Set a Healthy Tone

I led a session recently on preventing workplace burnout. Participants -- nonprofit executives -- understood the famous Peter Drucker quote: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

Knowing it’s on them to set the tone of their workplace, they shared some of the ways they are promoting their employees' well-being:

• Invite the whole person to show up by including personal checkins at staff meetings

• Educate yourself so you’ll recognize signs of overwhelm and burnout in your teamWorkshop participants also shared the following strategies to ensure worker well-being:

• Communicate clearly that you want to hear your workers’ concerns about their jobs or their lives -- and listen when they come to you

• When you learn of a concern, take time to assess it and make needed changes to create more psychological safety at work

• Lead by example – take care of your own health by taking time off and letting go of unimportant tasks

Leaders Should Provide What All Workers Need

The 2023 Mind Share Partners study documented the rise of workplace mental health as a key concern for the US workforce. It found that, during the pandemic, the proportion of workers who felt comfortable discussing their mental health with their supervisors rose from prior years. But in the latest study, it declined sharply.  

The study’s authors point to a significant clash between leaders’ desire to return to pre-pandemic norms that stress productivity and workers’ new attitudes about well-being at work.
 
To reverse this downward trend and boost employee mental health, the Mind Share Partners recommended the following strategies:

1. Stay the course with DEI initiatives and policies that, over the long haul, shift organization culture toward supporting historically marginalized groups. When attention and investment are given to actions that promote equity, community and a sense of belonging, everyone benefits.

2. Lead with more vulnerability, openness and transparency. If you trust your employees, they’re more likely to trust you and commit to their work (more on trust next time).

3. Collaboratively envision a mentally healthy workplace — ask your team to uncover issues contributing to a lack of safety that you might overlook.

4. Give employees greater autonomy — change the focus from job tasks to desired outcomes; give them the “what” and trust them to figure out the “how.”  Provide more flexibility in when and where they do their work.

Trauma-Informed Leadership

Today’s social sector leaders are also being called to not only endorse “trauma-informed care” in their services to marginalized communities. They are asked to recognize that some of their employees may be experiencing trauma at work – for a variety of reasons.
 
Katherine Manning, author of The Empathetic Workplace: 5 Steps to a Compassionate, Calm, and Confident Response to Trauma on the Job, discussed the pervasiveness of workplace trauma in Chief.  Trauma shows up at work from discrimination, harassment and worker conflicts, as well as war, natural disasters, mass shootings and police murders. In nonprofits, staffers face trauma when they interact with traumatized individuals and families.
 
Manning says it’s critical for leaders to acknowledge that trauma exists and learn how best to manage it.  She recommends these trauma-informed leadership strategies:

1. Acknowledge employees' struggles and make it clear that leadership is listening.

2. Show support by defining clear action steps in response to trauma.

3. Build trust through consistent follow-through.

4. Ensure that there will be no negative consequences when workers seek emotional or social support from their supervisor or HR director.

The business argument for leaders to embrace the new paradigm of humanistic leadership? It’s simply too expensive to keep replacing burned-out leaders and employees who resign, prioritizing their mental health over self-sacrifice to the mission.