How to lead when you’re not the expert: Part 2 – Team doubts
Diagnose team doubts and turn uncertainty into trust. A practical guide for new leaders to identify causes and win buy-in with calm, strategic steps....
Brain Circuits
CHROs: 3 ways to help top executives prioritize recovery
With organizations experiencing unprecedented levels of leadership burnout, Nele Dael identifies three ways to help your people integrate recovery into even the busiest schedule.
1. Let the body do the talking
Most dialogue around recovery is about its connection to positive effects such as happiness, but framing the approach to recovery in this way may not convince work-driven individuals to prioritize it. Instead, it may be more impactful to highlight benefits to overall mental health, including emotional, physical, and cognitive functioning.
Monitoring an individual’s functioning at these three levels by measuring both the subjective experience and objective indicators of well-being (such as heart rate and brain activation) contributes to a more holistic view of mental health and well-being in the workplace.
2. Take away the guilt
Business executives and managers are more likely than other workers to be highly engaged and connected to their organization, but they also experience more stress and other negative emotions related to work, and are likely to experience feelings of frustration, shame, or guilt whenever they take a break. Your job is to free them from this “recovery guilt.” Emphasizing the effectiveness of microbreaks is crucial here.
Executives can embed them into their daily routines, combating exhaustion in a practical, sustainable way, rather than to simply “grin and bear it” until their next stretch of annual leave. The same principle works for holidays: on some measures, short breaks can be more restorative than longer vacations. Longer breaks are necessary, but a mixture of long and shorter breaks will provide the most effective year-round recovery.
Executives must be allowed to accept that running down their reserves or engaging in unsuitable passive recovery activities, because they can’t face going for a run, for example, is counterproductive.
3. Promote health-oriented leadership
Leaders are role models. The more they prioritize their own well-being, the greater their positive influence on the wider workforce. Such health-oriented leadership has been proven to boost employee well-being by minimizing workplace conflict, reducing job insecurity, and improving working conditions.
Key takeaway
By encouraging recovery at the top, CHROs can lay the foundations for a healthier, happier, and more resilient workforce.
Authors
Related
Are you a corporate shock absorber?
Middle managers shield teams from brutal leadership. Learn to stop buffering, translate conflict, and steer strategy with clear trade-offs....
So, you think you’ve built an ecosystem…
Many organizations think they have created an ecosystem, but fall well short. Answer the questions below to check whether your “ecosystem” is sustainable in the long term....
Why are bad habits hard to break, and what can I do about it?
Habits form in the basal ganglia and can resist effort - discover substitution strategies that replace old routines with productive ones at work....
Audio available
Learn Brain Circuits
Join us for daily exercises focusing on issues from team building to developing an actionable sustainability plan to personal development. Go on - they only take five minutes.
Explore Leadership
What makes a great leader? Do you need charisma? How do you inspire your team? Our experts offer actionable insights through first-person narratives, behind-the-scenes interviews and The Help Desk.
Join Membership
Log in here to join in the conversation with the I by IMD community. Your subscription grants you access to the quarterly magazine plus daily articles, videos, podcasts and learning exercises.