assignments on burnout. Why hadn’t I done this before? Because I had thought I was clever, working so hard. An inadequate appreciation of leisure activities. Ignoring warning signals. What immunises me now? A more balanced life, plus some of the lessons from this book.

Is burnout just about overwork? No. Is burnout about stress? No. Is it about depression? No. Is it the ‘fault’ of the individual? Yes and no. Is it about depersonalisation? Not really. What is available to help you? Not that much.

In this book, I will address all those levels and all those questions. My primary objectives are: (i) to stop you getting into burnout, especially if you are on the way there, (ii) to get you out of it if you are in it and (iii) to keep you out of it.

The book is intended to be primarily practical while also psychological. It is based on my own experience with burnout, my consulting experience with it and some research. The latter does not include, in this book anyway, any regression coefficients or correlation values. It is not ‘academic’ but there are some ideas and theory. For the book, I did clinical interviews with 20 people in a mental health organisation, as well as using the data from my PhD. This included interviews with 11 nurses in industry and 37 with management students on a mid-career MBA. (I was trained to do the interviews by Professor Ed Schein of MIT.) The clinical interviews with mental health workers brings my own research up to date.

Mobilisation of Energy

Most of the book is about burnout. There are a couple of chapters, however, that focus on the mobilisation of energy. I think this is a better framework than that of ‘engagement’ being the opposite of burnout, which is what the academic literature is arguing about. In my experience, too much engagement can be associated with burnout rather than being its opposite. (See Chapter Four.) Mobilisation of energy is more than motivation. Used here, it takes on a Gestalt meaning, from a concept called the Cycle of Experience. This term is, by definition, a healthy state, leading to action, rather than referring to a hyped-state that is sometimes a precursor of burnout.

Structure of the Book

Some of the book is addressed to you as an individual (Part 1), some to job design and process (Part 2) and some to organisations (Part 3).

Part 1: The Individual

In the mental health sample, some of the employees were on night shift. Within that group of people, a few were burnt out—or on the slippery slope—while some were seemingly immune to burnout. They performed exactly the same job. The ones who were burnt out blamed the nature of their job (that it was night shift work). But it need not be since some of those doing the same job were a long way away from being burnt out.

Ultimately, it is the individual who burns out. The job doesn’t, nor does the organisation. In any one job area, some individuals burn out and some do not. There must, therefore, be some things that individuals do to create it. When I was burnt out, I didn’t need to be pacified with the idea that my situation had caused it. I wanted to get out of burnout so there had to be some things that I could do. Thinking like this was empowering.

There is an ultimate reason you are getting burnt out—an answer to ‘why’. While we explore some of the interview data, I will explain it with Gestalt psychology. We then take another tack, still looking at the individual, by explaining what is going on in burnout with a lens of Carl Jung. Both these major theories can help us with burnout. With the former, we end up with the term ‘Introject’ and with the latter, the term ‘Enantiodromia’. Strange words but they can unravel burnout for us.

Chapter One focusses on identifying burnout. What is it? What is it not? We look at how it differs from depression and stress, for example. The first place I started when I wanted to seriously get out of burnout was to read what the literature said about burnout. I emerged totally confused. Some of this stemmed from very vague definitions of burnout and that it was not distinguished from like-syndromes.

Chapter Two looks at one of the key principles of Gestalt: boundaries. This is the first of four chapters that explores burnout from a Gestalt perspective. The concept of boundaries is used to look at high burnout people who have too permeable boundaries and low burnout people who have more impermeable boundaries.

Chapter Three looks at closure. This relates to individuals being able to finish what they start. Low burnout people can do this easily. People who are high in burnout find closure—completing things in a sensible time—difficult. It is linked with the necessity to prove oneself, both in your own eyes as well as the eyes of others.

Chapter Four looks at self-investment. This is a key finding of my research and consultancy: burnout is marked by an attention to how much is put into activities as opposed to what is got out of them. High burnout people focus on putting in as much as they can until they are exhausted, and low burnout people calculate how much effort to put in based on what they expect to get out of it.

Chapter Five focusses on the introject. This chapter looks at the Gestalt concept of the introject. The conclusion from the previous chapters is that the high burnout person has an introject that drives their behaviour. This is an internalised set of oughts or shoulds that do not really belong to that person.

Chapter Six explores leisure and demands. This begins two chapters that focus on a Jungian approach to burnout. First, we explore the impact of different activities on burnout and conclude that overwork is not the complete answer. More important is time spent on leisure, which immunises you against burnout.

Chapter Seven looks at Enantiodromia. This is a core idea in explaining burnout. It refers to devotion to a way of approaching the world that is over-used. As a result, enantiodromia kicks in to redress the balance. This process is implicated in burnout and is drawn from the interpretation of enantiodromia by Carl Jung.

Part 2: The Job

We know that some jobs are more likely than others to lead to people being burnt out. Why is this the case? We need to find out what job factors, or job designs, lead to burnout. What is it about the way jobs are structured or designed that leads to burnout? Is there a way of immunising people, through job design, from burnout?

Chapter Eight looks at job design. This chapter compares two different organisations with two very different ways of designing jobs. One will lead to burnout and the other immunises people from burnout. We use the Schutz framework to make psychological sense of these jobs.

Chapter Nine looks at mobilising energy. Here, we explore an anecdote from my days as a consultant. It illustrates the idea of mobilising energies to achieve a task. It illustrates how difficult it can be to keep the energy going with our standard ways of organising. Without mobilisation, we get people stressed.

Chapter Ten explores the mobilisation of energy in relation to evaluation and performance criteria. We consider the importance of covering all bases, which most organisations don’t do.

Part 3: The Organisation

Finally, there are some organisations who are more host to burnout than others. We need to understand what aspects of organisations, as a whole, create or foster burnout. Further, how do you mobilise energy in organisations.

Chapter Eleven looks at crossovers and spinning wheels. This chapter, based on the work of Will Schutz, explores the phenomenon of spinning wheels, which high burnout people often feel. It walks you through how to get out of burnout at this level.

Chapter Twelve unravels one consulting assignment where the organisation had a cultural pattern and dynamic that was unhealthy. It resembled the burnout-prone dimensions we explored in the chapters describing a Gestalt approach, especially closure and the need to prove oneself. We will also explore two other organisations—one with an unhealthy dynamic, from my consulting experience, and one organisation with a healthy dynamic.

Overall, the book is designed to answer several key questions:

The ultimate question is whether there is any purpose to getting burnt out. Similarly, is there any good to come out of it? There may well be a purpose to this distressing event. For me, not becoming an academic but being a consultant was a plus. My burnout led me to this decision. If I had been an academic, I would have done nothing but rebel. Running my own business, I had scope to be me. There are other profound angles and aspects to the issue. You don’t always have to leave your job or your profession if you are burnt out. Sometimes, you just need a two-week holiday. These questions and more are what we will explore in the book.

Part 1: The Individual

Chapter One

Identifying What Burnout Is

We don’t actually know that burnout exists. No one knows. We assume and believe it exists based on the fact that the term and its descriptions are real in terms of our experience. But it is, in itself, invisible. Many medical conditions cannot be seen directly. They are inferred from commonly accepted symptoms. Burnout is not different. You can’t see it or touch it. You can’t prod at it to see if it is real. You have to infer burnout is present. I have come across many people who say to me I’m burnt out or I am close to burnout, or Burnout, that’s me. How do they know they are burnt out? Might it be something else? It is no wonder people make these statements. There are many books and articles that attest to the whys and wherefores of burnout and how to get out of it. In my mental health workers, they had a clear understanding of what burnout is, but it was miles away from the views of the academic literature. Who is right?

So, the first thing we need in this book is to get some clarity around what