Photosynthesis II

Today I will explain the importance of photosynthesis and what happens when the earth is burned of all trees and plants.

This event has already happened in the form of the late Permian mass extinction, and the situation looked worryingly close to current conditions.

The situation looked bleak, there was depletion of the ozone layer, no trees due to volcanic eruptions, large amounts on carbon dioxide emissions, and drastic global warming.

Among other factors, I will only be discussing the lack of trees.

As there were little to no trees, there was too much carbon dioxide. All land animals started to asphyxiate first, then dissolved oxygen in the oceans started to get used up. Carbon dioxide dissolved instead of oxygen, and filled the oceans with carbonic acid, H2CO3, acidifying the oceans and causing die-offs in marine life.

Over the total 50 000-year apocalypse, 82.5% of all the species of animals on earth died.

To give you a sense of scale, in took 8 000 000 years, or 2 922 000 000 days to restore ecological balance. This is, though, less than 0.2% of the total age of the earth.

This event marked the end of the Palaeozoic era, the longest in the history of the earth, 289 000 000 years and nearly 7% of the age of the earth.

Altogether, this was not a pleasant time.

As the conclusion to this article, we should not cut down trees and instead move to renewable energy, like Dyson spheres.

The above section is the unedited writings of my son.

Photosynthesis and Burnout Coaching

In the last edition of this newsletter, I spoke about how photosynthesis is related to burnout from the perspective of resource loss. By resources, I mean manpower, equipment, time, and budget on an organisational level. For individual, resources mean mental and emotional resources, support networks, and physical health. Read the entire article here: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/photosynthetic-processes-serene-seng-qvunc/.

In this edition, I want to look at what leaders and coaches can do for their people to prevent burnout and help them recover.

What to Do as a Leader

“Do more with less” seems to be the mantra of workplaces these days. While this state stems from a variety of reasons, from productivity drive, to market constraints, to restructuring, the problem is this philosophy often assumes there is no limit. That employees can be asked to produce more with less resources indefinitely. And that is simply not true.

So the first task of a leader in preventing burnout is simply to ask, what do we need to stop doing. What are the things that no longer contribute to our current goals?

The world has changed and our strategic direction is very likely to be drastically different from what it was before. It’s therefore inevitable that we’d be asking our people and ourselves to take on new tasks. But just as inevitable is some tasks which used to be necessary for our old direction is no longer needed as we change directions.

However, it’s often true in organisations that anyone can add a task, but it takes a lot of authority to take the tasks out. Even an intern can introduce a new form with the approval of her manager. But to remove that form several years later when it is no longer needed would need the approval of the department head.

So if you are the department head or team leader, make it your job to take tasks out. There are very few things at work more demotivating than being asked to complete meaningless tasks which take you away from your OKRs.

Two, speak to your people about their energy levels. Exhaustion is one of the most pervasive and earliest presenting symptoms of burnout. While everyone has days of higher or lower energy, “I’m always exhausted” is a sure indicator of a need to look closer.

The most urgent thing is to find a way to help the person restore their energy. It may be some time off, a temporary job rotation, or some extra help for the time being.

Then, take a close look at what is contributing to the exhaustion. Of course, it can certainly be an unsustainable workload. But just as often, it can also be a poor match between the person and job. Is the person spending at least 80% of his work day working in areas of his strengths? Or even the work environment. Does the person have the tools needed to do his job? Does he have good, supportive relationships with his colleagues?

Finally, if needed, refer the team member to your organisation’s services, such as employee assistance programmes (EAP), resilience training, or executive coaching. All of these have been shown in research to be helpful for burnout.

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What to Do as a Coach

Probably the first thing we need to do as coaches is figure out if we should be handling the case. Certainly executive coaching has been shown in many research studies to be effective for burnout prevention and management. But that is only if the situation hasn’t progress to require more medical intervention. The International Coach Federation (ICF) has an excellent guide on when to refer clients to therapy: https://coachingfederation.org/blog/referring-a-client-to-therapy.

Assuming a client is sound of mind, we should accept as a premise that the client has a really good reason to do anything she does. This means she must have a compelling reason to drive herself to burnout or the brink of it. Our job then, is to work with the client to figure out this reason, without judgement and assumptions.

Delving into the motivations for such behaviour can uncover useful and often noble reasons, such as wanting to add value to the team, do a good job for the organisation, or provide for the family. If that is truly what the coachee wishes to accomplish, then is the way she is doing it actually helping her to accomplish it? For instance, can an exhausted, burnt out person do a better job than one who is well rested and healthy?

Help the coachee look for a different way to reach her outcomes or a more useful perspective to take on the situation. What can she do to take care of herself while contributing just as much or more value to the team?

Finally, behaviour is a combination of motivation and habit. Changing perspectives can change motivation but there will certainly be an element of habit involved in a tendency to overwork. What prompts can the coachee put into place around her workplace and into her schedule to remind her to change behaviour?

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Final Product

The late Permian mass extinction took 200 000 years to occur. Most of the animal deaths occur in the last 20 000 years. Similarly, burnout takes some time to build up. Most of us do not burn out in the first days of a new job. It takes a continual depletion of resources with a persistent imbalance between the demands and rewards of a job for a person to finally burn out. And most of the devastation, like the mass extinction, takes place right at the end.

This is good news. It means for leaders and coaches, there is plenty of opportunities to intervene before things get really bad. When our people start to look like they may be headed that way, even if it’s taken us some time to notice, we can take heart that it is mostly likely not too late. That we can still do something to head of the worst of it.

Because if we don’t… Remember that it took 8 million years (40 times 200 000) for the world to recover after the Permian mass extinction. It took me two full years to recover from burnout, and many of the survivors I know have a similar story. Whether for ourselves or for our team members and coachees, prevention is much less painful than cure.

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