The Birth of Burnout

Freudenberger, a psychoanalyst and founder of the East Village Free Clinic in New York City, was the first person to use the term “burn-out” to describe the feeling of being overburdened and underappreciated at work. Fearful of sustained emotional interactions between his staff and the clients of the clinic—many of whom were drug users with mental health issues—Freudenberger warned that burnout was likely to affect the most dedicated workers at the clinic; it was the professional who had a “tendency to over-identify with those he is working with and for,” a person on a “self-sacrificing, dedication-to-others ego trip,” who was most likely to succumb, he said.Footnote ³² For Freudenberger, helping others could be a sign of egotism: those who were overly committed to their jobs, who tried to achieve personal satisfaction by working with others, were often merely trying to make up for deficiencies in other areas of their lives. For these staff members, their clients and coworkers had become a means to the end of their own self-fulfillment, rather than ends in themselves.

Freudenberger believed that this overcommitment, the inability of some staff members to maintain a boundary between oneself and one's job, flourished in the absence of the right kind of leader. As opposed to the manager who motivated his subordinates through charisma, Freudenberger's ideal leader was a more modest person who had “come to grips with the fact that he cannot be the whole show” and who made it part of his character to “share his griefs, his disappointments, his hangups, and his frustrations with the people he works with.”Footnote ³³ In reaction to the “authoritarian leader” who had inspired fear and condemnation in the postwar era, this new type of leader humanized himself and empowered his subordinates to exercise both self-direction and self-control.Footnote ³⁴ Many prominent management scholars shared Freudenberger's vision at the time, including Michael Maccoby, who wrote that the successful leaders of the 1970s and 1980s would be “self-aware, conscious of their weaknesses as well as strengths, [and] concerned with self-development for themselves as well as others.”Footnote ³⁵

Freudenberger worried that executives who did not fit into this mold of leadership would be “putting their organizations to work for them,” using their coworkers to fulfill a psychological need that could, in fact, never be satisfied at work.Footnote ³⁶ Such a person was heading for burnout “on a treadmill of his or her own devising, even though he or she ascribes it to external forces.”Footnote ³⁷ Writing for an audience of human resources professionals, Freudenberger warned that “people who are in the throes of burning out often fail to see their situation as stemming from inside themselves” and instead “complain about the organization and react cynically to whatever is suggested or attempted by others.”Footnote ³⁸ He warned his readers about the danger that even one person's burnout could pose, since “it can spread, like any burning thing, through an entire organization, leaving only ashes behind.”Footnote ³⁹ The most expedient solution was thus to help build up each employee's personal defenses, ensuring that burnout could not spread from one person to the rest of the staff. The search for self-actualization through work had put organizations in danger, creating a situation in which overcommitment could turn into burnout and spread throughout the staff. The solution was not a return to an impersonal professionalism—nor simply less work—but instead more self-monitoring and self-awareness. That the cure for burnout would happen on a personal, psychological level was now a given.

Burnout in Popular Business Literature

Freudenberger transitioned from writing mostly in psychoanalytic and social work journals to publicizing burnout in business periodicals and mass-market publications. For instance, in an article for Nation's Business, the official magazine of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Freudenberger and coauthor Geraldine Richelson told their readers that burnout affected “the leaders among us who have never been able to admit to limitations,” those who “started out with great expectations and refused to compromise along the way.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Freudenberger said that the remedy for this type of burnout was to “learn to acknowledge that the world is the way it is and accepting that fact,” to “come to terms with the nature of the world” in order to “get on with the business of refocusing ourselves.”Footnote ⁴¹ In service of that aim, Freudenberger and Richelson paired their article with a fifteen-question burnout self-assessment, reminding readers that “the biggest single gift we can give ourselves [is] a quiet, readily-available commodity known as self-awareness,” and that “to succeed in averting a burn-out, it's imperative that you monitor yourself.”Footnote ⁴²

Sentiments of this nature were central to articles published by prominent business scholars in established management journals. Harry Levinson, industrial psychologist and professor at Harvard Business School, published his thoughts on managerial burnout in a 1981 Harvard Business Review article, “When Executives Burn Out.” Levinson noted that professionals such as mental health workers and police officers—those who “work under severe pressure in people-oriented jobs for long periods of time”—were “prime victims” of burnout.Footnote ⁴³ Managers, however, in addition to the problems faced by other types of professionals, also had to “cope with the least capable among the employees, with the depressed, the suspicious, the rivalrous, the self-centered, and the generally unhappy” and “balance these conflicting personalities and create from them a motivated work group.”Footnote ⁴⁴ These responsibilities made executive burnout that much more dangerous: if an executive burned out, it was likely to affect his or her subordinates, creating a ripple effect all the way down the corporate ladder. Therefore, Levinson suggested, managers who felt overwhelmed by the emotional demands of their job should “withdraw, get appropriate help, and place themselves first,” viewing their own self-preservation as an act of protection of their subordinates.Footnote ⁴⁵ And, in order to ensure that burnout did not occur in the first place, Levinson suggested leaders should “take time to publicly remove their halos” by “explaining their own struggles, disappointments and defeats to their subordinates so that the latter can view them more accurately.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Fearful that organizations were being threatened by a new cohort of workers looking for self-fulfillment, on the one hand, and by a lack of control over managers, on the other hand, Levinson and Freudenberger proposed “self-awareness” as a way to protect organizations from burnout.

Another article on managerial burnout was published in 1982 in the California Management Review, a publication directed toward “active managers, scholars, teachers, and others concerned with management” and thus intended to serve as a “bridge between creative thought about management and executive action.”Footnote ⁴⁷ In “Executives under Fire: The Burnout Syndrome,” Morley Glicken, professor of social welfare at the University of Kansas, and Katherine Janka, management consultant and business journalist, argued that because “burnout at managerial levels is likely to affect workers at lower levels,” their article would focus exclusively on managers and executives.Footnote ⁴⁸ While they noted that burnout was “suddenly a major concern in American industry and government,” they lamented a lack of differentiation between being “burned out” and being “burned up.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Whereas the burned-up individual was destined for “mental and physical illness, sudden resignation, or involuntary termination,” the burned-out executive could be treated for his or her exhaustion while on the job.Footnote ⁵⁰ However, Glicken and Janka noted, “In the absence of either organizational assistance or individual competence for self-help, many executives facing burnout inaccurately diagnose themselves as burned up.”Footnote ⁵¹

Glicken and Janka suggested that corporations try to reduce burnout by introducing a new type of therapy that they had developed. Glicken and Janka's Career Enhancement Therapy (CET) called for a two-day, eight-hour-a-day treatment program, attended by a group of twelve to fifteen executives. During each session, therapists and executives would discuss “the causes of burnout, techniques useful in changing burned-out behavior, and the treatment used to help individuals in the group learn to change their behavior.”Footnote ⁵² They noted that the success of CET depended on executives becoming introspective and self-aware, able to “risk themselves by moving into a form of self and group evaluation,” and that positive change could not occur until “group members begin to look carefully at their own behavior, share it with others, [and] establish awareness of the complexities of [their] behavior.”Footnote ⁵³ For Glicken and Janka, as for other scholars, relieving the problem of organizational burnout necessitated creating self-aware and, to a certain extent, self-involved leaders; “the individual and the organization both have a stake in assuring the health, productivity, and satisfaction of top-level executives,” and so “when these factors are jeopardized by debilitating burnout, both share responsibility for positive action.”Footnote ⁵⁴

The Leader as Role Model

In 1956, William Whyte published his classic study The Organization Man. Whyte did not protest the organization or organized work per se, but rather the “deification” of it; he called on Americans to stop “denying that there is . . . a conflict between the individual and the organization,” noting that while “this denial is bad for the organization . . . it is worse for the individual.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Whyte's goal was not necessarily to liberate the individual from the organization, but instead to liberate workers from the belief that their interests and those of the group were aligned. In the decades that followed, a number of scholars influenced by—or integral to—humanistic management, such as Maslow, McGregor, and Argyris, took the critiques of Whyte and others and turned them toward the interests of business. At the core of their thinking was the notion that managers and executives could play a central role in reducing conflict between organization and employee; they could create an atmosphere in which “the individual can achieve his goals best by directing his efforts toward the success of the organization.”Footnote ⁵⁶ McGregor wrote that this kind of atmosphere was the product of a manager who practices self-control, who “develops his own strategy and discovers its value,” such that “his subordinates are following his example, and . . . considering their own applications of the idea.”Footnote ⁵⁷

Burnout emerged as a pathology of trying to integrate individuals with organizations; the solution, however surprising, was to link employees to the leaders of the group. The leader, practicing self-awareness and self-monitoring, could become a model of both how to deal with one's frustrations and how not to criticize the corporation but instead find fault with oneself. Burnout thus became, to a large extent, a humanistic management tool—one for managing managers and that could, in turn, manage the group. It ensured that employees would accept their inherent conflict with the organization but work diligently to become integrated with it; by following the leader, an employee could both work for the group and be an individual. If burnout became an issue in the 1970s because of a genuine concern about conflict between the individual and the organization, by the 1980s burnout became popular because of its utility as a management tool, convincing executives—and by extension, their subordinates—to practice self-monitoring, self-assessment, and self-therapy for their own benefit and that of the corporation.