When mental health is discussed in the workplace it is often in a negative context. We associate the words mental health with a long list of mental health disorders, rather than what it truly is. Our mental health is an indication of where we are on a scale of mental wellness. Every person moves left and right on this scale. We have good days, we have bad days. Sometimes good weeks. And bad weeks. Where our team members are on this scale has a direct impact on the quality of their work. We’ve all tried to focus when we’re stressed and something is nagging at us. It’s impossible. To unlock the competitive advantage of mental health in the workplace we need to reframe the conversation around mental health so that it empowers us instead of disempowers us. Here are 5 ways leaders can set the stage for mental wellness in their teams.
Start openly sharing how you are feeling
You’re the leader everyone takes their cues from. How you talk about your feelings opens or closes the door for your team to do the same. As such, I use the social time at the beginning of meetings while I’m waiting for people to join to talk about how I’ve been feeling and what’s going on in my life. Some days this will include stories of feeling really great and having fun experiences. And other times this will include stories of feeling down and the tools I am using to shift. The layers of trust this creates within a team can not be defined. This allows people to let their guard down and be real at work and not have to put on a smiley face when they feel like shouting inside. This creates emotional safety and the vibe that creates in the office is palpable.
Start asking, how are you feeling instead of how are you doing
Instead of asking, how’s your day...start asking your team, how are you feeling. This is a very different question and invokes a very different response. When you ask how someone is feeling, you are demonstrating that you care about their mental health enough to check in. When you ask how you are doing, you’re likely to get the patterned response of “fine”, which isn’t useful information. What you really want to know is how someone is feeling about their day, about life, about work. This provides insight into the depth of their mind and areas that may be available to tap into to help someone grow. For myself, if someone says fine, or bypasses the question I ask a more probing question like has anything been frustrating you lately, or is there anything that’s been weighing on your mind or is there anything I can do to help you? Demonstrating genuine compassion for how someone is feeling creates a strong bond between you and your team.
Celebrate your losses, openly
When I’m struggling with my mental health it feels like I’m losing. Losing doesn’t feel good unless you’ve built a culture where losing is acceptable. Dealing with a downswing of mental health isn’t about bypassing until you get to feeling better. That will make things even worse. The best way through it is through it, which means we have to work through the feeling that we’re losing, the feeling that we aren’t good enough, that we aren’t strong enough, or capable enough, or whatever words from our inner critic plague our thoughts when we are vulnerable. You can help combat this by celebrating your team’s losses and turning them into learning opportunities. Offer thanks for breaking the system so you can discover its weaknesses and then build it up again even stronger. Demonstrating graceful loss shows others how to be more graceful with themselves when they are the one who feels like they are losing. Create a process for dealing with loss that includes a celebration for finding a weak spot and then devising a plan to prevent it from happening again.
Provide spaciousness in people’s calendars
Are all these meetings really necessary? What would it take to put 2 hours of calendar free time on everyone’s calendar every day? One of the reasons stress and anxiety are so high in the workplace is because so many of us have to go to meetings all day and then try to figure out how to get actual work done. That creates an environment for burnout and inferior work. The counterbalance is your team needs to get real on the purpose and usefulness of meetings. And they need to have enough spaciousness in their workload so they can slow down. If every minute of every day is filled with something, nothing will get done. Our entire Executive team sets the example by scheduling 2 to 4 hour “jam sessions” where they shut off all notifications and put their heads down to do their most creative work. I’ve found that at a minimum, team members need a single 90-minute block on their calendar for focused work. I’ve yet to find a point of diminishing returns.
Create time to do your best work
As leaders, we can get sucked into managing the day-to-day operations of the organization. It’s tempting when there are little levers that can be adjusted all around us that we may perceive other people can’t see. But I’ve found when I dig a little deeper my meandering into day-to-day operations is often a signal that I haven’t set myself up to do my best work. This includes opening up my workload to do what I was hired to do, set strategy and vision while building architecture for execution. I can’t do strategy work and execution work at the same time and often find myself bouncing between the two. I’ve learned to delegate 100% of the tasks I can. Period. If I say I can’t, I ask myself why? Delegation creates more opening for me to focus on the amazing inspiring work I bring to the table. For me, this is really a choice of how I want to feel at work. When I have time to do my best work, I find myself fulfilled and grateful. That’s a lot better than the alternative.
The best way to unlock the competitive advantage of mental wellness in the workplace is to recognize that you can have a tremendous impact on how safe it feels to come to work today. If you can work to manage external stressors and create a set of accessible tools for when things are sliding your team can experience the waves together and support each other along the way. That creates a team environment where people love to come to work because it feels like coming home.
