Beyond burnout: Fixing the system, not the people

Burnout rarely walks through the door and introduces itself. It shows up quietly: a trusted nurse who's gone silent, a team that's stopped pushing back, a leader running on empty and calling it normal. In this episode of Lippincott® Spark, host Dr. Kelly Dries sits down with Lauren Spigelmyer, co-founder of Five Ives™ Framework, to reframe what's really happening, and to challenge a hard truth: building resilient nursing teams may have far less to do with resilience training than you think.

At the center of the conversation is the Five Ives™ Framework, a continuum mapped to the nervous system that helps nursing leaders name exactly where they and their teams stand right now. Instead of asking "who's the problem," it asks a more useful question: what state are we operating from, and what would it take to move up? None of these states is a failure. That shift in perspective can change how you deal with a struggling unit, and how you respond to the people you can't afford to lose.

Then Lauren introduces the idea that quietly reshapes everything else: your team doesn't just hear you, they experience you. Walk into a meeting rushed, reactive, and stretched thin, and that state spreads across the floor. Walk in grounded, and something different happens. She makes a compelling case that nervous system regulation deserves a place right alongside strategy, communication, and clinical judgment as a core leadership skill, because when you're depleted, you lose access to the creativity, the hard conversations, and the sound decisions that strong patient care depends on. For leaders measured on outcomes, engagement, and stability, the implication is significant: the state of the leader often becomes the state of the team.

Here's the part that makes this practical rather than aspirational: real change doesn't require a system-wide overhaul or a bigger budget. Lauren shares small, repeatable shifts you can put to work this week to help address burnout, settle a tense meeting, steady your own reactions, and signal safety to a strained team. They're simple enough to try before your next huddle yet grounded in how the nervous system actually works. Under relentless pressure, those small shifts are often what create the momentum everything else builds on.

Dr. Dries and Lauren Spigelmyer also dig into why so many attempts to address burnout fall short, what it looks like when your strongest people go quiet, and how to shift from reactive leadership toward the kind of stability that keeps skilled nurses at the bedside. It's an honest, generous conversation for anyone leading a team while giving it everything they have and wondering how to make that sustainable.

If you've ever led a well-intentioned self-care initiative or wellness program and wondered why nothing really changed, this episode offers a different starting point. Self-care matters, but Lauren makes clear it can't carry the full weight of a strained system. You'll discover a new lens for understanding team dynamics and practical structural tools you can apply immediately, helping you address the conditions that drive burnout, disengagement, and turnover.

Ready to see where you and your team land on the continuum, and what to do next? Listen to the full Lippincott Spark episode with Lauren Spigelmyer to hear the complete framework, the science behind it, and her practical tools for building lasting workforce stability.