Why does coaching help prevent nurse burnout?

Written By Kara Schultz

The focal question of this post is, “Will coaching prevent burnout in my team or for myself?” While there is some evidence that coaching improves an individual’s well-being or engagement with a job, researchers don’t explicitly talk about how coaching will reduce burnout. Does helping people feel more effective in their work reduce feelings of burnout? How does one’s motivation matter in terms of their feelings of burnout? In my personal experience, I know that my motivation and feelings of burnout move in opposite directions. I’ve not experienced emotional exhaustion or cynicism when I’ve felt most motivated. On the other hand, when I’ve felt no motivation, I haven’t felt effective in my job or what I was doing at the time. How does the motivation/burnout relationship work for you?

Coaching and Burnout

As mentioned in the previous post, coaching has positive outcomes for an individual by increasing feelings of self-efficacy and self-determination.

One researcher who used coaching to reduce burnout on a group of physicians notes, “The premise of coaching, in fact, is that people have more control over their life circumstances and satisfaction than they typically realize” (Gazelle et al., 2015).

This makes sense. Dyrbye and colleagues, 2019, used coaching to address burnout and provided an avenue for healthcare workers to discuss topics such as:

  • Optimizing meaning at work;

  • Integrating personal and professional life;

  • Building social support and community at work;

  • Improving work efficiency;

  • Addressing workload;

  • Engaging in self-care and;

  • Strengthening relationships outside of work.

Many of these topics can be influenced by the healthcare worker themselves, and with the help of a coach, the individual has support in designing goals that address these issues. This is likely why a coaching intervention reduced emotional exhaustion among the physicians in the Dyrbye study. However, Dyrbye and team did not find a similar reduction in two other factors involved in burnout — professional ineffectiveness and cynicism. This may be because, since coaching is a personalized intervention, improvements to self-efficacy and self-determination won’t be long-lasting unless changes are made to the organizational environment. While healthcare workers feel less exhausted, they know that the structural barriers to feeling more effective and less cynical at work are not changing. The coaching is a stop-gap measure.

This is where coaching may be the wisest strategy when partnered with other interventions that reduce burnout, especially amongst nurse populations. Nurses are prone to self-endangering behaviors at work. Examples include an inability to say no to extra work or filling in. These behaviors are most severe when patients or other co-workers make the request (Eder & Meyer, 2022). Moreover, for nurses, burnout is sometimes related to those positive outcomes that organizations want to see in their workforce, such as engagement, organizational commitment, and teamwork. By overcommitting and putting their patients or organization first, nurses risk not caring for themselves. This behavioral pattern puts nurses in a vulnerable state. As mentioned, coaching can support nurse’s self-care engagement and help institute boundaries between the self and others.

Most of the research I reviewed showed that coaching as an intervention for nurse burnout had some short-term effects, but due to a lack of follow-up, more research needs to be done to understand long-term effects. Usually, these effects are related to decreases in emotional exhaustion. To ensure success and, indeed, prevent nurse burnout, coaching needs to be longer in duration and combined with other strategies at the organizational level, like increases in staffing, role clarity, and more effective leadership. Coaching works by helping individuals change their thinking patterns and actions; without organizations that do the same, nurse burnout will never truly be resolved.

Works Cited

  1. Dyrbye, L. N., Shanafelt, T. D., Gill, P. R., Satele, D. V., & West, C. P. (2019). Effect of a Professional Coaching Intervention on the Well-being and Distress of Physicians: A Pilot Randomized Clinical Trial. JAMA Internal Medicine, 179(10), 1406. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2019.2425

  2. Eder, L. L., & Meyer, B. (2022). Self-endangering: A qualitative study on psychological mechanisms underlying nurses’ burnout in long-term care. International Journal of Nursing Sciences, 9(1), 36–48. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijnss.2021.12.001

  3. Gazelle, G., Liebschutz, J. M., & Riess, H. (2015). Physician Burnout: Coaching a Way Out. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 30(4), 508–513. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-014-3144-y

Kara Schultz