Mental Health & Leadership: Building Supportive Teams

Leaders, please have compassion and sympathy towards the people you are leading, remember I said PEOPLE, yes they are human beings with feelings, a heart and a pulse!

I wanted to share a few things that I have learned over the years of being fortunate to lead people.

One instance is having employees who are disengaged, what is our first thought and assumption of these folks? I bet you would say that they are lazy, entitled, they don’t care, etc. But as a leader have you ever tried to find the root cause of the issue? Probably not, correct?

What if you actually made an effort to build trust with your employees, and have a sit down with them without the notion of discipline in mind, and try to find out why they are acting the way they are.

Someone had thought me this before I became a manager, and I actually tried it out with one of my employees. I was amazed to find out that this person was actually dealing with mental health issues that were real, and they trusted me to open up about it. Think about what this person would have felt, if I never spoke honestly with them, and showed no care but instead tried to discipline them.

Another example was an employee making numerous errors and having various incidents within a short period of time. Again, you can assume all the bad things and throw the book at them, but instead try to figure out the root cause of the issue, because this was not normal. Once again, by creating a safe environment, the individual was able to open up and break down about their mental health issues they were going through.

This is now our job as leaders and human beings to provide support and help them!