Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink

50 - I'm Tired of Talking About Mental Health

• Leah Fink • Season 1 • Episode 50

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Are you fatigued by constant having conversations about mental health at work? Join us as we explore the origins and complexity of this topic, and dive into the overwhelm leaders may be feeling.  We then examine how to reshape leadership roles in order to move past these conversations and create a more successful and high-functioning team. 

Are your conversations about mental health going anywhere?

If you want to understand the real impacts of your team's mental well-being on your success, this is the episode for you!

To have your questions answered on the show, submit your story here: https://allthrive.ca/share-your-story

Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink is live every week at 12:00pm MST.  Please join us to get answers to your leadership questions! https://www.linkedin.com/in/leah-fink-all-thrive/

Speaker 1:

Every action you take as a leader has a ripple effect, starting with your team, going out to the organization and even out into people's personal lives. Here we offer you the chance to learn from real-life stories of leadership so you can gain a deeper understanding and level up your own skills From communication to culture, to power and equity, to feedback, to resolving conflict and more. Join us and make sure you're creating the ripples you want. Welcome to Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink.

Speaker 2:

Hello and welcome to Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink. Today we are going to be talking about mental health and, specifically, how hard it is when you're tired about talking about mental health in the workplace all the time. And instead of a specific question or story that was shared with me, I was speaking with a leader and talking about the work I do about elevating mental health in the workplace. He didn't want to share specifically, but said that I could use this example. He said he was so tired of conversations about mental health. It's just brought up way too much at work. It didn't seem to help employees and they just ended up thinking more about how they weren't doing well. Now I really wanted to share this example as I think it's so relevant and a really real experience for a lot of leaders. I think a lot of people are struggling with this discussion and for anyone who's experiencing that right now you are not the only one it's a really natural concern and a real challenge. So please be kind to yourself as you consider this. So let's look at this. I'm first going to add that we're talking today about overall mental well-being in the workplace. If you have staff that are diagnosed with mental illness, that's requiring some other specific pieces that you are going to have to deal with within your workplace. And so we're not talking about diagnosis, specific support. We're talking about that overall mental well being. When I use the term mental health Mental health first of all is this new topic in the workplace? If you went back 20-30 years ago, you would have barely heard the words mental health, let alone have been expected to support it in a leadership role. Maybe there is discussion around stress or around being healthy in general, but we really didn't talk about mental health. So leaders, and especially experienced leaders, have had to adapt to the shift. In. Now you need to talk about it and you might not feel equipped to address it at all, or you're tired of addressing it again and again, because it's not only, of course, the rhetoric around these changes, but in addition to this, we had the circumstances of COVID-19.

Speaker 2:

That brought mental health to the forefront of everyone's minds in this really big way, because a lot of people would have previously said maybe they didn't have any mental health concerns, or maybe people had some, but they were not as worried about it. You wouldn't have any mental health concerns, or maybe people had some, but they were not as worried about it you wouldn't have seen in the workplace. And suddenly there was this huge change. Suddenly people didn't have the resources that they had, they couldn't see the people that supported them, they couldn't do the activities they loved, they couldn't even plan what was going to happen within the next year, because things kept changing so much and all those pieces took a huge toll on people, on their mental health. And so this, suddenly this topic arose because not just one person with, maybe, mental illness was struggling, but all these people were suddenly talking about mental health and how stressed and concerned they were.

Speaker 2:

So, of course, workplaces had to respond. You wanted to keep your employees, you needed to get things done, you didn't want to lose everyone in the middle of this, and so you need to speak to these challenges. And for a lot of people, while there was the shutdown during COVID-19, there was an understanding that you need to step up more to support staff. Everyone was stressed and it was probably felt like a burden that you were extra stressed during that time dealing with it. And there was also, I think, a bit of an expectation that once COVID is done, once we're past this phase in the world, things will calm down. We won't need to talk about this so much anymore.

Speaker 2:

But after COVID-19, people were still talking about mental health. Maybe their situations were less extreme, but the conversations continued. And that's both because there are some real long-term impacts that people are still experiencing, still healing from from that shutdown, everything that entailed, but also there's this piece of once. There's space in a workplace, in any situation, to bring this up. You want to continue to do so. People kind of like that ability because it's not only just sharing how you are struggling, which can be a powerful thing, but also having it heard and acknowledged by leaders, by the workplace. That's really powerful. It gives this sense for people that someone cares about them. Now, of course, on the flip side of this, when those conversations were stopped or trivialized or tokenized, people feel a loss of care, and not that there isn't care, but they may no longer experience it when we start to shift that discussion, if we want to shut down this discussion Again.

Speaker 2:

This is all hard on leaders. You're generally not going to be trained in this. In many cases your role wasn't built to accommodate the extra time or effort you might need to put in now to support the staff team, and this is one of the reasons it's so important that leadership roles are well considered, so they include things about how much percent of your time you can use supporting staff in different ways, because that should be a big part of any leadership role, and also that hopefully the messaging from the top of the organization is sharing that it's okay to prioritize this within your role, that that top level of leadership is valuing employees and their health, and so different levels of supervision are all saying, yes, this is something I want to support and can support, and this is the resources I have. I know I have these resources to do so. Whether that's time, whether that's money, whatever, it is that you have that support. So we're going to shift a little bit now.

Speaker 2:

We talked about all these challenges and why it's kind of here, and one of the things I also hear is this idea that when you open a discussion, there's space obviously to both have positive and negative impacts, and the more we focus on something, the more real it is, and I think that there can be an effect where, when we take on something as this kind of identity, or we take on this mentality of kind of being victims when we hear we should be suffering from something, and a lot of people, I think, see mental health this way. If we focus on it too much, it will grow. Everyone will talk about mental health. Everyone will have worse mental health by talking about it. Not to say that that's true or not true. Just we have to be aware that that's a lot of people's perspectives and there might be a component of it that the more we talk, the more it brings.

Speaker 2:

But what do we do with all of this? The thing you don't want to do is end the discussion. You don't want to say, hey, we've talked too much about this, we're trying to address it, so just stop talking. That's not going to serve, and there's way too much rhetoric about mental health in the workplace that this isn't going to serve you or your organization. But let's focus this into three areas that you can address, and the first is, of course, there's a personal accountability for mental health. Everyone has their own challenges and everyone's responsible for what they're doing in their lives to help mitigate those challenges and still take care of themselves. We don't want to lose that area when we're thinking about people in the workplace, because we want to foster this empowerment, this self-efficacy that people can support their mental health, that they can get past challenges. So having discussions with individuals or with your team that really helps them understand some of these components, how they could be caring for themselves and sharing the resources things like benefits that your organization might offer that will help them on that personal level.

Speaker 2:

Flip side of this unfortunately our society tends to focus a lot on individualism and it's much easier, of course, also for organizations to place the entire onus of mental health onto the employee. So, for example, I'll hear from staff how the company noticed everyone in the organization was feeling stressed. So they had someone come in to speak about anxiety and they talked about what it was and they gave some tips for how you can not be anxious, and especially not be anxious at work. But the workplace itself was contributing to all those staff being stressed. They were stressed because of the circumstance, and so now the Onesto is put entirely on them to not be stressed, to not be anxious, and so we want to make sure that we're balancing this. We want to have those conversations about what you're responsible for for yourself, for mental health, but also look at this bigger picture.

Speaker 2:

Moving on to the second area, something that will also help with this is having really clearly defined structures and boundaries in your workplace. Having really clearly defined structures and boundaries in your workplace. It creates a lot of stress for leaders and teams when there's uncertainty. Black and white is really nice, and this is one space where you can be a little bit more black and white in order to have more flexibility, because sometimes you do have people who are really struggling and that can be hard both on the leader and on the team and there can feel a sense of inequality or that things aren't fair or that people are working much harder to accommodate this, and there might be some simple things that you can shift that would actually help with that.

Speaker 2:

Ironically, the clearer you are on your boundaries, the more space it gives you to support someone. So, for example, a common boundary in the workplace would be that someone needs to work X number of hours per week. Now you can think of what part of that boundary really matters to you and where do you have flexibility in addressing it. Maybe you can be open to people deciding what hours during the week they work. Is it weeknights, is it weekdays, is it part on weekends? Or if you have to have a specific required set of hours. Maybe they can have more say over their schedule to determine which kind of tasks they do at what time. Maybe it's even that you look at task-based instead of hour-based work.

Speaker 2:

There's a lot of ways that when you're really clear on what's important and what you require from staff, or what you really expect, then you have all this different space to play in it and to really have these discussions about how people can be best served. I know certainly of experiences of staff who were very stressed, having a really hard time in the workplace. They had some of these conversations and suddenly they were able to step into roles where they were not previously having success. And in this discussion, as we start talking about all these options and as we start looking now at some of the structures of the workplace, that really brings up this third area, and I believe this is where you have the most influence as a leader. It is so critical to do. Let's look at the workplace and what kind of environment you're creating for your staff, because when people talk about mental health in the workplace, what they're really saying is that there is stress in this environment that they are having a hard time dealing with, and this is 100% to your benefit to change this. If you are tired of talking about mental health, the way that you can reframe this discussion is how can I make my workplace more effective and successful? That is, honestly, basically the same thing people are asking when they're talking about mental health how so?

Speaker 2:

So the Mental Health Commission of Canada did a lot of research on what makes a psychologically health and safe workplace, aka a mentally healthy workplace. Do you know what they found? They found that all of the factors that build success for the organization were also critical for employee mental health. So how leaders communicated, what the culture was like, how engaged people are, the roles, responsibilities and expectations, what the organizational boundaries were All of those kinds of things came into play. Those are things that create more success for the organization. They actually make your job easier when they're in a good state that you spend less time thinking about all of these and, to quote their report, workplaces with a positive approach to psychological health and safety are better able to recruit and retain talent, have improved employee engagement, enhance productivity and are more creative and innovative and have higher profit levels.

Speaker 2:

Other positive impacts include a reduction of several key workplace issues, including the risk of conflict, grievances, turnover, disability, injury rates, absenteeism and performance or morale problems. I'm guessing those are probably all things you want in your organization. So when your employees bring up mental health, hopefully this is a bit of a different way that you can look at it. You can look at all the benefits that you could have if you can address some of these bigger workplace issues. And if you're curious about how your organization can do that work to become more successful, please get in touch with me. I do workplace mental health assessments that will look at all these factors and help you learn where you can be focusing your energy so you can be making the changes you need to, and you'll find that once that energy is focused, those changes are made.

Speaker 2:

Suddenly the talk about mental health isn't quite the same. You don't need to be going into all these pieces because you've really fixed some of those underlying issues. As a reminder to all our listeners, if you have a great story or question that you'd like to share with the show, we would love to have it. You can find the link for that in the description below and, as a thank you for that, I follow up with a session to make sure all your questions are answered and just to say thank you for contributing and I want to thank you so much for listening and learning with me. I understand that these discussions can be hard and feel overwhelming sometimes with how much they come up, so thank you for still taking the time to consider them and, as we close, remember to ask yourself what kind of ripples am I going to create this week?

Speaker 1:

We hope you enjoyed the episode. Make sure to subscribe, comment and connect with Leah at meetleahca.