Combating burnout with compassion in our Women’s ERG
Researcher, author, and mental health expert Leah Weiss talked about compassion in the workplace, the dangers of burnout, and how a supportive community and team can make a difference.
For our Women’s Employee Resource Group (ERG) recent event, Leah Weiss joined virtually to present on relevant topics ranging from compassionate leadership to identifying your purpose.
Leah is a renowned speaker and author from Stanford University and a founding faculty member of the school’s Compassion Cultivation Program. She has studied compassion and how it plays into relationships – specifically in the workplace.
Through this, she found a definition of compassionate leadership that she continuously comes back to: “honoring the innate dignity of others, acknowledging the full context of their lives, and recognizing that people are valued create value.”
According to Leah, being a compassionate leader or manager includes everything from how you hire staff and run meetings to how you give feedback and offboard people.
A lack of compassion in the workplace can lead to burnout, which Leah has spent the last five years researching. “One of the biggest things I’d like to highlight for you is that burnout is often framed as an individual problem,” she explains. “It’s a person in an environment.”
That means it requires a collective effort to fix the issue of burnout: “What if we as a team or as an ERG experimented with putting on like true guardrails or autoresponders? It's different for every organization.”
But when it comes to deterring burnout, it comes down to the four pillars of team resilience: team-awareness, autonomy, scheduled R&R, and community and collaboration.
“If you have other people in the ERG that you've shared your strengths, weaknesses with, it gives you a sense of community,” Leah says. “When somebody is set off, they have a place to go and get support, where they won't be judged, where they'll be understood.”
Leah also touched on the importance of self-compassion, which she refers to as the recognition of the struggle you’re experiencing: “An ERG is a great place to do this, to ask what is common in the challenges that we are facing as women in this organization and how can we support ourselves?”
To conclude, Leah discussed the topic of purpose. She uses Stanford trained psychologist Barbara Fredrickson’s definition of purpose: a far-reaching steady goal; something personally meaningful and self-transcending.
She asks, “how can we draw on our purpose to give us perspective even in the minutia of the things we don't like, the things that grind us and frustrate us?”