Wellness and Leadership Success
Leadership needs to be at their very best for a company to grow and succeed. And, just as top athletes focus on training, mental and physical health to achieve peak performance on the playing field, executives and senior leaders likewise need to a balanced approach that their own wellness to perform at their best. Stress, exhaustion, lack of downtime and the pressures to succeed all drag down a leader’s sense of wellbeing.
Successful businesses and organizations bought into the concept of employee wellness long ago. The benefits of these programs – improved productivity, morale, retention – demonstrates the importance of this investment. In fact, a recent survey found 84% of large employers – those with more than 200 employees – offered their staff workplace wellness programs of some kind.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, leaders focused on the health, safety, and wellbeing of their team members. But as the saying goes ‘do as I say, not as I do”, leaders generally did not take that advise and many experienced anxiety and burnout symptoms at unprecedented rates as they focused on others without restoring their own energy levels.
A Harvard Business Review–sponsored survey conducted in the fall of 2020 gathered feedback from more than 1,500 respondents from 46 countries9 —the majority of whom were at or above supervisor level. Eighty-five percent of these respondents said their well-being had declined, while 56 percent said their job demands had increased. Moreover, 62 percent who were struggling to manage their workloads said they had experienced burnout “often” or “extremely often” in the previous three months.
The number of people reporting more symptoms of burnout has increased since then, not only in C-suites but also across organizations. When people are exhausted, they fall into a scarcity mindset (thinking about what they don’t have) and aren’t as adaptable or open to learning. We expect to see these mental-health and well-being challenges continue for at least the next year or two.
The best way to handle demanding situations is by investing in one’s own well-being first. Just like athletes who continually invest in their own physical and mental health—not only before a game or a race—leaders have to be fit to face whatever comes their way and to support others for however long it takes. Leaders should focus on allowing themselves to thrive, and then helping others to be at their physical, mental, and emotional best.10
Research shows that taking deliberate breaks accelerates learning and skill acquisition. For example, a study of violin prodigies11 revealed that students who were quickest to master the instrument took regular and significant breaks, including naps between practice sessions, rather than playing for hours on end. In another study of people trying to perform a task involving new skills, those who took breaks to mentally reset improved much more quickly under performance pressure.
