Burnout Coaches

Martha C. White, Seeing Workplace Misery, Burnout Coaches Offer Company, New York Times, July 9, 2024.

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted how and where people work, the World Health Organization recognized burnout. In 2019, it defined the hallmarks of this type of chronic workplace stress as exhaustion, cynicism and ineffectuality — all attributes that make it tough for people to bounce back on their own, said Michael P. Leiter, a professor emeritus at Acadia University in Nova Scotia who studies burnout.

“It’s hard, at that point, to pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” he said. “It’s really helpful to have a secondary point of view or some emotional support.”

Enter the burnout coach.

Operating in a gray area between psychotherapy and career coaching, and without formal credentialing and oversight, “burnout coach” can be an easy buzzword to advertise. Basically anybody can hang out a shingle.

As a result, more people are marketing themselves as burnout coaches in recent years, said Chris Bittinger, a clinical assistant professor of leadership and project management at Purdue University who studies burnout. “There’s no barrier to entry,” he said. [...]

This lack of oversight makes it difficult to say how many burnout coaches there are, but researchers who study burnout such as Mr. Leiter say a pressure-cooker corporate culture, a shortage of mental health care resources and the disruption of the pandemic have created a critical mass of burned-out workers searching for ways to cope. [...]

Interest in burnout coaches comes amid shifting views on workplace wellness. William Fleming, a fellow at Oxford University’s Wellbeing Research Center, found that many employer-provided wellness services, like sleep apps and mindfulness seminars, largely don’t live up to claims of improving mental health.

“Those interventions — not only are many of them not working, but they’re backfiring,” said Kandi Wiens, the co-director of the medical education master’s degree program at the University of Pennsylvania and a burnout researcher.

Mr. Fleming said these initiatives were ineffective because they focus on the individual rather than issues like overwork or lack of resources that lead to burnout.