by Adam Grant
But for most students, Overbrook is no fairy tale.
Located at the corner of Fifty-ninth and Lancaster in the heart of West Philadelphia, Overbrook is just a few blocks from one of the top ten drug corners in the country. Take a stroll past the school, and it’s not uncommon to see the drivers of passing cars rolling up their windows and locking their doors. In 2006, Overbrook was one of twenty-eight schools in the United States that was identified as “persistently dangerous” based on crime statistics. As of 2011, there were roughly 1,200 students enrolled at Overbrook, and nearly 500 were suspended at some point during the school year, racking up nearly fifty assaults and twenty weapons or drugs charges. The educational prospects for students are similarly dismal. On the SAT, Overbrook’s average hovers more than three hundred points below the national average, with more than three quarters of students in the bottom 25 percent in the country. Nearly half of all students who start high school at Overbrook will never finish: the graduation rate is just 54 percent.
In the hopes of turning this tragic situation around, a corps of talented, passionate young educators has arrived at Overbrook from Teach For America (TFA), the renowned nonprofit organization that sends college graduates to spend two years fighting educational inequity as teachers in some of the most disadvantaged schools in the country. TFA is filled with givers: research shows that the vast majority of teachers join to make a difference in students’ lives. Many come from privileged backgrounds, and they’re determined to help students who are less fortunate. As one anonymous teacher put it:
I knew throughout my life that I wanted to do something where I help . . . Social justice issues burn within me and the fact that so many students have been so viciously failed by the school systems in this country is infuriating and invigorating. I want every child to grow up able to make choices . . . education can be an equalizer . . . it’s a justice issue, and by joining TFA I saw a way to help make it my issue too.
In the past twenty years, more than twenty thousand teachers have worked for TFA, making tremendous strides toward promoting educational equity. But sheltered lives in suburbs and sororities leave many teachers dramatically unprepared for the trials and tribulations of inner-city schools.
In the Overbrook hallways, the school’s massive difficulties fell hard on the shoulders of a twenty-four-year-old TFA neophyte named Conrey Callahan. With white skin and blond hair, Conrey stood out in the halls like a sore thumb: 97 percent of Overbrook’s students are African American. Conrey—a dog lover who lives with Louie, the mutt she rescued—grew up in a cozy Maryland suburb, attending a high school that was named one of the best in the country. Calling her a ball of energy would be an understatement: she runs half-marathons, captained her high school soccer and lacrosse teams, and competed for six years in jump rope competitions, making the junior Olympics. Although her intellectual prowess led her Vanderbilt professors to encourage her to pursue history, Conrey set her sights on more practical matters: “I set out to make a difference, improving education and opportunities for kids in low-income communities.”
But Conrey’s idealistic dreams of inspiring the next generation of students were quickly crushed by the harsh realities of arriving at school at 6:45 A.M., staying up until 1:00 A.M. to finish grading and lesson plans for her Spanish classes, and days marked by breaking up fights, battling crime, and trying to track down truant students who only showed up for two days of class in an entire year. One of Conrey’s most promising students was living in a foster home, and had to drop out of school after giving birth to a child with developmental problems.
Conrey was constantly complaining to one of her closest friends, an investment banker who worked a hundred hours a week and couldn’t grasp why teaching at Overbrook was so stressful. In an act of desperation, Conrey invited the friend to join her on a school field trip. The friend finally understood: “she couldn’t believe the sheer exhaustion that she felt at the end of the day,” Conrey recalls. Finally, Conrey hit rock bottom. “It was awful. I was burned out, overwhelmed, and ready to give up. I never wanted to set foot in a school again. I was disgusted with the school, the students, and myself.”
Conrey was displaying the classic symptoms of burnout, and she wasn’t alone. Berkeley psychologist Christina Maslach, the pioneer of research on job burnout, reports that across occupational sectors, teaching has the highest rates of emotional exhaustion. One TFA teacher admires the organization but says it is “focused on hard work and dedication almost to a fault . . . you leave training with the mindset that unless you pour every waking hour of your life into the job then you’re doing a disservice to your kids.” Of all TFA teachers, more than half leave after their two-year contract is up, and more than 80 percent are gone after three years. About a third of all TFA alumni walk away from education altogether.
Since givers tend to put others’ interests ahead of their own, they often help others at the expense of their own well-being, placing themselves at risk for burnout. Four decades of extensive research shows that when people become burned out, their job performance suffers. Exhausted employees struggle to focus their attention and lack the energy to work their hardest, longest, and smartest, so the quality and quantity of their work takes a nosedive. They also suffer from poorer emotional and physical health. Strong evidence reveals that burned-out employees are at heightened risk for depression, physical fatigue, sleep disruptions, impaired immune systems, alcohol abuse, and even cardiovascular disease.
When Conrey hit rock bottom at Overbrook High School, she felt that she was giving too much. She was arriving at work early, staying up late, and working weekends, and she could hardly keep up. In this situation, it seems that the natural way to recover and recharge would be to reduce her giving. But that wasn’t what she did. Instead, Conrey gave more.
While maintaining her overwhelming teaching workload, Conrey began volunteering her time as a TFA alumni mentor. As a content support specialist, every other week she helped ten different teachers create tests and design new lesson plans. Then, in her limited spare time, she founded a mentoring program. With two friends, she created a Philadelphia chapter of Minds Matter, a national nonprofit organization that helps high-achieving, low-income students prepare for college. Conrey spent her nights and weekends filing for nonprofit status, finding a pro-bono law firm and accountant, and applying for national approval. Finally, after a year, she was able to start recruiting students and mentors, and she created the plans for weekly sessions. From then on, Conrey added five hours a week mentoring high school students.
All told, Conrey was spending more than ten extra hours per week giving. This meant even less room in her schedule for relaxation or restorative downtime, and even more responsibility to others. And yet, when she started giving more, Conrey’s burnout faded, and her energy returned. Suddenly, in fact, she seemed to be a renewed bundle of energy at Overbrook, finding the strength to serve as the coordinator for gifted students and create a Spanish 3 program from scratch. Unlike many of her peers, she didn’t quit. Of the five teachers who joined Overbrook from TFA with her, Conrey was the only one still teaching there after four years. Of the dozen teachers who arrived in the same three-year window as her, Conrey was one of just two left. She became one of the rare TFA teachers who continued teaching for at least four years, and she was nominated for a national teaching award. How is it possible that giving more revitalized her, instead of draining her?
The Impact Vacuum: Givers Without a Cause
A decade ago, Howard Heevner, a dynamic director of a university call center, invited me to help him figure out how to maintain the motivation of his callers. The callers were charged with contacting university alumni and asking them to donate money. They were required to ask for donations three times before hanging up, and still faced a rejection rate exceeding 90 percent. Even the most seasoned and successful callers were burning out. As one experienced caller put it: “I found the calls I was making
to be extremely difficult. Many of the prospects cut me off in my first couple of sentences and told me they were not interested in giving.”
I assumed that the takers were dropping like flies: they wouldn’t be as committed as the givers. So during training, I measured whether each caller was a giver, matcher, or taker. In their first month on the job, the takers were bringing in an average of more than thirty donations a week. Contrary to my expectation, the givers were much less productive: they were struggling to maintain their motivation, making fewer calls and bringing in under ten donations a week. I was mystified: why were the callers who wanted to make a difference actually making the least difference?
I got my answer one day when I paid a visit to the call center, and noticed a sign one of the callers had posted above his desk:
DOING A GOOD JOB HERE
Is Like Wetting Your Pants in a Dark Suit
YOU GET A WARM FEELING BUT NO ONE ELSE NOTICES
According to my data, the caller who proudly displayed this sign was a strong giver. Why would a giver feel unappreciated? In reflecting on this sign, I began to think that my initial assumption was correct after all: based on the motivational structure of the job, the givers should be outpacing the takers. The problem was that the givers were being deprived of the rewards they find most energizing.
The takers were motivated by the fact that they were working at the highest-paying job on campus. But the givers lacked the rewards that mattered most to them. Whereas takers tend to care most about benefiting personally from their jobs, givers care deeply about doing jobs that benefit other people. When the callers brought in donations, most of the money went directly to student scholarships, but the callers were left in the dark: they had no idea who was receiving the money, and how it affected their lives.
At the next training session, I invited new callers to read letters from students whose scholarships had been funded by the callers’ work. One scholarship student named Will wrote:
When it came down to making the decision, I discovered that the out-of-state tuition was quite expensive. But this university is in my blood. My grandparents met here. My dad and his four brothers all went here. I even owe my younger brother to this school—he was conceived the night we won the NCAA basketball tournament. All my life I have dreamed of coming here. I was ecstatic to receive the scholarship, and I came to school ready to take full advantage of the opportunities it afforded me. The scholarship has improved my life in many ways . . .
After reading the letters, it took the givers just a week to catch up to the takers. The takers did show some improvement, but the givers responded most powerfully, nearly tripling in weekly calls and donations. Now, they had a stronger emotional grasp of their impact: if they brought in more money, they could help more scholarship students like Will. By spending just five minutes reading about how the job helped other people, the givers were motivated to achieve the same level of productivity as the takers. “The greatest untapped source of motivation,” writes Susan Dominus, “is a sense of service to others.”
But the givers still weren’t seeing the full impact of their jobs. Instead of reading letters, what if they actually met a scholarship recipient face-to-face? When callers interacted with one scholarship recipient in person, they were even more energized. The average caller doubled in calls per hour and minutes on the phone per week. By working harder, the callers reached more alumni, resulting in 144 percent more alumni donating each week. Even more strikingly, revenue quintupled: callers averaged $412 before meeting the scholarship recipient and more than $2,000 afterward. One caller soared from averages of five calls and $100 per shift to nineteen calls and $2,615 per shift. Several control groups of callers, who didn’t meet a scholarship recipient, showed no changes in calls, phone time, donations, or revenue. Overall, just five minutes interacting with one scholarship recipient motivated twenty-three callers to raise an extra $38,451 for the university in a single week.* Although the givers, takers, and matchers were all motivated by meeting the scholarship recipient, the gains in effort and revenue were especially pronounced among the givers.
The turnaround highlights a remarkable principle of giver burnout: it has less to do with the amount of giving and more with the amount of feedback about the impact of that giving. Researchers have drawn the same conclusion in health care, where burnout is often described as compassion fatigue, “the stress, strain, and weariness of caring for others.” Originally, experts believed that compassion fatigue was caused by expressing too much compassion. But new research has challenged this conclusion. As researchers Olga Klimecki and Tania Singer summarize, “More than all other factors, including . . . the time spent caregiving, it is the perceived suffering that leads to depressive symptoms in the caregiver.” Givers don’t burn out when they devote too much time and energy to giving. They burn out when they’re working with people in need but are unable to help effectively.
Teachers are vulnerable to giver burnout because of the unique temporal experience that defines education. Even though teachers interact with their students on a daily basis, it can take many years for their impact to sink in. By then, students have moved on, and teachers are left wondering: did my work actually matter? With no clear affirmation of the benefits of their giving, the effort becomes more exhausting and harder to sustain. These challenges are pervasive in a setting like Overbrook, where teachers must fight many distractions and disadvantages to stimulate the attention—let alone attendance—of students. When Conrey Callahan was emotionally exhausted, it wasn’t because she was giving too much. It was because she didn’t feel her giving was making a difference. “In teaching, do I have an impact? It’s kind of dicey,” Conrey told me. “I often feel like I’m not doing anything effective, that I’m wasting my time and I’m not making a difference.”
When Conrey launched Minds Matter Philadelphia, she may have been bulking up her schedule, but the net effect was to fill the impact vacuum that she experienced in her teaching job at Overbrook. “With my mentoring program, there’s no doubt; I know that I have a more direct impact,” she says. By mentoring low-income students who were high achievers, she felt able to make more of a difference than in her Overbrook classroom, where each student presented specific challenges. When she mentored high-achieving students, the positive feedback came more rapidly and validated her effort. She watched one mentee, David, blossom from a shy, reserved loner into an outspoken young man with a close group of friends. As with the fund-raising callers meeting a scholarship student who benefited from their work, seeing the impact of her program had an energizing effect.
But that effect wasn’t limited to the mentoring program. Thanks to the energy boost, Conrey developed renewed hope that she could have an impact in her job at Overbrook. Observing the progress of her high-achieving mentees instilled confidence that she could help the students struggling in her own classroom. “I know what I’ve started is really making a difference with these kids. What I’ve seen in three months is a big change for them, and they make me realize how great kids can be.” As she spent more time mentoring students at Minds Matter, she walked into her Overbrook classroom with greater enthusiasm, fueled by a revitalized sense of purpose.
In research with two colleagues, I’ve discovered that the perception of impact serves as a buffer against stress, enabling employees to avoid burnout and maintain their motivation and performance. In one study, a student and I found that high school teachers who perceived their jobs as stressful and demanding reported significantly greater burnout. But upon closer inspection, job stress was only linked to higher burnout for teachers who felt they didn’t make a difference. A sense of lasting impact protected against stress, preventing exhaustion.
In the classroom, it sometimes takes years for a teacher’s lesson to hit home with students. By that time, many teachers have lost contact with their students. But at least for a while, teachers have the opportunity to see their sh
ort-term impact as they interact face-to-face with their students. Many other jobs provide no contact at all with the people who benefit from our work. In health care, for example, many medical professionals provide critical diagnoses without ever meeting the patients on the other end of their test results. In Israel, a group of radiologists evaluated nearly a hundred computed tomography (CT) exams from patients. After three months passed, the radiologists had forgotten the original CT exams, and they evaluated them again. Some of the radiologists got better, showing 53 percent improvement in detecting abnormalities unrelated to the primary reason for the exams. But other radiologists got worse: their accuracy dropped by 28 percent—on the exact same CT exams, in just three months. Why did some radiologists get better while others got worse?
Their patients had been photographed before their exams. Half of the radiologists completed their first CT exams without a patient’s photo. When they did their second CT exams three months later, they saw the photo. These were the radiologists who improved by 53 percent. The other half of the radiologists saw the patient photo in their first CT exams, and then completed their second CT exams three months later with no photo. These were the radiologists who deteriorated by 28 percent.