Fix your leadership, not your employees
There’s apparently been a spike in employees taking mental health leave. I can believe it. Work culture has gotten more and more toxic and dehumanizing over the past decade.
I’ve experienced it myself, and I’ve heard plenty of anecdotal evidence from the hundreds of clients I’ve coached over the past two years.
One client recently told me, “Every employee here must use AI to become 20% more efficient.” They’d been given no explanation of how to do that, and what “20% more efficient” meant was breathtakingly imprecise.
Meanwhile, some experiments are showing that AI can actually decrease productivity.
No wonder more employees are taking mental health leaves from work.
Pain relief is not a cure
Giving someone a few coaching sessions is not going to cure your dysfunctional work culture and destructive leadership, just like giving someone an aspirin is not going to cure their brain tumor.
In fact, good coaching will likely help your best employees find the courage to flee your toxic workplace, not get better at enduring it.
If you’re seeing a spike in mental health concerns among your employees, by all means be supportive. But don’t blame employees for the burnout your company culture is causing them. That’s like blaming the trees for being on fire when you’re the one holding the flamethrower.
“Here is a bucket of water to help with the burns you seem to keep having,” you may say, offering your employee six sessions with a therapist or coach. “Isn’t it odd that you keep catching on fire. There must be something wrong with you. So you should fix that.”
Buck the trend
The trend in business right now is to find more and more ways to dehumanize and control employees. Buck that.
Do the opposite. Being a leader means leading people, not destroying and replacing them. The world needs more leaders right now, not more barbarians burning things down.
I built and led highly engaged, highly effective teams for 30 years in a variety of industries and a diversity of functions, from nonprofits to tiny startups to behemoth Fortune 100 companies. I led through crises, through mergers, through amazing growth, and through pandemic lockdowns. I grew programs from quaint after-thoughts to number-one rankings.
I didn’t accomplish all that by dehumanizing the people around me and automating them out of jobs.
No one ever does for long.
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RELIT: How to Rekindle Yourself in the Darkness of Compassion Fatigue gives practical, relevant, actionable advice on avoiding and overcoming compassion fatigue and caregiver burnout. As a professional coach, I have to pay close attention to self-regulation and my own personal resilience. My chapter explains the things I do to stay centered and stay focused so I can give every client my best, every time.
Download my chapter for free: Show up. Try hard. Be nice.
Or just go buy the whole book. It’s worth it.
