Three Things Leaders Must Understand About Mental Health

As awareness of mental health continues to grow, its effects on modern workplaces are increasingly difficult to ignore. In the past decade, diagnoses for conditions like depression and anxiety have increased steadily across the country, and most working-aged Canadians say their jobs play a significant role in their mental health. Loneliness is on the rise. Substance abuse is a growing workplace concern. Burnout is rampant.

If you’re a leader—at least, a thoughtful one—there’s a good chance you know that your decisions and actions can contribute to the mental well-being of your employees. You may even feel a responsibility to create conditions in which everyone is better set up to thrive.

But have you applied the same rigour to your own mental health? Julian Barling and Simon Rego think perhaps you should. Earlier this year, Barling (Borden Chair of Leadership at Smith School of Business and an expert in leadership and workplace well-being) and Rego (Chief of Psychology at Montefiore Medical Center and Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Albert Einstein College of Medicine) published The Cognitive Behavioural Therapy Workbook for Leaders, a book meant to help people in positions of power proactively attend to their mental well-being. (You can read more about some of the practices explored in the book here.)

In a recent Smith webinar entitled Inside Leaders’ Mental Health, the pair shed light on why it can be so hard for leaders to prioritize mental health—and why it’s so important for them to do so. “Leaders are human: They are not immune to the struggles of anyone else in this world today,” Rego said. “It’s important to normalize the feelings, the challenges, the stressors, the struggles and the strains that leaders face. Just because you’re struggling does not mean you’re failing.”  

Read on for three takeaways.

Takeaway #1: Leaders experience unique mental health pressures 

When you’re a leader, it can feel not only as if all eyes are on you—but also that those eyes hold you to a higher standard. 

Here’s the hard truth: They are, and they do. When you occupy a leadership role, people really do expect more of you. “We have to recognize the myth of invulnerability: that is, the widespread belief or stereotype that if you become a leader you must have some kind of super-resilience,” explained Barling. He then pointed to research he recently conducted with Anika E. Cloutier (an associate professor in Dalhousie University’s Faculty of Management and who completed her PhD studies at Smith School of Business) that quantified the intentional and implicit expectations of leader buoyancy among boards, senior ranks and HR teams. “There is strong support for this idea,” Barling said. “People really do believe that being a leader and having a mental illness is an incongruence, that you cannot do both at the same time.”

There are many reasons for this common perception, Barling explained, including a widespread assumption that leaders have access to resources that facilitate greater well-being, along with a pervasive understanding that leaders have status that shields them from undesirable health outcomes, including mental illness.

Because of these misconceptions, few individuals know how to process a leader experiencing mental illness. “When leaders violate that strong stereotype, they are stigmatized for it,” Barling said. And the stigma can be strongest in the leaders themselves. “They fear being seen as weak, as unreliable, or as not being ‘leadership material.’” 

Indeed, leaders are especially susceptible to what Rego called “amplified self-stigma” when it comes to matters of wellness, including mental health. “They develop beliefs such as ‘I can’t make a mistake,’ or ‘I can’t show weakness to other people,’” Rego explained. “These internal beliefs create barriers towards seeking the very assistance that could not only help them deal with those beliefs, but also help the team function better.”

Takeaway #2: Seeking help looks different for leaders

In recent years, many companies have made great progress towards supporting employee mental health, offering a range of services and resources to help people operate at their best. But as Rego and Barling explained, mental-health offerings tend to be less straightforward for those further up the org chart to access. “Fewer organizations are providing resources to support the mental well-being of leaders,” said Barling. “And even if or when they do, leaders are reluctant to use those resources—for some really good reasons.” (See: The aforementioned stigma.)

When leaders hear one thing (that people are an organization’s greatest asset, for example), and experience another (that resources suitable to a person in a position of power aren’t at hand), it can create a contradiction that is difficult to square. “When we experience this mixed messaging, we can easily internalize it,” Rego explained. The dissonance that occurs from trying to reconcile seemingly paradoxical messages can lead to problematic beliefs and emotions, like guilt, he continued—and that can accelerate pressure to shoulder the burden alone. “It’s a trap that leaders can be quite vulnerable to fall into,” Rego said. “And it can come at a great emotional and personal cost.”   

Takeaway #3: Leaders’ mental health struggles affect everyone 

Mental health can feel like an intensely private and personal matter, and fundamentally, it should be. But the reality is, when a leader struggles, the effects can go far beyond the individual. “It’s often unintentional,” Barling explained. “But when employees start to think their leaders are suffering from mental health issues, they start to question those leaders’ competence. They tend to lose trust.”

This type of “bottom-up” stigma—which Barling has researched alongside Smith PhD candidate Michaela Scanlon—can spark a laundry list of negative organizational outcomes, including diminished effort on the part of others on the team. “When leaders struggle, they do so quietly due to the pressures of their role and the stigma attached to leaders who may admit what others perceive as weakness,” Barling explained. “This affects their leadership behaviours and the decisions they make—all of which has an effect down the line on employee stress, employee intentions to leave, safety and performance.”

Considered through this lens, a leader’s decision to attend to their mental health is as much a strategic business imperative as it is a responsible personal choice. And in Rego and Barling’s view, cognitive behavioural therapy can play an important role in making that happen, providing the tools to catch, challenge and change problematic thinking patterns, to attenuate emotions, and to engage in more productive behaviours.

This tends to benefit everyone: the individual leader, their teams and their organizations at large. “These skills not only help leaders improve themselves, they also help leaders lead others better,” Rego explained. “It really can have a robust ripple-out effect.”

As Barling summed it up: “Be well and you increase the likelihood that you will lead well.”