STRESS
January was a month for the books. On top of a lot of professional stress, my partner and I spent much of the month caring for a sick family member, who passed away at the end of the month. So yeah… that was rough.
Death is an incredibly stressful situation, always. If you think of stress as a bucket, my bucket started 2019 brimming with professional stress, and adding this personal stress caused a complete overflow and severe feelings and symptoms of burnout. So I turned to the usual sources of advice for help in dealing with this. “Exercise more”, “meditate”, “make sure you’re getting enough sleep”… but I was already doing all of those things. And here I was, with this overflowing bucket in spite of it.
I had a big realization at this point. That was all great advice. Everyone should do those things (especially exercise!) But- none of those things actually fix anything. They are all coping mechanisms. They will all help you empty the bucket faster. But they don’t do a damn thing to slow down the rate at which water is pouring into the bucket.
That’s the problem with most advice about stress. It is helpful, but it doesn’t actually fix anything. If you want to get out from under burnout, you have to dig deeper than coping mechanisms. You’ve got to look at where the water is coming from.
What does that mean? Well, for me, I started with reaching out to an excellent professional community. I was reminded of the importance of having a relationship with a therapist. I tried to break down and inventory my thoughts and actions. How much of them were about things I couldn’t actually control (a lot)? How could I shift that to things I could control? Marc Hedlund gave me some great advice to redirect my action to starting new awesome things, instead of trying to stop broken things.
What really helped was reading about the Maslach Burnout Inventory (all credit to cate for pointing me in this direction, and I’ll update this post with her own excellent tale of burnout as soon as she publishes it). Just read this:
- Conflict in Values
A conflict in values occurs when your personal values and goals aren’t in line with those of the organization. An extreme example would be someone who has a strong belief in the humane treatment of animals working for a meat processing plant. Maslach writes, “Contributing to a meaningful personal goal is a powerful incentive for individuals. When this work contributes as well to the organizational mission, people may be rewarded with additional opportunities for meaningful work.”
Welp. That’s middle management, in a nutshell. Even so much of the language used in war stories about the role (“shit umbrella”, “carrying water”) rolls up to “representing someone else’s values as if they were my own”. So I’m left with the uncomfortable conclusion that a lot of my burnout was coming from my job (duh) but not just my particular job at a particular company- my job and role in general.
What’s the recommendation?
Maslach suggests two options for dealing with a conflict in values: either attempt to bring your personal values in line with those of the organization, or leave the organization and look for a more meaningful job. While smaller, less significant value mismatches can often be accommodated within your current job, finding an organization that supports similar values may be preferable.
So this explains the common daydream of the middle manager: “Someday I’m going to wear the crown”. The easiest way to solve the conflict in values is to be the person in authority who’s setting the values for everyone else. The hardest way is to bring your personal values in line with your organization. The in-between path is to find a different organization whose values are more in line (if not an exact match) with your own.
What’s next? I’m not sure. But I understand where I’m starting from a lot more than I did in 2018, and that’s not nothing.