Decrapify Work or Die (in the flickering flames)
Fess up first
It’s Global Mental Awareness Month and Mental Health Week in the UK. I read this week that many organisations have put all the capabilities in place to help their employees with their mental health - the Employee Assistance Programmes, the HR processes, counsellors, coaches and all the rest - but that take up remains low, despite evidence that the problems are worsening.
It’s not enough just to provide the apparatus, you have to create an environment where employees feel safe too use it. Clearly, the old attitudes towards mental health have not shifted yet. If ‘leaders’ still do not talk about mental health, conceal their own struggles and fail to support people who say they are struggling, then nothing much is going to change.
Leaders need to start to tell their stories and share their experience to create a safe space for the people they profess to lead to do the same. They have to give permission for the conversation to be had. Their mental health is frequently under greater challenge than most and they suffer more. It’s time to drag that truth out into the open.
And they need to do it whilst they are still in leadership positions, not have to wait until they’ve burnt out and had to quit the fray.
It’s not easy, though, especially for those of us of older generations, who have been further socialised to ignore these issues through decades spent in corporations. I often tell my story and use my experience of poor mental health to evidence a point or promote an argument but I still find it discomforting. It still challenges me at a deep level and can still leave me feeling very vulnerable. So leaders need to be supported and encouraged to do this and congratulated for their courage.
Burn, Baby, Burn!
The topic of burnout is on fire at the moment (I did promise Dad jokes… ). Whilst some still insist it is down to us to control ourselves and our environment, personal factors only account for 30% of the cause. 70% of burnout is caused by the workplace, toxic environments that overwork people and cause enormous levels of uncontrollable stress.
It’s almost as if organisations were set up with the purpose of creating burnout in their employees. Now, I’m pretty sure this is not the case (I mean, there’s probably some run by narcissists and sadists …) but it is an inevitable outcome of how they work today.
I wonder if ‘leaders’ feel good about that? With the majority of people feeling burnout at some point, I wonder if they are proud of creating the circumstances that do that to people? Is that the sort of place they’d want their family to work?
This is the sort of question that led Bob Chapman to a personal epiphany at Barry Wehmiller and led to his ‘Total Leadership’ approach that puts people and the stewardship of those precious souls at the heart of the way the company operates.
And whilst I am sure there are a number of psychopaths out there, maybe if we hold the mirror up to the rest they might decide they no longer want to be associated with them.
Down, down, deeper and down
Aaron Halliday Phd says that burnout and depression are closely intertwined in this Linked IN post
His point is that the symptoms are the same but are differently diagnosed according to the situation they occur in. If it’s in the workplace (so caused by the stress there), it’s burnout. If it in the personal life, it’s depression.
Diagnosing mental health conditions based on where they occur is plainly absurd. Our lives are not so neatly segmented, especially in today’s world where the boundaries are blurred by technology.
It’s funny how burnout has soared during COVID when work and personal life have been smashed together and our workplace and living space have become one, isn’t it? It’s almost like there some connection …
What happens in our work life spills across into our personal life and vice versa. I have often spoken about the mid-life, mid-career crisis, when the demands of your family and personal life peak at precisely the same time you career seems to run into the sand. I’ve met many people who have experienced this (including me!) and the psychological damage is often ignored and untreated.
If you’re suffering burnout at work, you don’t suddenly start flourishing the moment you step inside your front door. Equally, if your personal life is challenging then it impacts how you are at work - and if that is ‘not allowed’, it simply makes it much worse.
So why do we have two diagnoses for the same condition? A cynic might think it’s because burn out hits the company health bill (in the US, at least) but depression doesn’t. Either way, it’s a human being who is struggling and needs help and support and that’s all that matters.
Smells like team spirit
I listened to a ‘Leading from the Heart’ podcast with Paula Davis, who has just brought out her book (of course) called “Strong teams are the secret to beating employee burnout”. It sounds like there’s some interesting research in it and it’s a useful contribution but I think she’s wrong.
Strong teams are not just the secret to beating employee burnout. Strong teams ARE the secret. Full stop. Successful organisations are really just collections of great teams, ideally networked together. The future of organisations are based around various ways of connecting teams, from Haier’s entrepreneurial model to Buurtzorg’s parallel network and many variants in between.
She makes the point that we’re not very good at ‘teaming’, which is true. That's probably because organisations generally ignore teams and relegate their importance, so consequently don’t train people or reward them for being good team members.
It's to their detriment. Teams are critical.
Culture sits in teams. Creativity sits in teams. Action sits in teams. Oh, and yeah, wellbeing sits in teams.
Everything else is, as David Graeber might have said, is bullshit.