Fix the Performance / Mental Health Conundrum

Break the cycle of either/or thinking about performance vs mental health, and build a culture where high performance puts good mental health at the heart.

Recognising that burnout and stress are not sustainable ways of working long-term, embrace a better work/life balance to help people thrive.

What

There are times when some of your more senior people feel that their juniors don’t want to work, lack resilience or commitment, and use ‘mental health’ as an excuse.  They believe the demands of the job were clear. They are frustrated that, if their team won’t do the work, they have to pick up the slack. They are envious of the boundaries expressed by their teams, because they had to do it when they were in their place.

The more junior people believed they knew what they were taking on, and thought they had the tools to handle the pressure. But they were inexperienced, and didn’t understand the intensity and challenge. Lack of support – real or feared – leaves them isolated, worried and unable to act.

Under pressure, with neither senior nor junior team members able to articulate what’s going on for them, misunderstanding prevails. Stress and distress increase. Anxiety levels rise.

Why

Here, the problem isn’t mental health. It’s a combination of leadership behaviours first and foremost, coupled with issues around confidence and resilience for the team.

It’s essential to remember that people show up to work hoping and intending to succeed. By the time the situation described above happens, something has gone very wrong. And both parties are experiencing it, both are failing, and both are feeling let down – by the other and by the organisation.  

Breaking down behaviours that drive disconnection means mental health pressures ease, ensuring better delivery for clients and the organisation.

How

Appointing mental health ‘first-aiders’ and training in ‘spotting the signs’ and signposting is good risk management practice but will never fix this growing problem. Instead, resolving this tension needs a two-pronged approach.

Leaders need to develop their emotional intelligence and emotional resilience. Curiosity about what’s happening in and for their teams needs to be second nature. Recognising when to push and when to pause and support is critical. And understanding that pushing harder drives poor performance and burnout in the long run is essential.

Team members also need support. They need help with confidence, resilience and empathy: confidence to push back, resilience to not ‘take on’ the pressure, and empathy to understand what is happening to their leaders. Building their emotional intelligence, to understand what’s going on and being curious rather than combative creates the conditions where outcomes can be very different.

By building emotional intelligence and resilience on both sides, understanding, connectedness, teamship and interdependence grows. This is a process which takes time, as all parties need space to experiment with different ways of being and develop trust in new ways of working.

Recent Engagement

Support to “fix” mental health without sacrificing high performance in a leading professional services firm

Challenging false beliefs around the causes of stress and distress in the workplace to eliminate stressors and remove potential problems before they manifest

Our client reported escalating anxiety and distress across the organisation: those who managed others at every level of seniority reported feeling overwhelmed because the people working under them set more strict work/life boundaries than they themselves were able to enjoy, and frequently claimed mental health issues required them to enforce these boundaries. There was a sense that ‘mental health’ was being used as an ‘excuse’ by people with poor work ethics to simply work less hard, pushing the pressure back up the chain to already overwhelmed managers and team leads who had to pick up the slack.

The client wanted to commission training on how to manage for high performance in an environment of increasing claims of mental health issues. Whilst it is an important element of any risk management strategy, we could see it would not fix the twin problem of escalating mental health issues and the concomitant performance impact.

We helped the client to see that a vicious circle was in action - of each ‘side’ pushing harder against the other: managers increasingly aggressively trying to push work onto followers who were already feeling overwhelmed, and followers crying ever more shrilly that they were at the limits of their capacity. It was not only work managers were pushing into their people, it was also tension, stress and anxiety.

Through moderated conversations about the relational dynamics taking place in the business, supplemented with some targeted learning on emotional intelligence and the psychanalyic concepts of the mechanisms of projection and emotional ‘transference’, we helped managers understand what they were really doing: evacuating anxiety into their people to feel more in control themselves, rather than supporting their subordinates through ‘containing’ their anxiety in the face of high pressure and high workloads, allowing them to feel a greater sense of safety, so they could perform at their best.

The belief that pushing harder gets better results was shown to be what it is: false. By creating time and space to listen to, think about, and help to manage the anxieties being expressed, managers in fact enhanced performance across their teams - a burden shared became a burden halved - the vicious circle of ever spiralling anxiety became a virtuous circle of understanding and mutual support - time lost to mental health complaints declined, turnover declined, morale improved and productivity was restored.