Leaders Speak Up: Unlocking Mental Health in the Workplace

Transcript

Des Dearlove:

Hello, I’m Des Dearlove, co-founder of Thinkers50. Welcome to Mind Matters, our special series of webinars to mark Mental Health Awareness Month brought to you in collaboration with our friends at Silicon Guild. Now, this is the fourth and final webinar in this special series. Recordings of the previous webinars are available on the Thinkers50 channel on YouTube, and this one will also be available as soon as we can get it up there.

The title of today’s session is Leaders Speak Up, Unlocking Mental Health in the Workplace. Our moderator and the instigator for the Mind Matters series is Morra Aarons-Mele. Morra is the author of The Anxious Achiever and host of The Anxious Achiever podcast. She was also shortlisted for the 2023 Thinkers50 Leadership Award.

Today, Morra is joined by three very special guests. Megan Reitz is Associate Fellow at the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford and Adjunct Professor of Leadership and Dialogue at Hult International Business School, and a Thinkers50 Ranked Thinker. She’s the author of several books including Speak Out, Listen Up: How to Have Conversations That Matter, Speak Up, and The Appropriate Mind Time.

Amy Edmondson is Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, renowned for her world-leading research into the concept of psychological safety. She’s the author of The Fearless Organization and Right Kind of Wrong. She’s topped the last two Thinkers50 rankings as the most influential management thinker in the world.

Finally, last but certainly not least, Peter Sims is a best-selling author and the founder and chairman of BLK SHP Inc, a place and platform for making small bets and building new ventures. He’s also the co-author of the best-selling book True North with Bill George, which was selected as one of the top 25 leadership books of all time. His second book, Little Bets, was selected by the Wall Street Journal as one of the six best advice books for entrepreneurs. Now, that’s really not bad for someone who describes himself as an accidental author. Peter was also part of the team that started Giving Tuesday, the global philanthropic movement that has raised 10 billion in over 100 countries for social good causes.

Welcome one and all and everyone tuning in from around the world. We do like to hear from you, so please let us know where you are joining us from, share your questions and insights and reflections.

Morra, as ever, the floor is yours.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Thank you, Des. Good morning, good afternoon. I just couldn’t start out… I’m in such a good mood today. I’m wearing green in honour of my Boston Celtics, I don’t know if any of you are NBA fans, who swept… Yes, Amy. Yes… who swept the Eastern Conference finals and are headed to the NBA finals, and I’m in a very good mood this morning, so just had to share.

Speaking up. What is it about speaking up that unlocks connection among people, among teams? What is it about speaking up that can unlock better mental health at work and on teams? How do we do it well? Why is it so hard? Why do we feel we risk so much when we do? And most importantly for today, what is the leader’s role in speaking up and getting personal about their own mental health and their own struggles in order to make speaking up and being heard easier for the people on their team?

We’re going to dive into all that. I hope that we will get practical as well as stir up some big thoughts with this group. It is amazing to see all of you: Zurich, Cape Town, Switzerland, Toronto, Gothenburg, all over the world. Tell us where you’re from. Ask us questions. I promise I will get to your questions. As usual, we’re going to go round robin with our speakers. I may take moderator’s privilege, and then we will get to your questions.

I just want to start with this really quick thing about what happens when we connect, especially through story. You’ve probably heard that we are wired for story. Do you know that when you hear a story unfold from another person, your brainwaves actually start to sync up with those of the storyteller? This is from Uri Hasson at Princeton. He says, “It’s as though I’m trying to make your brain similar to mine in areas that really capture the meaning, the situation, the schema, the context of the world. We make meaning, share context, and learn from challenges through story and through speaking up.” And so that’s why I’m so thrilled to have you all here to tell us about your work and your stories.

I’m going to start with Megan.

Megan Reitz:

Thank you very much. Thanks, Morra. Hello everybody. I’m saying good afternoon from a beautifully sunny Barcelona, so I’m also in a good mood being here. It’s one of my favourite cities. This topic of mental health is incredibly close to my heart, and it is hugely important the way we speak up about mental health. To state the obvious, it costs lives or saves lives. It’s that clear.

I suppose I’ve got three things that I’d kick off with really. One is, of course, a leader’s role in speaking up and enabling others to speak up around mental health is hugely important. I’ll come back to these. Secondly, but not if it’s performative. Actions speak louder than words. Thirdly, our actions and our words are situated in a system that has certain rules of the game that make it incredibly difficult for us to connect in a way that improves mental health. As well as looking at the leader’s role and the conversation inside an organisation, we have some serious questions to ask about the system as a whole.

Just to come back to each one of those. The first one, obviously what a leader says, what a leader doesn’t say even more so, gets replicated across the organisation. Their role is hugely important, and their role in inadvertently silencing conversations is worth paying attention to. Yes, speaking up, but also the blind spot that we, myself and John Higgins, who’s my co-researcher, we’ve really been exploring over the last 10 years is the fact that as you get more senior or if you get more into a powerful position, whatever that might be, even if it’s not hierarchical, you are likely to go into what we call an optimism bubble.

That means you’ll overestimate the degree to which people are speaking up around you. You’ll overestimate your listening skills and you’ll overestimate how approachable you are. We’ve surveyed about 21 or 22,000 employees now, and the data of how that happens as you go up an organisation is really pretty clear. The first thing is, probably, leaders might already think that they’re having quite good conversations in the workplace. Or that at least classic phrase: my door is always open. Of course people can speak up about it. It’s fine. It’s fine.

That’s the first thing we need to crack and we need to say actually, possibly, it’s not as easy if you don’t have the same labels on your head, with the power and with leadership labels. We might have to do a lot more work than we realise to really help people feel at ease and to speak up.

In particular, I would mention in this first point how we respond when people speak up about mental health is… Well, it defines whether somebody else will speak up afterwards. All it takes, and I’ve seen this happen, is for a leader to look rather puzzled or frustrated or unsure when somebody does bring up a topic that’s tricky, and that will really figure in everybody’s minds. They’ll be like, “Right, we won’t talk about that again.” Our response as a leader really impacts the habits, conversations that we have in an organisation. That’s the first point.

The second point is when I read the title of this session, leaders should embrace mental health. I must admit, because I work a lot at various conferences in the run-up to conferences, and I had this image of a HR or corporate communications person with a leader sat in front of them rather harried and hurried saying, “Right, make sure you embrace your mental health on stage.”

Morra Aarons-Mele:

I’ve seen that happen. Yes.

Megan Reitz:

Yes, exactly.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Insert vulnerable anecdote here.

Megan Reitz:

Precisely, so please come up with something in your background that will cover mental health. But it’s got a bit between these. Don’t make it too far this way or don’t make it too… Can you embrace it on stage, please? Employees see straight through that.

Amy Edmondson:

And be authentic.

Megan Reitz:

Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Yeah, so I was struck actually in our research. It was two different stories. One story of a young lawyer who had some time off with a mental health issue, and then the organisation was so careful bringing that lawyer back in and actually slowing them down and really holding their hand all the way through. It was really amazing.

And then another story that we’ve come across where in the financial services where a director was… They have an allocation. I mean, if you’re off with mental health, you get your six therapy sessions to try and get you back in as soon as possible. It really is that instrumental, which brings me onto the final point and then I’ll shut up.

My current research with John is on what we call spaciousness. How do we create the experience of a sense of space where we can have the conversations that matter inside what I call pathologically busy organisations? There’s two stances I suppose, two orientations that we see in an organisation. This is inspired by Iain McGilchrist’s work, and Martin Buber. One is what we call instrumental. In an instrumental gaze, we see ourselves as separate, as fragmented, as utility. There’s a means to an end. The focus is on short-term, tangible targets. Busy, do it. Really important, okay? That’s necessary. Another frame is what we call the relational gaze, and that’s when we have a broader perspective. We see our interdependence, we see our relationship to one another.

We make very different choices depending on what gaze we have in the organisation, and you can’t meet a mental health issue and crisis just with more instrumental processes. You have to question the whole way we look at work. Whilst this may sound rather dreamy, actually, it comes down to, what the hell are we doing? Why are we working? What is the point? Why are we working together, and what is the point of my leadership? It’s there in those really crucial questions, actually, that we start to genuinely have the kind of relationships and the kind of conversations that help at work.

More about that later potentially. But that’s, I think, enough from me.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

I love the spaciousness. In one of our earlier sessions, we were remarking on the time that a leader spent time with us, actually took the time to show us something, to help us through a challenge. That spaciousness of, I’m here for you and I haven’t just mentally moved on to the next.

Megan, I just have to give you a statistic that I pulled. This is from Headspace’s most recent data. Since 2020, the number of employees who reported their company leaders talk openly about their personal mental health has more than doubled. It was 35% in 2020. Headspace is reporting 89% of leaders are talking openly about their personal mental health, and yet employees are feeling less cared for than ever. Their own mental health gets worse.

When you hear that statistic, what comes to your mind?

Megan Reitz:

Well, what comes to my mind is one, as I said, I think we really have to be careful when it’s performative. I see performative speaking up all the time. I see leadership teams stating how they want everybody in their organisation to be collaborative. Everybody’s looking at the leadership team going, “You’re kidding. You’re all in silos and you hate each other.” That is one issue.

The other issue is we are inside what is increasingly a broken system. We are inside a system where the instrumental gaze has got out of control. And our focus on the doing, on the short-term targets means that we are squeezing out some of the other conversations that we absolutely have to have if we are to set up an organisation that enables us to flourish. The more that we end up focusing on this instrumental gaze, the less we end up being able actually to allow the kind of conversations which are relational.

For example, I mean we have in our research one phrase that is, “You need to have the small conversations to enable the big ones to happen.” In other words, if we squeeze out those conversations where we see one another as human beings with stories, with lives, if we squeeze out those moments where we genuinely encounter one another, then you can forget about the big conversations where we need to talk about mental health. And the big conversations where we need to offer a crazy idea or say, – and Amy will know lots about this – “Actually, I’ve made a mistake. We’ve had a failure.” Those big conversations can’t happen unless we nurture and pay attention to the relationships that are there.

We are in systems, economic, organisational, political, educational health systems, that are narrowing our gaze down to more shorter-term, tangible, instrumental results, I think given the latest research that we’re doing. I’d point to those two.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Thank you.

Amy.

Amy Edmondson:

Okay, so the remit was unlocking mental health, and I wanted to share five things that I think are relevant for this discussion. But I can’t help just backing up and saying during the introductions, just even your wonderful book, Morra, anxious achievers, here I am. Yep. I’m an anxious achiever, so I’m glad and grateful to be here. And then of course the whole accidental writer, Peter, I’ve always called myself an accidental professor, really was a kind of strange, accidental left turn that landed me here. Lots of learning, lots of mistakes, lots of setbacks along the way.

Unlocking mental health in the workplace. Here is what I wanted to offer. Number one, reframe reality. I mean the messaging. Let’s get out ahead of people’s automatic taken for granted assessment of what leaders expect or of what the work is like, what the job is like in reality. We need to set expectations to fit reality. The world is complex, uncertain, volatile, and all the rest. When we don’t talk about that, we tend to feel it’s just me, right? I’m the one. I missed a deadline. The project didn’t come out the way I had hoped. I had a failure here. I made a mistake there. That’s normal and natural. Let’s normalise it. Let’s de-stigmatize it. Let’s embrace that reality together. We got to talk about it, make it discussable all the time.

Number two, and maybe this should be number one, but double down on purpose, on meaning. This ties into what Megan was saying, too. I think part of mental health is the belief that you matter. I think one of the biggest factors in reduced mental health is the sense that you don’t matter. You might not matter because you might not think what you’re doing matters, is noticed by customers or clients, or even more important colleagues. That mattering both to the world and to each other and to the people that you come in contact with every day is part of health. It’s part of being human. It’s part of what makes us want to get out of bed in the morning. Not just happiness and comfort, but that belief that we matter. And so we need to double down on talking about it. Why does it matter? Why does it matter that this organisation exists or that this project exists?

Number three, double down on community, and that builds so nicely on Megan’s relational point. We need robust, authentic relationships that are based on realistic understanding of and appreciation of each other and support a kind of desire to support and a desire to be accountable with and for each other. Let’s build those kinds of robust relationships.

I agree. When we squeeze out the life moments, that can get in the way of that important factor. I mean oddly in the early stages of the pandemic when we were all sent home and I realised something very obvious, but my wonderful faculty assistant at the time… Her name is Sarah Nicholson, she’s a genius, she’s amazing. Now she works for HBS Online and does all these fantastic course development things. But at the time I remember thinking we had to keep working. We had our remote setup, but it would’ve felt so odd and awkward to call her up and say, “Hey, how was your weekend?” That would’ve just been intrusive and weird. Whereas in our normal life before the COVID sent us all home, I would not come in on a Monday and not say that, not share some of my own tribulations and so on, building what I think is an authentic friendship and relationship.

Okay, number four, build scaffolding to invite input. By scaffolding, I mean rituals, whether those are rounds or are wonderful ways that we either do check-ins or we brainstorm ideas. Just structure is your friend on this thing. With everything that Megan and I have studied about voice and speaking up, it doesn’t happen spontaneously. It needs help. It needs scaffolding. More on that if you wish.

And then lastly, I think both for leaders but also for each and every one of us, master the pause. Meaning take a breath and ensure a productive, collaborative, caring, I don’t mean to overstate that, but just thoughtful response to what you hear. Someone disagrees with an idea you really care about. Pause, breathe. Express interest. It should be genuine. Dig in, roll up your sleeves, get into a higher quality conversation as a result of that surprise. But it’s helpful to take a breath so that you can help yourself respond productively.

Let me stop there.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

I’m taking a pause, Amy. You write so movingly in the book about our very human need to keep up appearances, to be seen as smart, to fear being shamed, right?

How do you help people as a leader get over that? Because us high achievers, we’ve talked about this, it’s in our DNA a little bit. But we have to at some level learn to move past it.

Amy Edmondson:

A wonderful former mentor, he’s no longer alive, Maxie Maultsby, a psychiatrist and wonderful thought leader in the space of cognitive behaviour therapy, but he called it rational behaviour therapy, his little blend, said, “We are all fallible human beings.” And then he shortcut that to FHBs, which I loved. It made me smile because it’s…

Why do I bring up Maxie? Because his point was this is just a fact, so call attention to it. Make it discussable. That’s not going away. We will always be fallible human beings. Can we thrive as fallible human beings? That becomes the question. That becomes the life question, not can you not be one. Not an option. But can you thrive as one? I think it’s A, call attention to it B, make it discussable, and C, express caring about others, others’ experiences, others’ tribulations, others’ hopes and aspirations. And then realise it’s only fair to share your own as well.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Thank you.

Peter.

Peter Sims:

This is such an interesting topic, and I’ll share some personal reflections and then also some of the things that we’ve seen on the corporate side.

My company, BLK SHP, has worked with some Fortune 500 companies on how to de-stigmatize mental health. We started this about five years ago, so SAP and ServiceNow and BlackRock became interested five years ago. And how do you de-stigmatize mental health because it was a continuation of diversity inclusion, it was the next wave.

I think there were two reasons that there was interest from these CEOs. One is that the culture shifted a lot. I mean, organisations aren’t driving this shift in mental health. I mean, this is completely coming from musicians, artists, people who are kids talking about mental health that’s trickling up to organisational change. Every family is affected by mental health. That was just something we realised early. I think the learning and the growth may happen. There are spaces that get created in organisations that are useful. BlackRock now has 600 ambassadors for mental health.

But I think the primary source of change is going to come at the family unit level and in the culture. That is to say that young people are going to talk with their parents and say, “I’m having challenges.” They’re going to connect with that challenge from their kid emotionally and feel like they can talk about mental health differently.

I’ll just share an example personally. I’m an entrepreneur, and last year I had a very challenging year. Really for the first time in my life I experienced depression, and it was pretty severe. I was Googling everything I could, like Eckhart Tolle and every resource trying to figure out what the hell to do. I was pretty open with people about this. On the one hand I was open with people who are older than me and senior and including some CEOs who I know of in big organisations, and these guys and all men, they really didn’t know what to do with this set of questions. I think it’s a generational thing. They don’t have the tools. They were used to saying, “Just tough through it.”

The younger people I talked with who had experienced depression said, “Just be patient with yourself. Give yourself self-care. You’ll get through this.” Their advice was the right advice. I look back on that experience. I’ve talked to some of the people who couldn’t advise me in the past, and I said, “I think you’re missing a piece of the toolkit to be able to actually work through this type of situation.” It’s not that they haven’t gone through something similar, many of them had, but they just never had been around anyone who could give them perspective that was more enlightened really, just more insightful.

And so I think that for those types of leaders who are currently running most organisations, that generation, there’s a huge generational shift that’s coming. If this topic is to gain significant change inside an organisation, it’s going to be because the younger generation’s going to come up. They’re going to have a different set of tools and experiences to really drive lasting change. I’m very optimistic about that.

I just think that this is one of those topics that unless you have something that you can personally relate to, it’s intimidating. It’s very scary for people. If you don’t have the tools, I mean how are you supposed to try to respond to somebody who’s raising a topic that you just have no emotional experience with? I mean it’s asking, I think, too much of people. Within an organisational context, I think what’s most potentially empowering is to say, “Look, there’s somebody in your family who you can connect with at an emotional level.” Maybe it’s your aunt, maybe it’s one of your kids, maybe it’s one of your sisters or brothers. You can say, “Look. For them, how can you be there for them?”

Based on that emotional experience, how can you then connect with other people even if they have different situations they’re going through to be able to help them understand that this is in a best case scenario where people get treatment or where people get help, that stigma should actually be a superpower. I mean, we know with people on the spectrum or people with different mental illness disorders that this is often a source of their greatest strength. It really is a set of human questions. I think that emanates back to a generational shift that is coming aided by kids talking to their parents, and by the realisation that many of these situations are very treatable with the right type of advice.

You have to do everything in a mental health situation because mental health itself is a scary term, but it’s just what would you do for somebody in your family in this situation? And then hopefully organisations can continue to do what the leading organisations have done, which is surround themselves with support structures so that people can get sent to the right advisors.

That’s my take. It’s definitely a movement. It’s unstoppable. It’s a generational shift that’s coming. There’s a lot of confusion right now as to how people should handle the stigmas and how it’s one of those in-between periods. But ultimately it is, in terms of effective leadership, a source of finding the highest superpowers for people working with us.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

I’m curious about the role of story, and any of you can take this. I find in my work with leaders that even if I haven’t had depression with a capital D or anxiety with a capital A or bipolar, I’ve been through challenges. I’ve struggled, and we as humans are wired to connect to that narrative of facing challenge, learning, and building resilience.

I’m curious if any of you in your work have seen the power of helping people use narratives successfully? Or speaking up, Megan, with skill in a way that actually can shift the mind of that person Peter’s talking about who is the CEO and is like, “I’ve never felt this, I don’t want to talk about this.”

Megan Reitz:

I mean, I think Peter, really interesting what you were talking about, particularly around how many are unpracticed in these sorts of conversations. We are in such an interesting time where it’s up for grabs. What sorts of conversations happen inside our organisations? We do have a generation of people that aren’t used to that being far outside of the box of, well, it’s about business.

I think what you’re talking about is experiential knowing. When we have experiential knowing that’s very different from propositional cognitive knowing about something. We talk about things very differently when we have our own point of reference, when we can feel. Look, I’m doing this.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Yeah, you feel it.

Megan Reitz:

When we feel our experience and then we talk from that place, it of course is very different.

And it is possible for anyone to have a conversation with anyone else, even if they may not immediately know the experience, if we foreground hugely our real desire to learn and to understand and to hear what we don’t understand and being curious. It is incredibly powerful when we speak from experiential knowing. When we don’t have that experiential knowing or can’t access that, then it’s incredibly powerful when you meet someone that looks at you and goes, “Tell me, just tell me. Tell me honestly,” and you can see that they really want to learn.

I’d say both of those orientations are incredibly helpful, and especially when you are in an uncharted territory that Peter was talking about.

Peter Sims:

I can share a thought on this too, Morra.

I co-authored this book True North about authenticity and leadership with Bill George, and there was a lot of focus on being vulnerable. Really what we found or what I learned through that process is that vulnerability as reported from a historical experience is valuable, but vulnerability in the moment is not a good playbook. And so as it relates to mental health, I think talking about experiences with mental health in your own situation is probably frowned upon.

I can do it because I own my company. But for a CEO, like the CEO of Nike or Starbucks, both of whom I know, I don’t think it’s a great idea for them to be talking about a severe depression. They can’t really do that. I think they can talk about family members or they can talk about old friends disguising the identity and talking about their experience with that situation, with that person, and what they learned from it and creating space that way.

That’s just a thought that came to my mind. I haven’t overthought this.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Can I ask you a question? First of all, I want to be… thank… I want to give you a shout-out for saying the truth. A lot of us in the mental health at work field don’t actually come out and say what you just said, which is that it’s dangerous for the guy in power to talk. I wish that-

Peter Sims:

Or the guy or woman, anybody.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Or woman. It’s more dangerous for a woman. I wish that weren’t so.

I’m going to ask a question from Frank. What are concrete initiatives to shift the perception of vulnerability? Let’s talk about stigma around mental health from a weakness to a strength. Sometimes I feel like I’m fighting a losing argument in this space. People are just not going to talk about it when they feel like the buck stops with them, unless they’re retired or entrepreneurs or whatever.

Amy Edmondson:

I have a different take on vulnerability, which is that vulnerability is merely a fact. We are all vulnerable in that we don’t have a crystal ball, so we’re vulnerable to all of the things that are coming at us of which we’re unaware at any given time.

And so I think it is when we conceptualise that being at least part of what it means to be vulnerable, it is a strength to acknowledge that. It is a strength to say, “Here’s what I care about, here’s what I’m unsure about, anxious about. Need you.” We need to hear from you. We need your hard work, we need your full engagement. Vulnerability is only a weakness in a world that expects to run on time, expects predictability, expects certainty. We don’t live in that world.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Yeah.

Also, I think that there are so many leaders who are looking for an opportunity to share. The statistics I once dug up around prescriptions for anxiety and depression drugs in this country actually equate to about 40% of the population. And so someone’s taking them, and it’s not all young people. I think that there is a way to push.

I have another question from Elisabeth. How do we avoid preaching to the choir around mental health? The people here, both speaking and attending, surely know the importance of the topic. But how do we not just talk in echo chambers? I mean Peter, I think you were getting at that. How do we reach the people who have resistance, genuine, blissful ignorance, God bless them, or just don’t care enough to make the necessary changes?

Peter Sims:

Yeah, I would say on that question I would say figure out who their kids are, and I mean go through their family. Talk to them about their family story. I don’t know.

Reflecting on Amy’s comments about vulnerability, I’d like to believe that people can be vulnerable in Fortune 500 companies. I just think that if I put myself in the shoes of a CEO or the C-suite, which sets the tone, I mean they’re under so much pressure to hit the numbers and to have a good presentation on the next earnings call. Any sign of them having doubt is going to be potentially captured by someone that’s going to be reposted somewhere, that somebody’s going to ask a question about.

It’s like I think there’s a systemic issue based on the system that we’re in, and it just doesn’t reward any form of vulnerability in my opinion. Again, I own my own company. I can say whatever I want. It’s great to be so free and it doesn’t matter. My team knows who I am.

Amy Edmondson:

I mean, I just want to maybe make a distinction that is between my personal life, my marriage is falling apart, my life is horrible, whatever, and the vulnerability that I think effective leaders must display if they’re running large complex organisations.

I mean, for instance, American Icon, the wonderful book on the turnaround at Ford, when Alan Mulally says, “Listen. Team, we’re on track to lose 17 billion this year,” – that is a statement of vulnerability. We cannot keep going this way. There will be a point where they shut us down. Let’s start telling the truth to each other. It’s a statement that the company’s vulnerable, I’m vulnerable. If you don’t want to play, this isn’t going to work, right? I’ve staked everything on this because it’s implicit in that message.

I think to include the reality, even the reality you said, which is that earnings calls and reputations can be at risk when things are taken out of context, that’s part of the reality. Let’s make that discussion, too.

Peter Sims:

Yeah, business realities I think agree with that. I just think if people knew what was going on inside the CEOs of these companies, they’d be shocked. Because they are so vulnerable, they are so human and they can’t say any of that. They’re in a tiny little container without many real friends at all. I mean, it’s brutal. That-

Morra Aarons-Mele:

So where does-

Peter Sims:

… context-

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Oh, sorry. I was just going to say, where does all that anxiety go? I mean, if I’m about to report earnings and they’re not good and I’m going to get attacked, I’m anxious. Where does it all go?

Megan Reitz:

There’s an irony here, isn’t there? There has been an invitation for the past five years or so, especially from people in leadership roles to employees, to bring their whole selves to work. They’ve basically been leaving out the terms and conditions.

I absolutely get that. Stating “bring your whole self to work, it’ll be fine,”  is naive, okay? We turn up at work and we are all of us. At some level it is the theatre of business, the theatre of performance. We have that going on. And if those in powerful positions have no capacity to show any level of vulnerability, then we are in serious trouble.

I was at a conference this morning, and I listened to a leader speak really well from the stage. This sounds very small in comparison to mental health perhaps, but he was talking about how to have the difficult conversations and how he gets actually quite nervous before… It’s an hour before the feedback conversation he’s supposed to be having with somebody, and he was talking, “Oh God, I’m just…” Just in that moment, you could see him as a human being. He wasn’t bearing everything obviously because he can’t do that in the position that he’s in, but he was showing just signs of, I actually, I have these feelings, I have these emotions also.

That’s such an important capacity for leaders to go into, to edge into that kind of zone. Yes, of course there are things, there are territories, there are things they can or can’t say. If they can’t say anything, then why on earth are we trying to help other people in their organisation as well? It’s a bit of a challenge back.

Amy Edmondson:

I-

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Oh, sorry.

Amy Edmondson:

I just think that’s a great story, and that’s exactly what I was talking about. That regular human emotion that, say, we might all experience when we’re having to do a performance conversation and that this leader is acknowledging that, naming it. I feel anxious, I feel my stomach is… That I think is a very good concrete illustration of what it looks like to be vulnerable around an ordinary aspect of the job.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

It’s called boundary vulnerability, right? I’m human, I’m just vulnerable enough, but I’m not a mess, right? I’m not going to go on about my divorce and how my kids hate me, but I’m not sleeping well because-

Amy Edmondson:

Stress.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

… this merger is really stressful, yeah.

Peter Sims:

People don’t say that though very often, I don’t think.

I mean, I do think, yes, to highlight their emotion is great and to be able to say… Look, I’m not a cynical person here. I’m just saying, yeah, you can talk about your mother and you can talk about things in your life personally that people can grab onto. That’s crucial. You have to be able to tell those stories.

But I think to get up and say that you’re anxious about something, I mean, you can say it’s a big challenge. As Amy says, you can point out the business imperative and the business challenges that are obvious to everyone and not hide from that. That’s crucial. But that’s different than talking about your emotional wiring and your emotional fabric. I just think I’ve not seen many leaders be able to do that well. I mean, I’m trying to think of one person who could, outside of a persona in a big organisation, navigate that. I really can’t think of many examples, or any-

Morra Aarons-Mele:

You should listen to my podcast.

Peter Sims:

Yeah, maybe that’s…

Morra Aarons-Mele:

But it’s hard. I have a hard time getting, certainly people from public companies, to go on the record, it is a huge challenge.

Where do we go from here? The system’s broken. Things need to change.

Peter Sims:

It’s changing.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Where do we go from here?

It’s changing.

Peter Sims:

It’s changing. The culture’s changing. The organisations aren’t going to change this. The culture’s changing. The kids are going to change it with their parents. All these signals we get from movies, artistry, it’s all saying that mental health is part of life. The policy world is following that as well.

Amy Edmondson:

I mean, I think I completely agree with Peter. I think it is changing. I think it’s changing in a way quite rapidly, quite starkly.

I want to go back to something Megan said at the very beginning, which is near the end of her comments, which is that the system is broken. It’s not just the system in terms of mental health, it’s literally the broader system is broken. We have companies producing things we don’t need. We have rampant consumerism of things we don’t need that don’t make us happy, especially compared to experiences and relationships. All the rest of the research is pretty darn clear on what builds happiness and longevity, and it’s not stuff.

In a way, I mean I think we’re talking largely about cosmetic fixes, right? How do we fix it around the edges? Of course, I’m sure, certainly speaking for myself, I feel utterly helpless in terms of how do we address the root cause, right? How do we address the root cause of the mental health crisis, which I think has to do with people’s sense that a lot of things are broken in a very large way. Of course that is ultimately a leadership issue, so maybe there are opportunities here for leaders to get out ahead of these challenges and figure out what we really need to work on together.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Actually, Amy, that leads me to a question I have for you, but anyone can jump in.

You are a team person. You really help us think about what can be done on a team. A team is so much more flexible than the CEO and leadership in the system. If I’m a team leader, if I’m a manager who really wants to change things, how can I start modelling this productive vulnerability tomorrow?

Amy Edmondson:

To me, it comes down to three broad behavioural categories. One is messaging, the second is modelling, as you just asked, and the third is mentoring.

The messaging is just repeated and truthful messages about purpose, about challenge, about what we’re up against, why it matters, why each and every one of you are needed to do this well. The right communications that engage and inspire.

The second is modelling, and I think that’s what you asked about. Modelling is, show up as caring and passionate about the possibilities here, but curious, humble. I know this sounds like a tall order, but it’s not really as tall as it sounds… a fundamentally emotionally intelligent person who is trying to build a team fully cognizant of the reality, which is that we can’t do it… I can’t do it. I need to do my part, but I can’t do it alone. I need you. Utterly dependent on you.

Great teams have the capacity to use each other’s strengths and weaknesses to interact in a candid way, to ask good questions, to argue their points carefully with as much evidence as they can muster, to listen, to change your mind, right? There’s a kind of dynamism of a good team. I think the leader’s first job is to build a great team. At the top modelling therefore that teamwork that then others in the organisation, other teams will start to emulate.

Megan Reitz:

Yeah. Can I just say I think many managers and leaders, many of them have really good intentions. It’s about creating that space where we’re able to remember how we want to show up. Amy was talking about how we show up is really important. The question I’m holding is…

We interviewed somebody a while back and they said, “At work in my team meetings, it’s like drinking from a fire hydrant,” was the phrase, was the metaphor. It’s like, I actually now can’t breathe. I’ve got so much stuff to do.

In fact, Amy was mentioning the pause. Really interestingly, and I researched the phrase “permission to pause” has come up over and over and over and over again. How do I give myself permission to pause? How do I give others and enable others to give permission to pause? Part of this is, how do we create spaces in systems where we actually remember what it is we want to do, what our intention is? How do we show up?

Some of my other research is in relation to mindfulness, which is essentially paying attention to what you’re paying attention to now. How do we enable ourselves to pay attention to what we are attending to? How can we set up some kind of ritual every day where we just try and bring, again, that compass, the compass point of how am I showing up? What is the impact I want to have here?

Many leaders I work with, they don’t need long to reconnect with it and go, “All right, okay, “and then they make small but significant different decisions and choices during the day. But they just need that kind of capacity, that discipline, that permission, that space to just reset the compass again and again and again. Because we’re inside systems that drag us away from the compass all the time-

Morra Aarons-Mele:

All the time.

Megan Reitz:

… and we focus our attention onto stuff that actually is not the stuff that we need to be attending to.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

I’m going to close with a really personal rapid fire question, which you can answer however you want. I’d love you to share a way that you have learned to pause when you’re worried you’re not showing up as the leader you want to be. Or when you’re feeling anxious or having a really tough day, how do you communicate that constructively to people so they can work with you more effectively, or if you don’t?

Anyone can go.

Megan Reitz:

Well, I can say that when I’m feeling anxious, truly anxious, it is like being in a vortex where I can’t even see that I’m in a vortex. That’s what it’s like when you’re circling in anxiety. The zone of what you can see narrows.

The metaphor I have is that I have learned over time to know where my lifelines are, which ropes. When I’m in that vortex, what are the ropes I can grab hold on? One is I know there are a handful of people that I can wave at and go, “Sinking. Help.” They know, they get it.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

They get it.

Megan Reitz:

They get it.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

They get it.

Megan Reitz:

That’s one really important, know your lifelines and know who is it that you have that gets it and that can throw you a line.

The second thing that I do is I have a mindfulness practice. I train my brain, if you like, is a very basic way of saying it. I train my brain every day, mainly. Sometimes I don’t. Anyway, mainly most days I train my attention because that is a practice.

We leave our brains very much up to chance, actually. Some of us occasionally, not for a while, but occasionally we take our physical body and exercise it and don’t leave that to chance. Occasionally. But our brains, we think, “Well, they’ll just do their thing. Let’s just hope for the best.” My second thing would be, actually this thing needs some practice and it needs some training and we need to train our capacity to be able to notice what we’re attending to and to shift that attention onto things that are really helpful when we’re in those sorts of situations.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Thank you.

Amy Edmondson:

I so wanted to add value on that one, but I really can’t because Megan’s first point was exactly what I would’ve said. I wouldn’t have said vortex, I would’ve said paralysis. But then there’s that sudden, okay, I know who I can reach out to. They’re few and far between, but I know who I can reach out to. They will just insert a little bit of perspective, and then I can breathe and do the rest of the skills that I know how to do.

Peter Sims:

Yeah, I agree with that.

I think just taking a hike is good. I usually have to reconceptualize a situation. It’s usually something I need to learn. It’s a lack of self-awareness on my part if I’m feeling anxious about something, so just try to get a pause.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Yeah, moving your body can do wonders.

Megan Reitz:

Physical environment as well. Our physical environment, our ability to connect in with systems larger than ourselves like nature, enable sometimes that another kind of lifeline.

Morra Aarons-Mele:

Yeah.

I want to thank you three so much and thank everyone who has been with us throughout this series. It’s been so wonderful. Come talk to us on LinkedIn if you have questions. I’m going to hand it back over to Des to close this out.

Des Dearlove:

Thank you. Thank you all.

What am I going to take away from this? Well, I’ve learned about optimism bubbles, that leaders overestimate the amount people are speaking up and overestimate their listening skills. That’s always really important to understand that. Vulnerability is a fact. It’s only a weakness in a world that expects and demands predictability. I think that’s very true. It’s a generational thing. Definitely a movement, unstoppable. That’s very inspiring and I think uplifting, and it can be a source of a superpower. My big, big takeaway is lifelines.

Thank you to Peter, Megan, and Amy, and of course to Morra. This is our final session in the Mind Matters series, but recordings of all the webinars will be available on the Thinkers50 channel on YouTube, and please do reach out and get in touch if you think this content could be helpful to people in your organisation or your life or your community. Please do get in touch.

Thank you for joining us. This is Des Dearlove wishing us all good mental health.