Avoiding Burnout at Work

While working over the last 10 years, in several different non-profit organizations, I have seen a similar scenario play out many times. Putting my notes together, I thought it may be useful for other leaders who are in a non-profit environment.

1. You have 5 or 6 people who are always doing 80% of the job.

2. Those 6 stop seeing others pitch in so they decide they are going to take ownership in this because they are always the one in the weeds.

3. Leadership misreads this ownership and feels good about those 6 taking ownership and handling it and forgets that the only reason that these people “own it” is because they are against the ropes.

4. The pack of people who are always there, never really hear the Pastor or Leaders talk about how we are going to get more volunteers or a pitch for more people.

5. This carries on for a few weeks until the person has so much ownership that now when someone else decides to volunteer or leadership places someone new in to volunteer, you hear things like, “Nah, that’s not the way to do that” and/or “Who put this together!” from the original person who now feels there way is the only way to do things.

6. The person that we now finally got to volunteer feels like he or she is not good enough or that the person who is saying these type of things (mind you not really on purpose or to hurt anyone) has an attitude and now the new volunteer is telling themselves in their head, “see, this is why I don’t like to volunteer.”

7. We loose the person who made the jump to try to volunteer because they feel like others have an attitude. (btw – this word spreads quickly like a disease.)

8. The person who “Owns it” lasts a few more weeks before finally something happens that makes them say, “This is ridiculous, I don’t need this, and I just want to go to church”

9. Leadership now gets involved with all areas of setup and says to themselves things like “Welcome to ministry” or “I remember when such and such church started the Pastor told me he did this for the first 6 months, etc. etc.” – all of these statements of course are said to give an excuse for the real issue. Prior poor leadership.

10. Leadership is now preparing every aspect of Sunday morning experience and is unprepared and unmotivated because now everything is getting done 50% just to make “SOMETHING” happen each Sunday.

11. People start wondering, what the heck is going on at that church, a lot of people are talking about this and that etc. Gossip.

12. And just as quick as the good news spreads around your town, now the cloudy, weird word gets around about your church.

13. Leadership now is in continuous battles amongst themselves about what, when and how to make all this work.

14. Leadership decides to make a rash decision and point fingers in areas and now all areas are a little out of control and attitudes and gossip is peaking.

15. Leadership feels like the team was the problem and gets fired up because over the last several weeks they have replaced most of the old team with an entirely new team because the old team “had some problems.”

16. A couple weeks in, leadership starts pressing to get more people involved and slowly starts calling the plays which immediately leads back to step A. because the team was never the problem in the first place.