Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink

40 - Am I Responsible for My Employees' Mental Health?

• Leah Fink • Season 1 • Episode 40

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How can a leader truly balance supporting their team's mental well-being while also expecting individuals to take responsibility for their own mental health? Join us on this episode as we tackle this challenging question.  You'll gain clarity on the fine line between providing necessary accommodations and taking on too much personal responsibility, all while ensuring your leadership fosters a positive, supportive work environment.

Do you know the boundaries of your responsibility?

If you want to understand the reality of working with mental illness in the workplace, you should join us for a listen!

To have your questions answered on the show, submit your story here: https://allthrive.ca/share-your-story

Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink is live every week at 12:00pm MST.  Please join us to get answers to your leadership questions! https://www.linkedin.com/in/leah-fink-all-thrive/

Speaker 1:

Every action you take as a leader has a ripple effect, starting with your team, going out to the organization and even out into people's personal lives. Here we offer you the chance to learn from real-life stories of leadership so you can gain a deeper understanding and level up your own skills From communication to culture, to power and equity, to feedback, to resolving conflict and more. Join us and make sure you're creating the ripples you want. Welcome to Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink.

Speaker 2:

Hello and welcome to Leadership Ripples with Leah Fink. Today we're talking about something that can be quite complicated, and that is the balance of how much you're responsible for supporting your staff's mental well-being and their responsibility to being mentally healthy. Ap shares their situation. I have a staff member on my team who is dealing with some mental health issues. She has quite bad anxiety that often affects her ability to work. I've made several accommodations for her, to the point I think the other staff are seeing it as favoritism. I'm starting to get frustrated, as I don't think she's putting in effort to do better and expects me to do everything. You talk about the responsibility of leaders to create a mentally healthy workplace, but I think she should be taking on some of the responsibility for her own health. What can I ask her to do? So this is a great question, ap, and thank you so much for sharing it. And, like I said, this is a complicated topic. This doesn't always have a perfect answer, so we're going to dive into some ideas of mental health in the workplace and some concepts of leadership to give you a bit of a framework of how you might think about this.

Speaker 2:

First, we've got to really look at some of this language when we talk about mental health, because we both use mental health to speak about generally being mentally well and we also use it to refer to mental illness or mental disorders. So for the purpose of this conversation, we're going to make sure that we're separating those two things, as it really does help when you look at how you're going to address them. Let's talk about mental illness briefly, and you might already know this, but let's give a brief intro so we're all on the same page. So mental illness or mental disorders are medically diagnosed and hopefully they're also being supported by a professional, and the most common mental illnesses in North America are mood and anxiety disorders. You might also know mood disorders as depression or that's what people tend to call it, and with that we really need to make sure that we're distinguishing what makes a disorder, because people in your life might talk about anxiety and depression in different ways, because those are words that we use to describe this experience or how we're feeling. So I could say I'm feeling anxious when I have something that's really stressful in my life, or I could say I feel depressed when I'm really sad about something that is different than being diagnosed with a medical disorder.

Speaker 2:

In North America, we use the DSM-5 that's created by the American Psychiatric Association as a way of distinguishing this as being a long-term challenge, not just a short-term feeling or short-term experience, and something that affects your day-to-day life in this ongoing way. And of course, this applies to a whole host of other disorders as well. Those two are the most common and they do have. The language that I feel is used most outside of the term of diagnosis, plus anxiety is what AP mentioned in her story. So for AP and for everyone else who has staff who speak about a mental disorder, there's some basic things to be aware of.

Speaker 2:

Now, of course, this can be slightly different depending on where you live, where you are in the world, and I will say I am not a legal professional, so please take this as a rough guideline and ensure that you're checking in with your own organization, with your own legal, with your own. First of all, staff do not have to disclose any issues to you and you cannot directly ask about them, aside from a couple specific fields that might either ask you about it during the application process or have a psychological evaluation, but that is something that you would choose to go into that field, knowing that. So it's a conscious choice. And, that being said, if someone does disclose a mental health issue to you, you're then obligated to accommodate them to the point of undue hardship. So that means you have to put in real effort to accommodate them, you have to keep it confidential and you can't discriminate against them for having that mental illness. Now, even if someone doesn't disclose anything to you and you notice someone who seems to be struggling, you also need to check in with them. You need to inquire if they need any help, if they need any accommodations. And this is a discussion you should be starting, based on the issues you're seeing at work and a curiosity about how you can support them to better do their work.

Speaker 2:

So there is, even legally, a fair amount of onus on employers, on leaders, to support someone who is mentally struggling, whether they have a diagnosis or not. And if it does become a known diagnosis, that means the employee might be more legally protected as well, whereas another employee who maybe speaks about how they're struggling but doesn't disclose a diagnosis, might not or might see a different consequence for a poor performance. So, ap, you have someone who's speaking to you about how they're struggling I don't know whether or not, they have a diagnosis but I am glad to hear that you've been engaging in these conversations with this person about how you can support them. That is the most important step, regardless of their actual situation, and definitely responsibility everyone should be taking on. If you're a leader trying to help people on your team and I want to say hopefully you also have had support from your leadership, from HR, to navigate this situation it's helpful to have that larger support team because that can open up the realm of accommodation to things beyond maybe what you can provide on your team. And if you felt like you're really on your own in trying to support that person or what you offered is not able to support them, please ensure that you're reaching out to some other resources to do that as well.

Speaker 2:

Sometimes as well, no matter the situation, no matter the person and this could be at any level on any type of interaction when you ask how you can support someone they might not know and this can, of course, add to the trickiness of this situation they might just know what's not working or what is stressing them, and it may take them some time, it may take some trial and error to get to that, so it may take you, as their leader, some patience, of course, to go through this process. You might need to experiment, to do lots of check-ins with them and make sure that you can find something that's working. And also, during this whole process, if you haven't already connected them, if your workplace hasn't already connected them, really look at some of those outside resources and make sure they're aware of those, and so there should be. Hopefully, your organization has some sort of benefits plan. Maybe they have an employee family assistance plan. There's a variety of government resources. There's local resources, online resources that could be so helpful to this person if they haven't accessed them yet.

Speaker 2:

And this is really where I'm going to say staff should ideally be responsible for some part of how they're showing up. That is, that they are seeking out resources and support so they can function optimally, that they're engaging with these accommodations, that you're providing for them and they're showing up. That is, that they are seeking out resources and support so they can function optimally, that they're engaging with these accommodations, that you're providing for them and they're offering that feedback. They're having that conversation about what is working. I also want to recognize that, if they are experiencing some extreme mental disorder or they're really at a challenging point in their life. This can be very hard for them to do and, of course, that's going to feel like there's more of a burden on you.

Speaker 2:

So that, all being said, let's switch tracks for a moment and talk about what this means then to create a mentally healthy workplace, because I want to make sure it doesn't feel like you have to take on the role of some sort of mental health provider who is treating whatever mental disorder your staff may be dealing with. That is going to generally promote well-being for your staff, lessen stress, and that's not just for this person but for the whole team. You're kind of creating this space and so the day-to-day, the immediate, they're not seeing maybe some of those symptoms, and so you want to make sure that your whole staff team can do their best work. In general, this goes beyond this one person. So you're looking at some of the factors in the workplace that might be impacting your team, both positively and negatively, and if you want to know a little bit more about those factors, a couple episodes ago we talked about the factors that are inherent in a mentally healthy workplace, so definitely go check that out and understand more about that side. So these are really the pieces that we're responsible for. We need to explore challenges that our staff are having individually, making sure that everyone has some accommodations and real understanding about how they can do their best work, about those individual needs that they might have. We're focused in general on creating this mentally healthy environment where everyone can thrive, and when you think about all of that, that's a lot of responsibility.

Speaker 2:

Leaders who are doing a great job leading, who are not just trying to ignore these problems, have a lot of responsibility and it can be quite draining. And that leads us to this very important piece of taking care of yourself. Something that's really hard, that a lot of people experience challenge with, is when you're trying to support someone who's having some sort of challenge with their mental health in their life. It is incredibly draining and challenging for you. You might feel powerless in what you can actually do to help this person. Is it truly helping them? You may feel some sense of fault or responsibility that you are actually not responsible for. You are not responsible necessarily for this person's mental illness and sometimes we can take a lot of that on emotionally and that's not necessarily helpful. That's not supportive of yourself or that person. Your responsibility as their leader is supporting this environment that they're in.

Speaker 2:

And, of course, you can also feel trapped in this situation of you're trying to support someone with different needs while supporting the rest of your team and having to work potentially with this differing outcome. There can be this emotional burden, of course, but there's also a professional burden often If there's a reality that this employee is not optimally functioning in the way that you hope all your team members are in the way that their job roles say they are supposed to contribute, you might not have to be doing extra work to support that. Your team might feel like they're taking on extra work to support that. It's a really hard situation and absolutely everyone in that situation from the person who's dealing with that mental challenge to everyone on your team and yourself.

Speaker 2:

I feel so much empathy for you as you work through this and that's why I'm reiterating really make sure that, if this is a possibility at all, if it's safe for you at all, reach out to your leaders and those supports in your organization, obviously also trying to get support for yourself in your personal life, maybe also professional support, so you are able to handle this the best you can.

Speaker 2:

I've got to say some organizations do have really amazing support set up that if you share this, they'll come in with all sorts of ways that they can help you in this employee and really sadly, there are a ton of organizations that not only will not support but might even discriminate, act definitely immorally, maybe illegally, because they don't want to deal with this problem, and that puts you obviously in a tough place of what you want to do with that and that's a much bigger answer and discussion than this show is. So do your best to support yourself and your team, reach out for those resources and I hope this was helpful to you, ap for some ideas about this framework of mental illness in the workplace versus mentally healthy environments and really, if you take one thing, just about that piece of how you can get support for yourself so you are able to handle this the best. I am very much looking forward to our discussion after this, as I also want to be one of your supports and as a reminder, if you have a story that you want to share with the show, like AP did, I would love to hear it. You can find the link for that in the description below and then you can look forward to a session with me after, so we can make sure your question is answered and give you some extra resources to work with.

Speaker 2:

This show is available in podcast form if you prefer to listen that way. That comes out on Friday mornings and the link for that is also in the description. I want to thank you so much for listening and learning with me. This is such a big, complicated topic that is becoming more and more alive in our world, and so taking this time to really understand it in the terms of your leadership is so important. So thank you for being here and, as we close, remember to ask yourself what kind of ripples are you going to create this week?

Speaker 1:

We hope you enjoyed the episode. Make sure to subscribe, comment and connect with Leah at meetleahca.