DEI Work is burning us out. And I don’t believe the typical go-to self-care tips are the answer. I recommend trying this more strategic approach to organizing DEI work, roles, and teams. My approach shifts conditions that produce DEI burnout vs merely addressing a symptom.

Do any of these DEI Burnout symptoms sound familiar?

You are working with a smaller budget, less shared responsibility with the rest of the organization, and fewer hands to help. The diversity councils, champions, and ERG meetings have tapered off. You had a big entourage to carry the load, but now you’re the single load bearer for the work.

You have less authority, and with the waning post-George Floyd wave of attention, you experience less demand in the form of company-wide efforting. The pendulum has swung to focus on recession-proofing the business despite record profits.

In this climate, there’s a general sense of disconnection, isolation, and fatigue.

Go-to self-care tips aren’t enough to reduce DEI burnout

When racial equity/DEI practitioners experience these pain and pressure points, the typical mantra is self-care. 

• “Get a therapist, mentor, skip-level sponsor.” 
• “Take time off.” 
• “Find another place to work that will honor your efforts.”

The problem is that these self-care tips are not robust enough to eclipse the tornado-like wind currents that come with facilitating cultural, structural, and systemic changes. And if you’re anything like one DEI practitioner I’ve talked with - they have a therapist and mentor already,  and it’s not a sustained solution. She says, 

“I don’t have a place to go to right now. I have my mentors, but our relationships aren’t giving what they used to. Even my therapist trusts me a bit too much & doesn't check in anymore. I have to actively say to her, ‘um remember me? Can I get back into regular rotation?’”

While some would argue we strengthen the self-care approaches, it primarily treats a symptom. If we were to address a root cause of DEI burnout, look at how DEI work gets organized.

How DEI work is organized and its relationship to DEI Burnout

The way DEI work is organized doesn’t help. Let’s consider one example.

When you think about your or your company’s approach to DEI is it organized into pillars? (Think words or phrases that are supposed to provide the broader team a course along which the work moves.) 

Some common DEI pillars are:

• community, growth, education, and engagement, 
• hire, retain and develop, or 
• representation, inclusion, and data analysis.

The problem with DEI pillars as the top-line company-wide, DEI-teamwide guidance is three-fold.

1. Pillars are not a strategy. Pillars are typically a list of DEI notions, more like concepts even. 
2. They tend to function as topics or themes, not top-line methods that prescribe a group of willing team members how the systems inside the organization will use the pillars to pivot from unfair to equal. 
3. Pillars are typically list-y. Lists don’t tend to demonstrate interrelatedness, alignment, or coherence between the concepts on the list. If we take one set of pillars above, it’s unclear how representation coheres, aligns, and interrelates with inclusion and data analysis. It goes unarticulated in the list of DEI concepts. 

Organizing your topline DEI guidance into DEI Pillars sets up conditions for DEI Burnout

DEI Pillars, from a leadership standpoint, leave the door wide open for a high number of topical-driven projects and programs that command high amounts of busyness and individualism. This foundation of organizing DEI teams, roles, and work easily gives way to high effort, duplication, overlaps, and overwhelm with too much going on. In other words – DEI. Burnout. Central.

And, unfortunately, these inputs rarely convert into little to a worthy return on investment. DEI Burnout Central.

Common self-care approaches like get a therapist and take time off - cultivate how to sustain oneself under these conditions (vs shift them). 

Even more, there’s an inherent asymmetry between the way DEI work is organized and what’s typically recommended, available, and accessible for self-care. The breadth of the work, contextual factors, and conditions outsize common self-care go-to’s.

Despite all of this though, you might think, ‘this work is connected to my sacred purpose. I’m still motivated to do this work, perhaps at a smaller scale with my therapist in tow.’

And I salute you! 

While…encouraging you to consider how you might preempt wellbeing (and decrease burnout). Burnout does not have to be an inherent aspect or readily accepted aspect of the work. Use this blog post where I lay out a multi-step approach to shift out of DEI pillars as a top-line compass to a codified model for racial equity.

While there’s a recession-threat-based lull now, you’re not fretting. Because you recognize openings to do substantive racial equity/DEI work comes in waves. 

And you know you have to stay ready so that when the next opening suddenly arises, you’re ready to take position.

If you want to stay ready now so you don’t have to get ready then, check out the blog post - use these steps to shift out of DEI pillars as a top-line compass and out of DEI Burnout.

I help trailblazing leaders like you, who are stuck between mainstream minutiae and resistance from status quo keepers, pivot organizational systems from unfair to equitable.

When you enroll in The Equitecture® Academy for Decolonizing Leadership, you shift from:

• Risk aversion to fortified, unshakable leadership
• Mainstream generic approaches to unprecedented models for more racially equitable outcomes
• DEI burnout to tenacious healing and growth
• Martyrdom , reactivity, or inaction to honorable gamesmanship
• Misaligned and unclear to found providence
• Being an isolated load bearer to cooperative command

Work with me to expand your leadership capacity in care-curated leadership crucibles, sustained coaching, community, and battle-tested curriculum. If you want help applying these concepts, enroll in The Equitecture® Academy for Decolonizing Leadership.