There is only one type of badge I like to wear for work – a conference badge. Yes, the kind on a lanyard with the option to add pins to the lanyard and ribbons to the bottom of the name badge. They are a great opportunity to show a little personality at the conferences and also make for some great art in the office afterward.

Yet, when we talk about burnout in the nonprofit sector, actions that significantly increase the risk of burnout for a single team member, or the team as a whole, are often worn like badges of honor – I call it The Burnout Badge. The badges worn and celebrated, often after a heroic effort has been completed in service of achieving the organization’s mission.

Heroic actions and the resulting individual and team stress are leading indicators for team well-being. The actual act of being burned out? That is a lagging indicator. 

I strongly believe that grant professionals have been cheered on for years in their acts of heroic efforts – taking laptops on vacation, working until the late hours of the night for an 11:59pm ET grants.gov deadline, and on, and on. 

Burnout is defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) as an occupational phenomenon—not a medical condition—resulting from chronic, unmanaged workplace stress. And unfortunately, the data compiled and published in the GPA Journal by the #HealthyGrantPro group of Trish Bachman, GPC Patricia Duboise, GPC, Bethany Planton, GPC, and Johna Rodgers, GPC has proven repeatedly that burnout in the grant profession is more than real. It might even border on an epidemic.

A culture of sustainable and successful grant seeking can not be a culture of heroic efforts. Yes, you can be successful in your grant seeking efforts with heroic efforts, but it is not sustainable. It is a likely path to burnout.

I recently read an article from HealthLine about how the act of following a set work schedule as a form of boundaries is one technique to avoid burnout. I read the article as I sat on my iPad in the early morning hours, drinking my coffee, working on my edits in my manuscript for Playbook for Changemakers, my book coming out later this year. The irony of the article I was reading and the time of day I was reading it wasn’t lost on me. I had left my time boundaries by the wayside Now, my immediate defense was that the book is a “fun” side project. But the reality? It is a business priority. It is part of our backlog. Yet, here I was blending my time boundaries to work on it. Burnout-prone activity? Or resilient culture activity? 

The reality is, and the data supports, that it is one thing to do a heroic effort occasionally – that isn’t a direct path to burnout. But the more the heroic efforts stack up, the higher your risk of burnout.

While individual and team wellness techniques, like our team talked about in Prioritizing Wellness: How Our Grant Writing Team Stays Mindful and Fights Burnout, are important, by themselves, they are not enough to build a resilient culture that is not burnout prone. The structure of the way the team operates needs to be addressed AND a culture of team wellness needs to be in place. Some of the key team operational items to address include:

• Time boundaries
• Clear priorities
• Psychological safety

Some of those items are easier and faster to put in place than others, but all three listed, take focused time and effort to build into your team and organization culture.

If you like learning about techniques related to minimizing the risk of burnout for yourself and your colleagues as much as I do, I hope you’ll join me for The Burn Out Badge: A Heroic Effort is Not a Plan on Wednesday, March 18th.

What are some of the ways that you have approached building a resilient culture in your organization that is not a burnout culture? We’d love to hear! Let us know in the comments or reach out via email. Diane @dhleonardconsulting.com