Have a Seat with the C-Suite, Vol. 14
If you’re anything like us, you’re already looking ahead to the new year and making your New (School) Year’s Resolutions. One of the things we’re thinking about a lot is wellness – mental, physical, relational, and intellectual. Along all dimensions, wellness is critical to improved job performance and leaders are critical to employee wellness. This week’s C-Suite recaps some best practices for maintaining your own well-being as a leader and promoting healthy practices among your faculty and colleagues.
Try: How to Create an Employee Wellness Program
This article features a Q&A with Transamerican Center for Health Studies director Hector De La Torre. His various roles in business, healthcare, and research have equipped him with a unique perspective on employee wellness and the influence leaders have when it comes to promoting health across an organization. He offers a variety of good advice to leaders of any organizational type, whether you have an existing employee wellness program or you’re looking to develop one. We’ve distilled his responses into a few key takeaways:
Wellness is comprehensive, which means mental and physical. Healthy employees are effective, creative employees. Ignoring wellness is perilous not only to the health of your employees, but to the health of your organization.
Leaders set the tone in wellness, as in everything else. De La Torre says, “If leaders have little understanding of these well-established connections or dismiss the relevance of employee wellness in the workplace, they will not invest in these programs.”
Consider carefully what barriers to wellness your employees may perceive and how you can dismantle some of those barriers. De La Torre lists some common barriers: “Examples of barriers an organization may encounter include a perceived lack of need, employees' low expectations of their organization and ability to provide wellness programs, a distrust of management, employee burnout, the inconvenience of some scheduled wellness events, and concerns about funding.”
Finally, if your organization does not currently have a wellness, program, consider starting one or advocating for one. De La Torres suggests starting with the FINDING FIT workplace wellness report, with is available on the Transamerican Center for Health Studies website.
Read: UTEP Researchers Study How to Deal With Principal Burnout
Leaders consistently do demanding work and education leaders often work more hours for less pay in more difficult environments than do leaders in other fields. Burnout is almost guaranteed unless education leaders are conscientious about counteracting the results of exhaustion and discouragement that can be all too common. We love to see policy briefs on important issues because they are just that – brief summaries of new work on issues of critical importance to educational leadership. Dr. David Knight of the University of Texas at El Paso released in June a policy brief summarizing research on principal burnout and how to preclude both burnout and the turnover that often follows. In this brief, the full text of which is available here, Dr. Knight and his colleagues outline the major predictors of principal burnout. While burnout is not correlated with the percent of low-income or low-achieving students at a school, is it associated with a principal’s years of experience. That is, more experienced principals tend to report less burnout. Importantly, the brief also offers implications for policies that may better address principals’ mental health at all career stages, including: frequent surveys to assess rates of burnout, university-based training which addresses the kinds of secondary trauma often experienced by school leaders, increased collaboration across school to reduce the burden of trauma, and increased attention to leaders’ mental health through national professional organizations.
Share: How ‘empathy gap’ among social workers can affect services for people of color
Terence Fitzgerald, an associate professor at USC’s Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work, studies institutional racism. After surveying more than 900 social workers, he identified what he calls an “empathy gap.” He elaborates on this finding: empathy tends to be inversely proportional to truthfulness. In other words, white participants believed they were empathetic, but their actions and experiences often suggested otherwise. Conversely, many people of color say that their peers treat them fairly, but that doesn’t play out in practice. Instead, a collective narrative has emerged of experiences that represent microaggressions, along with other overt and covert forms of racism.” Given that institutional racism and microaggressions are detrimental to individual health and organizational productivity, this is a critical finding. Teaching, also considered a care profession, is similar to social work in many ways. Think about your own perspective or that of your colleagues: is empathy expressed equally to all clients (e.g., students and families) and especially across racial lines? Fitzgerald’s assessment of empathy in social work is sobering: “In practice, we pick and choose the degree of empathy that we direct toward particular populations….People don’t want to admit that their empathy is limited by racial lines.” I strongly recommend that you read this article to learn more about his research methods and key findings, but his recommendations are especially important. First, he recommends training so that people in care professions “unlearn” the “myths concerning people of color, especially black people.” Second, he suggests a renewed focus on hiring people who “understand this racialized lens.” This means training both for aspiring educators and for those who are currently on the job. Fitzgerald concludes that, “We can’t keep turning a blind eye to the historical significance of race and how it affects our work, interactions and lives today.”
Lead: Proactive Mental Wellness: keys to success in the midst of entrepreneurial endeavors
Leaders, especially in creative and care professions, face unprecedented challenges to their mental health and therefore unprecedented responsibility to protect their own mental health. Helena Lass, a psychologist and founder of Wellness Orbit, contrasts the wellness challenges of previous eras with those of today: historically, mental health has focused on righting disorders rather than preserving wellness. She also notes that wellness looks different across professions and takes as an example the fields of construction and of modern start-ups:
“Construction work is labor-intense, and comes with its own set of potential health hazards and requires specific know-how in order to sustain peak physical health. Due to the nature of deskwork, we can assume that the proportions of demand placed upon employees are approximately 10% physical and 90% mental. With this is mind, employees who do such mental work are rarely offered skills on how to protect themselves properly. What is the use of an employee with a healthy body, but is [sic] mentally unable to contribute?”
Lass suggests that individual wellness should be taught in the same way we teach reading – as a set of discrete but related skills that undergird one another and promote the development of other skills. Specifically, she suggests explicit instruction in interpersonal skills and awareness. Also, because these are not currently instructional priorities in most educational institutions, she notes increased need for these supports at the organizational level: “Both, young startups and established businesses, need to effective [sic] re-educate people on how people function as humans.”
- Lauren