Like many Ph.D.s, I’ve followed the conversation about faculty burnout in the pandemic era and read the firsthand accounts. But more and more, I’ve been questioning whether that word accurately conveys how most academics feel now.
Over the past six months, as director of faculty mentoring and coaching at Duke University, I’ve worked with about 50 academics in one-on-one and group sessions. They are early and midcareer faculty members in positions that run the gamut (tenure track, tenured, full-time nontenure track). Obviously they have come to me for career guidance.
Yet I don’t recall a single one of them using the term “burnout” to describe their feelings about faculty work. The three main sentiments I have heard:
- “Not enough hours in the day.” A lot of faculty members are concerned about time management, prioritization, and work-life balance.
- “Something’s been lost since the pandemic.” Some feel a vague sense that something important has gone missing in day-to-day academic life. One person sought to reclaim “more ease,” another sought “more joy,” and yet another wanted to be more “lighthearted.”
- “I want my work to have more of an impact on people.” If I could make a word cloud of all the terms and phrases uttered in my 2022 coaching conversations, “impact” would be the most repeated.
What to make of all this?
The faculty members I coach face very real challenges in terms of workload, balance, and professional satisfaction. It’s just that “burnout” isn’t their issue. And I would venture that many, if not most, academics would agree.
In an excerpt from his 2022 book, The End of Burnout: Why Work Drains Us and How to Build Better Lives, Jonathan Malesic argued that “burnout is real — but difficult to diagnose.” The term burnout is “fuzzy,” he wrote, claimed by different people with different interests at stake.
Many Ph.D.s — myself included — find it difficult to reconcile our current work challenges with the most extreme burnout symptoms, such as the literal inability to keep working. In an essay in The Chronicle, adapted from her book, Unraveling Faculty Burnout: Pathways to Reckoning and Renewal, Rebecca Pope-Ruark wrote candidly about her own burnout, which included spending hours on the couch playing solitaire. In writing the book, she noted that she had difficulties finding male faculty members who were willing to speak with her on the topic, perhaps out of fear of being labeled “burned out.”
Why some academics resist the burnout label merits further study. But as a coach — whose job is to help people move forward in their careers — I worry that framing the current collective faculty plight as an “epidemic of burnout” risks keeping people mired in place, fixated on things they can’t change (like systemic problems), rather than on things they can.
What if we shifted the conversation away from burnout and focused instead on “impact” — specifically, on how to help faculty members see how effective their work is in all its forms? Wouldn’t a focus on impact help academics feel more job satisfaction and more control over their careers, especially in stressful times? After all, burnout is something that happens to us; impact is something we generate.
Narrowly defined, “impact” is tangible proof of a professor’s influence on a discipline, and it is traditionally measured by publications and citations. Across higher education, we’ve seen a recent shift to (a) broaden the definition to include teaching, mentoring, and service and to (b) adopt new ways to measure the reach of faculty work (such as “alt-metrics”).
Faculty careers are built on the notion of impact, so why not talk about it? My coaching sessions seem to be a space for discussions that academics feel they can’t easily have with colleagues. Sure, professors chat to some extent about the impact of their work. But for many of those I coach, what’s different about our conversations is that they can reflect on what impact means to them — at different stages of their lives and careers and in ways that aren’t strictly tied to the tenure-and-promotion process. For example:
- One faculty member — working on a research project with significant everyday relevance — wrestled with how to characterize its impact in her tenure file. As we talked she realized that there was a “Venn diagram” between the impact she wanted to have and “what counted” with the promotion committee. What should she do about the kinds of impact that only she deemed important?
- Is there such a thing as too much impact? That is the dilemma facing another faculty member whose groundbreaking research has great potential. If his research could improve the lives of millions of people, would that justify (or even mandate) the extraordinary amounts of time he’d have to take away from his young family to amplify its reach? And if the potential for impact had no clear limit, what level of impact would be “enough” for him?
- Yet another faculty member came to coaching feeling — despite his recent, smooth path to tenure — that he wasn’t having the “kind of impact” he really wanted. Did he need to publish even more in top journals? Accept more invitations to speak at conferences? During our session, he decided to talk with a few senior scholars he admired. He returned to session two, having had a “eureka” moment: “My senior colleagues aren’t worried about their impact,” he said, “they’re too focused on amplifying the impact of more junior people.” That insight helped him shift his mind-set and his career goals.
At this point you might be thinking: Is focusing on impact — as a faculty re-engagement strategy — really any different from what has been prescribed in all of those books and articles on burnout?
Colin West, a physician at the Mayo Clinic, talked about his research on burnout in the medical profession in an interview this past fall with The New York Times. All of the solutions to burnout, he said, “‘run through a common pathway': They connect people with their most meaningful activities.” Likewise, in her book, Unraveling Faculty Burnout, Pope-Ruark wrote: “When we do not feel as though our lives and work are meaningful, we open the door wide for burnout to enter.”
But here’s the thing: The faculty members I’m coaching don’t just want to feel like their work has purpose. Rather, they seek to articulate and measure how their work is helping other people. At first glance, those two aims may seem like the same thing. But they’re not. As a scholar, you can have a clear sense of purpose and pursue work that feels meaningful to you — without helping anyone beyond a very narrow field of specialists. That’s an acceptable level of impact for some, but not for everyone. And what I am hearing from more and more faculty members these days is that they fall into the latter category.
Many of the faculty members coming to me for coaching are seeking to transform institutional expectations of “impact” (i.e., publications) into a more personalized rubric that speaks to who they are and what they value. This rubric takes into account:
- Who do you want to have an impact on?
- What does that impact look like?
- How do you know you’ve achieved it?
Most annual review, tenure, and/or promotion processes require faculty members to answer these questions, in one form or another. But the answers may be different, when pursued in the context of a confidential coaching session — one that allows space for people to integrate their personal, cultural, political, and perhaps religious values with their professional aspirations.
I believe that lots of faculty members would benefit from broad conversations that extend well beyond the narrow terrain of annual evaluation, tenure, or promotion processes. Since not everyone has the time or opportunity to pursue coaching, I offer a few modest strategies here to help you do some big-picture thinking about the impact of your work:
You turn to colleagues to critique your work, why not turn to a trusted few to talk about its impact? Faculty members band together all the time to review one another’s work, discuss shared intellectual interests, and provide accountability on things like writing deadlines. Who can you talk to about the impact of your work in ways that are exploratory, holistic, and nonevaluative? Start with a trusted mentor.
Pay attention to what people are saying about the impact of your work. Academics tend to be perfectionists and go out of their way to avoid negative feedback. But the only way to know what kind of impact you’re having is to ask. When you invite and pay attention to feedback, you don’t just want comments on whether your work is good, but whether it’s actually helpful to somebody.
Don’t dismiss or avoid a negative critique about the impact of your work. Teaching evaluations, for example, are imperfect and notoriously susceptible to bias. But find a way — perhaps with the help of a supportive mentor or colleague — to distinguish between comments that are a true reflection of a problem in your teaching and the “noise” generated by one or two unhappy students and/or from biased responses.
Similarly, embrace and engage with feedback from scholarly reviewers. Their criticisms aren’t always delivered fairly or helpfully, but they may provide a roadmap to future success.
As a mentor, seek feedback even from routine interactions. For many faculty members, the greatest sense of fulfillment comes from the casual, unofficial mentoring they do with students and junior scholars. Academics rarely take the time to assess those informal exchanges, but it’s surprisingly easy to do, and it can enhance the impact of your mentoring and the satisfaction you feel from this kind of work.
When people seek me out, formally or informally, I always ask how I can help them. Some people tell you what they want, unprompted. Many others are surprisingly vague about what they want out of a conversation until they talk it out. So when someone comes to you for help or guidance, try this approach:
- At the beginning of the conversation, ask, “What do you want to take away from this conversation?”
- Then ask, “How can I be helpful to you right now?”
- At the end of the conversation, revisit the person’s initial aim and ask again, “What is the takeaway here?”
Granted, these questions may be a bit formal for routine interactions, so use your intuition in modifying them. You could, for example, just stick with, “How can I help you?” at the outset, and find a way to ensure that people leave the conversation with something useful.
In whatever form you ask these questions, the answers are usually gratifying, and sometimes surprising. From a coaching perspective, the smallest steps forward are usually the most effective ones. Every fleeting glimpse of your impact on someone can be a small victory that helps you build coherence from a busy day and emboldens you to consider larger impacts of your life’s work.
