Why as a leader you need to check-in with yourself
Burnout can affect anyone but as someone with responsibility for the working lives of others, the ripple effects can be greater for someone in a leadership role. With teams looking for direction in challenging times and new working practices pushing the boundaries of what was previously thought impossible, the pressure can be unbearable.
Burnout can lead to physiological and psychological ill health, not to mention the life-changing distress resulting from harmful coping mechanisms.
The knock-on effects will be felt by everyone. With low energy and loss of connection with their purpose and the people around them, burnt-out leaders are more likely to be slow and indecisive when making decisions and may miss opportunities as a result. Low morale leads to greater pressure and a lack of motivation for everyone. Productivity sufferers and a cycle of negative words, actions and emotions establish themselves. This radiates out into families, communities and beyond.
Loss of talent when people choose to walk away from impossible conditions compounds the issue.
What can we do to protect leadership wellbeing and build resilience?
It’s not personal
What is resilience? Expert Dr Robert Coles of the Roffey Park Institute describes it as “The capacity to flex with challenges and maintain a balance between an emotional state and a rational state when dealing with challenges”. The needs of productivity and accountability aren’t easy to juggle with those of real humans in times of rapid or unpredictable change.
Is resilience an intrinsic personal quality? Coles believes not. “We get our resilience from and through the way we respond emotionally and rationally to situations and to others.”
This has implications for how we see resilience in the workplace and how we build it. Is it an internal issue to be borne by the individual or does it have something to do with the environment in which they find themselves?
Is there a magic bullet: a methodology or programme that we can follow in order to build resilience in ourselves and our teams?
A collective project
Resilience isn’t just a level of tolerance to ambiguity and risk. It’s a radical idea but telling someone that they don’t have enough resilience is a senseless thing to do. You’re likely to drive them deeper into the painful space in which they’ve already found themselves.
Communication and connection are key. Where exploration and experimentation, backed up by encouragement is the norm, people will be able to act with confidence and curiosity in challenging times.
In this way, resilience becomes less about someone’s intrinsic characteristics and more about their environment. By fostering a culture of constant learning, problem-solving, collaboration and positivity rather than limiting imagination and promoting fear of failure, you create a natural space where innovation can flourish and flexibility becomes the touchstone. People will know what to do when they come across the unknown because they have been taught how to do so.
How do you know if there is a problem?
Is it possible to know if a leader’s resilience is on the wain before they’re suffering mental and physical ill-effects or team morale has taken a hit? How can we prepare ourselves, our leadership and our teams for the unknown?
There are no shortcuts. Quality conversations give everyone the opportunity to voice their position and what their needs are. Surveys have their place but they’re not a replacement for this process, particularly if you consider that a form filling exercise will have pre-determined questions.
It’s also necessary to delve deeper into a wider decision-making culture. Is there one way of making decisions? How do we listen to minority voices and encourage others who wouldn’t naturally be vocal to speak up?
Are systems able to flex to accommodate new and changing needs? Firms that were able and open to embracing home working culture were able to adapt quickly when it was necessary. Leaders working in an environment where they were already allowed to creatively manage teams working at different times and places were spending less energy time fighting the way things have always been done and more solving the logistical problem at hand.
Seven areas of balance
To protect the wellbeing of leadership and managers who in turn safeguard that of the teams that they work with, consciously work to achieve balance in five key areas:
Tech and human savvy
Tech can be a way of automating and streamlining processes to free up human ingenuity and creativity. Tap into this freedom but don’t leave these qualities shackled to other, less obvious systems and bureaucracy.
A questionnaire or a survey has its place but be mindful of the questions you’re asking and how you’re framing them. Are you limiting the responses you’ll get and how might that distort your findings? Be curious about the narratives and motives behind the insight you’re seeking and recognise when nothing is going to replace quality conversations.
Coles states “A lot of what people value is simple. It’s the informal conversations, expressions of support, informal advice, listening to problems – none of this is hierarchical or structural.”
Innovation and tradition
Grounded values underpin what we do and how we do it. Our history teaches us where we’ve come from and the things we need to learn from. Tradition connects, strengthens community and can form a solid foundation from which to grow.
Balance this with a desire for innovation. It takes bravery but have the courage to fail: your tenacity will inspire others. Where there is judgement, you’ll weaken the sense of daring that builds resilience. People will know how to deal with the unexpected because they’ve been taught how to. If you value the quality of the process as much as the outcome you’ll embed the kind of resilience that will take you through tough times.
Boldness and humility
It takes a clear head to make strong decisions in times of uncertainty, particularly when they will affect the lives of others. Using the information at hand, experience and the insight to sift through these well enough to find the answer takes confidence and a strong mindset.
Resilient leaders will also be good listeners with the humility to know that they don’t know everything and there is much to learn. They will include all voices and perspectives, being curious about their own blindspots.
Global and detailed view
An organisation is an ecosystem of people, “a sentient networking of relationships” according to Coles. If this is so, then the ability to focus in on the individual is as important as zooming out and seeing the bigger picture. The energy being put into taking a view of where the organisation sits within the world, its sector and other external forces needs to be balanced with that being put into securing a sound knowledge of what the internal forces are.
Being mindful of how a struggling individual, department or system can affect the whole involves being deliberately inquisitive about the details. This is not the same thing as micromanagement, of course, which can collapse the kind of confidence and thirst for problem solving that we’re aiming for.
Responsibilities and self-care
A study looked at how managers deal with delivering negative feedback. Those with higher empathy levels delivered it in a way that was more beneficial to the recipient but they felt depleted afterwards and did better if they were allowed recovery time. The managers with lower empathetic drive felt energised by the process but the feedback wasn’t as constructive. This is just one example of how the same undertaking can affect the energy level of two different people.
Beyond the obvious switching off emails and phone alerts in the evening and at weekends, what other ways can you find of making sure you protect your energy levels? If we are working as part of an organic whole it’s no longer good enough to frame the problem as one of being ‘lonely at the top’. This is not about individual strength. It’s about the strength of the whole.
Resilience is always a work in progress
Rather than being something that’s easy to pin down or mark as resolved, building resilience is an ongoing process. It’s a frame of mind more than anything and within an organisation, it’s a collective one. Although the benefits are clear, the starting point may not be. It might take a multi-faceted approach involving tech auditing, consultancy and coaching key individuals: whatever it takes, expert help is on hand to lead you through the process.
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