Burnout in leadership 

This article was first featured in our printed TISCA News and Views magazine, Autumn 2024.

Burnout is remarkably common in leadership. Just like Moses’ experience in Exodus 18, we find our patterns and burdens get out of control, usually bit by bit, until we are overburdened, overwhelmed and barely surviving but not sure what to do about it. Then it only takes a single major additional stressor and we go over a cliff. 

In my role at Living Leadership, a lot of Christian leaders have spoken to me about this over the years. Here are a few of the chief factors I have heard repeated time after time: 

• Isolation, complexity, exhaustion and discouragement. What I call “The Cell” in which we get trapped. When they combine it is deadly, but usually it is the isolation that is the final straw. 

• People who don’t give attention to their limits for a long time, allowing their load to exceed their limits thereby normalising the unsustainable. 

• This leads in turn to squeezing out their inner life with God, and often their home life, so that neither are adequate to the demands of their outer life in leadership. Their life patterns start to tend towards unhealthiness rather than healthiness, and their support structures are inadequate to help them reverse the direction of travel. 

There are always other factors, but these are common. They result in many people crumbling. In Christian leadership this is often after about 15 years or aged about 45 because they established unsustainable patterns when they were 30 and now perceive they are unable to renegotiate the conditions. Being married to a senior teacher, I believe the world of education is frequently just as pressured, or more, and with less opportunity still to renegotiate. 

A friend of mine describes normalising the unsustainable as a form of self-harm. However, in leadership it is a complex one because not only is it demanded of us, it is also socially approved. We get positive validation for remaining in that state and feel we are letting people down if we take positive steps to get out of it. 

Ensuring we are not running on empty is essential not only for our own health but also for that of our organisational cultures and staff. Setting impressive organisational goals that can only be delivered at the cost of burning people out is common but neither healthy nor honourable. And it definitely doesn’t reflect the heart of a saviour who invites us into his rest. 

So, can I ask you to consider what makes you over-extend? What causes you and your organisation to exist in overdrive? What are you expected to deliver that can only be done at the expense of unhealthiness and drain? We all have limits and we all eventually meet the law of diminishing returns. Do you know what yours are? 

There are no quick fixes to burnout because the issues are multi-layered. But at rock bottom is the fact that God renews the weary, and those who wait on the Lord renew their strength (Isaiah 40:29-31). The question I would like to leave you with is: do you have any margin in your life in which God is able to do that? And if not, what practically would need to change in order to create it? Godly rest is the antidote to unsustainable pressure. 

In my experience leaders almost never manage to renegotiate pressure on our own. We lack the deliberateness. After all it means changing our patterns, expectations of ourselves and others’ expectations of us, our attitude to time and activity and how we use all these things for affirmation. It takes practical strategies for embracing different expectations and patterns, all of which is hard. Like Moses, for most of us it takes Jethro to help us analyse the factors and encourage us to make the changes. It was his intervention of wise insight and spiritual care that started to take the lid off the pressure cooker. 

So, what do you need to do to start to be replenished, and who might be able to help you, for you to have any chance of making changes in reality? If you are aware of warning signs, don’t just ignore them and soldier on hoping it will get better. It almost never does. But your God loves you and he is determined to refresh the weary and satisfy the faint (Jeremiah 31:25). If you will but let him. 

Marcus Honeysett is Executive Director of Living Leadership, a charity devoted to helping those involved in spiritual leadership in churches and Christian organisations, and their spouses, to live in Christ joyfully and serve him faithfully. To find out more about their ministries and resources, visit www.livingleadership.org