High Burnout Fields

Some Fields Are Just Different

At Failure Lab, we have worked with individuals from many different fields - construction, ballroom dancing, marketing, medicine, fitness, manufacturing—and everything in between.

It is inarguable that certain fields are more inherently failure-burnout-prone than others. We are talking about fields like medicine, emergency response, grassroots organizing, non-profit work, justice-oriented advocacy, social work, education, and others. These fields are critical to the continued functioning of our communities; they also consistently endure dramatically higher degrees of burnout than the average population.

Admitting Failure Lab’s Fail

It is true that redefining our relationship to failure is the key to unlocking better organizational culture, increased connectivity and job satisfaction, creativity and innovation, and continued evolution and growth.

It is also true that in some situations, there is no energy to focus on creative evolution because survival, mental health, and resilience must come first.

As we have worked with various individual and organizational clients in high-failure/burnout fields, it has become obvious that we were egregiously missing the ball. Talking to department heads about management skills when their people were struggling to keep their heads above water. Working with managers about leadership development when their cortisol levels were so chronically and dangerously high that it was impacting their long-term health.

All organizations need leadership development and management training to stay sustainable. But in fields where unrelenting failure is a part of everyday life, those people need more and better care than communication strategy and exercises in giving feedback.

They need a space for care and decompression - an opportunity to get out of fight mode and into a place where they can be, heal, learn, and grow.

And they probably need to be forced to take care of themselves because their work is critical and unrelenting.

Investing in Care for the Caregivers and Change-makers

When it comes to our caregivers and change-makers, we must play the long game. We must create organizations and cultures that treat the humans that drive them like……humans rather than expendable resources to be used up and discarded when they reach their limits.

Obviously, this argument has an ethical piece, but there is also an impact and economic argument. We must protect those people from their own unrelenting drive and from the systems that extract their gifts without replenishing their light.

We must do that and, at the same time, grow their leadership, communication, and management skills. Can we care for the humans most impacted by High Failure Fields? Yes. We can, and we must.