Something for the boss

Mismatches
Last week I wrote that an effective treatment of burnout will always be multi-faceted, every angle should be approached. What we didn't consider then was that often there can be a serious mismatch between someone's personal style and job-expectations and the (implicit) expectations that the working environment has about the colleague/employee. If becomimg burnout has a relation with having to function in a large-scale organisation, then this also deserves attention in treatment.

6 different sources
Christina Maslach stated it quite right in het book "The truth about burnout". She describes a process as follows:
A high workload is almost always the starting point in getting burnout. Everybody is always busy and modern management, prompted by budget considerations, is always pressuring employees to do more in the same amount of hours.
This easily leads to a situation where emplyees come to think that they lost grip on their work. Next step may well be that you start to think that you are quite badly paid for all your efforts and the troubles your boss throws in with you for free. Once you are going down on this way of thinking you can easily jump to the conclusion that you are working in an extremely unfair system. Large-scale organisations are characterised by a fierce internal competition. You can easily feel all alone in a serious competition where your colleagues don't mean well with you at all. In the end you see ever more differences between what you stand for in your own work and what you perceive the organisation is targeting for.

Subjective? Objective? And what to do next?
Now the process, described as it unfolds, is of course a highly subjective one, it is all part of somebody's unique individual experience. Still, if emplyees go through such an intra-psychic process, there must be another, more objective and job-related reality behind it. A good therapist should always be alert on these phenomena and will have to find a way to exert some influence here. Usually this should be found by connecting with the human resources department of the company under consideration.