I am in a room with a group of clinicians on a leadership programme. We are talking about how people get silenced. An academic conversation that changes. They are exhausted, their teams are exhausted. A situation compounded by the assumption they should not talk about this fact. That this is not welcome data and probably best to stay quiet.
As I listen, I think about a book by Emily Chappell, an endurance cyclist. Tough beyond my imagination. Extreme willpower combined with the knowledge to know when it is time to stop. Listening to people, I realised I subscribed to the ‘effort’ model of work. There is always more to give. I know you are tired; the pandemic was yesterday; we must push on – so more effort (please).
We talked about their work culture and how it shaped their attitude to limits and exhaustion. How it silenced the experience of having nothing more to give, by confining it to the personal. How as leaders they faced a double jeopardy. To keep going and keep others going, while maintaining a silence around the human costs. Self-silencing replicating and reinforcing what needs to be hidden, even though everyone knew it had implications for safety and wellbeing.
An ‘effort’ culture confronts its leaders with a challenge. To create sufficient safety for people to move from personal distress (which needs attention) towards thinking about what their experience might reveal about how work is organised around here. To make explicit the assumption that people are not deficient; that it is hard to think and do your job, when exhausted. What can shift focus from the personal and the effort model, is to argue that if other people are feeling exhausted, it is a clue about the real and hidden cost of getting results. It is not easy to talk or listen to exhausted people; and maybe we would rather not. The reason to do so is that leaving people isolated with their exhaustion, makes them carry the responsibility for what is the result of collective action – the results, the performance against targets. That is wrong.
We know if we do talk, it does not follow people will listen or my energy will return. What changes is how I am in relation to exhaustion. If we agree it is a shared phenomenon, expecting more effort slips into a form of bullying. More usefully, we can think together and take collective action, because we understand exhaustion/burnout to have a social/system dimension[i].
The following can help structure a conversation to surface the hidden cost of achievements and invite the exhausted and those who have a responsibility for setting culture into a conversation.
- What choices do we offer people when they cannot do anymore?
- What is useful about our approach?
- What is the downside?
- What and who are we ignoring?
- What is our own experience of exhaustion?
- How does this inform our current approach?
- What aspect of this experience do we tend to silence?
- Why is that?
- What small changes could improve things, keep people safer?
Conclusion
The ‘effort’ culture can offer few choices when we reach our limits: keep quiet; go off sick; express suicidal thoughts. Being ready to listen and question assumptions is the work of a Freedom to Speak Up Guardian. Taking care of people, facing facts, and protecting the space we need to think and work safely. The place where it is possible to move between feeling and thinking and to find one’s sense of competence again. Where you can stop blaming yourself and find your way back into your role, your authority and competence. To start thinking again, with others about how work is organised and could be improved.
Dr David Naylor is author of Speaking Up in a Culture of Silence: Changing organisation activity from bullying and incivility to one of listening and productivity
[i] See: Schaffner, A. (2017) Exhaustion – a history. New York: Columbia Press.
‘…burnout can also be regarded as a social form of depression, a systemic dysfunction that is directly related to the work environment and ones role and position in it. The individual is thus not responsible for falling prey to the condition but can be considered a victim of it alienating work environment and broader psychophysically damaging sociocultural development beyond their control’ (p.216).