I've been thinking about the mental health crisis.

What does a meaningful response to the growing mental health crisis look like? How do we discern a positively impactful response from a superficial just-checking-of-a-box or let-us-get-more-from-our-people reaction?

I am grateful for all the beautiful things being done in the private sector to offer resources to those already suffering with mental health issues. I commend this effort. For example, the organization I work for, Liberty IT, offers pathways to counseling, physical and mental health resources, income insurance that includes mental health coverage, and a network of trained mental health champions. As managers we've also been offered fantastic training from Action Mental Health. This training not only built our awareness about the extent of the mental health crisis (1 in five people are struggling in the UK), but it also challenged us, the Managers, to be more mindful about how we co-create the crisis. The truth is we co-create the dynamics that challenges the indivual and collective mental health.

We all play a part in creating this problem!

If we can recognize this truth, we can discover opportunities to intervene at the root of the problem in addition to our well-intended interventions at a symptomatic level.

I think organizations can be impactul at mitigating the root cause of mental health by offering their employess role clarity and the associated role boundaries, actively managing capacity and avoid knee-jerk change:

1. role - is my expectations clear and are each team members clear on their role? For example, I have spent a lot of time over the past year building team agreement and team norms, as well as championing for consistency and automation in how we do things. This is a great way to reduce the cognitive overload of "doing business" so we can focus on the "business" . This doesn't mean we need to be static, it only means we need to be deliberate in how we respond to what is in front of us.

2. demand - am I asking too much and am I setting this person up for success? For example, after inheriting teams that were irrationally overcommitted, I put a guardrail in place with my teams to help them seek a reasonable balance between adding value and working at sustainable pace. I empowered them with the tools to say no.

3. change - do I identify and manage change proactively? Does my group have an "internal locus of control"? Do I see my change initiatives through to completion, or do I knee-jerk in the next flavour of the month direction? For example, I recently noticed that it is much easier for me as a manager to "spin up new ideas" than it is for my team to "execute on ideas". Also, I noticed that my team members have great ideas of their own, but if my list of ideas is already 5 deep, my team members generally don't have the capacity to engage with their own creativity. Creativity demands space. Execution demands time.

How does lack of role clarity, lack of capacity planning and knee-jerk change create chronic stress in your team? How does this impact your mental health?

Notes

• An version of this reflection was posted on LinkedIn.

Related tags

leadershipthinking aboutself-realization