How Enhancing Leader And Employee Mental Wellness Is a Crucial Factor For Success?
Leaders with excellent self-leadership inspire others to thrive.
Fostering the mental wellness of leaders and employees proactively is of utmost importance, especially in today’s challenging times.
Senior leaders and entrepreneurs often overlook the well-being of mid-level leaders and HR’s, expecting them to create a positive employee experience on their own. However, without systematic intrapersonal education, such a task is hard or impossible.
Mental wellness is based on intrapersonal skills
Senior leaders tend to forget that employees and junior leaders in their workplace have limits to their capacity. One such limit is time, the other and even more important is a lack of effective skills, especially awareness-based intrapersonal skills.
You just can’t fix something you don’t comprehend. When you lack an understanding of your own intrapersonal processes, you will fail to secure the mental wellness of others.
The fact remains, none of us have had intrapersonal education or mental wellness lessons in schools.
In the case of mental health proactivity needs systematic effort.
We all have mental health. The key question here is what do we do to keep it good? It demands time and research to develop a systematic approach that secures mental wellness for people in your organization.
Securing excellent self-leadership is the key to the mental wellness of both leaders and employees.
Securing the wellness side of the mental health equation is often vaguely understudied. All illnesses are already a result of lacking wellness. So, it is constant reactivity and rescue vs. leading proactively and paving a path to something new (see the graph below).
Although many leaders acknowledge mental wellness as something significant, they frequently fail to secure excellent mental well-being and employee engagement and productivity simultaneously (see the right-hand side of the graph above). Stress, for example, cuts engagement levels low and burnout may lead to losing your brightest talents.
Securing mental wellness isn’t something that junior leaders and managers can figure out on their own. It demands training of their minds first. When they understand their own intrapersonal events, it becomes possible to understand others.
As Forbes reported in February 2021 around 60% of leaders feel emotionally drained by the end of the workday. Also, only 20% of employees are actively engaged (see the Gallup employee engagement levels graph below). As a result, most people in workplaces wither.
However, as the graph above shows, it could be also different. The potential to improve work engagement is there (from an average of 20% to 73%), but it needs to start with stress reduction and burnout prevention.
Mental health risks of leaders
Leaders are often more open to stress, burnout and mental health issues than employees. It means leaders need to take time to study how to keep their minds fit and well. This will allow them to move away from a constant inner reactivity-centric decision-making model.
Inner reactivity is the main problem, it creates emotional and mental struggles, killing proactivity and initiative and then spoiling interpersonal relations later on. However, while the mental health risks of leaders are higher than the risks of employees, both need addressing.
Ignoring the potential risks of chronic stress and strain under which many leaders or managers operate doesn’t alter the reality.
Reducing chronic stress levels is possible but demands learning coping mechanisms while people are well. The fact is, sooner is here better and more efficient than later.
Any manager or employee who finds themselves spending most of their day in a constant battle, feeling frustrated, engaged in conflicts or engaging in numerous debates is at risk of burning out and ending up with depression.
Leadership effectiveness and employee engagement are both directly correlated to mental wellness and stress levels. As languishing and stress increase, leadership effectiveness and employee engagement decrease. Thus procrastination becomes standard. This is why, knowing how to deal with stress and pressure is here the key to improving work culture. When a person finishes their workday feeling stressed and thus sees no hope for improvement, they are at risk of facing burnout and/or serious mental health issues.
Experiencing prolonged periods of stress and anxiety can make them short-tempered and lead to a desire to give up. They may start seeking new roles or look for ways to avoid the negativity present at work procrastinate or become passively aggressive. As a result, they are more likely to doubt their competence, become judgmental and exhibit impatience or anger with their teams.
No person thrives when people owning power over them become toxic or frustrated. Bad work culture kills creativity and personal initiative. Killing those two brings stagnation and replaces innovation with recombing the same old stuff over and over again until your customers no longer see no need for your goods or services.
The solution is securing mental wellness for all
Many workplaces invest in interpersonal training programs or boosting employee emotional motivation but up to now too few secure access to trainings that support mental wellness proactively. When people have mental wellness they discover true intrinsic motivation, this motivation never fades.
Training your mind comes down to learning practical intrapersonal skills and applying those to solve all your daily situations. The benefits of systematic mind health training should be here seen as the core essence of the mental wellness revolution that all workplaces truly need.
It is crucial to notice that leaders or managers can’t achieve their maximum potential in leading others if they are incapable of leading themselves first. Regrettably, this aspect is frequently overlooked in many workplaces, and thus leads to soaring costs and resigning of key personnel regardless of their position or rank.
Workplaces have the opportunity to provide training and support to enhance the mental fitness and mental sharpness of everyone in their team from top to bottom. If it is first done by leaders themselves, they can become advocates for improving the mental wellness of the whole organization. When applied workplace-wide, the new proactive mental wellness approach can improve employee engagement, productivity and innovation.
Establishing space to gain clarity on self-leadership and setting clear expectations and facilitating the necessary support/recourses to fulfill those expectations is what allows success.
Conclusion
By prioritizing mental wellness, organizations can foster a healthier and more productive work environment for leaders and employees alike. Such businesses can thrive and amply provide goods and services that make life on this planet better.
By investing in mental wellness training organizations can promote emotional well-being and mitigate the risk of languishing. Additionally, providing clarity on expectations and ensuring the necessary support for success is crucial in enabling people to steer themselves and others effectively amid challenges.
The mental wellness of leaders and employees isn’t an option but an absolute necessity for sustainable success and developing a healthy and sustainable organizational culture.
