Board performance begins in the bedroom


Mind out of the gutter. We’re writing about mental burnout off the back of a recent LinkedIn Live session and extended convo FDI had with Dr Jaelea Skehan, Director of Everymind. Specifically its impact on board directors, the boardroom, and how to create a workplace culture that prevents it from happening.

The tricky thing is, many board directors don’t know when burnout is happening to them.

They might cite feeling exhausted. Snappy. Cynical. Uninspired. Unmotivated. Ineffectual. But not necessarily ‘burnt out’. The border between normal adult crabbiness and burnout is a foggy one. Hard to recognise.

Which brings us to the bedroom.

The bed is often where mental health issues first crop up. Sleep. Dreams. Sex. And more. For instance, insomnia is a strong sign of depression. And also, a key cause of it. Recurring nightmares and night terrors can point to anxiety disorders. Impotence might be chronic stress. So Jaelea sees the bed as a useful site for self-diagnosing burnout too. In a few ways.

  1. How do you feel first thing when you wake up in the morning? Dread? Negative about work? Fearful about work?

  2. Have you noticed any change in your sleep lately? More tossing and turning? Trouble falling asleep? Waking before your alarm, heart racing?

  3. Have you withdrawn from your bedmate (your partner) recently? Burnout can often manifest in turtle-shelling from friends and family.

The bedroom is a good place to start identifying burnout. But the boardroom is another area to note, as Jaelea mentions, “How has your approach to work changed [...] or the ways you’re producing work changed? Also including the way you interact with people in your work.”

Boardrooms are particularly intense working environments. High stakes decisions. Egos. Opinions. Data. Emotions. Stress. Balancing full time workloads alongside multiple board commitments. It all makes board directors particularly prone to the murky soul-sapping quicksand of burnout. And that can devolve into darker stuff if unaddressed. 
So how can we build safeguards in the boardroom against burnout? Jaelea thinks it has to do with  capital V Vulnerability. 

“Vulnerability can be a critical enabler of success,” she says. “‘Cause when people are trying to mask what’s going on, when people try to armour up, or be who they think others around them need them to be, then we’re not getting the best out of people.”

“High functioning teams are teams that actually have some give in them,” she adds. “High functioning teams are teams that have psychological safety.”

Upfront conversations are key. About core standards of behaviour, how you’re gonna work together as board directors, and how you’ll support people who aren’t functioning well. It could be a couple of pages, or an in-depth wellness plan. The main thing is that it’s deliberate. That the state of everyone’s minds is (pardon the pun) burnt into everyone’s minds.

The flow-on effects are important. Because a board that prioritises their own mental health will make decisions that prioritise the mental health of the people - the staff and stakeholders - affected by their decisions. 

This isn’t fuzzy stuff. It has a direct impact on a company’s pursestrings. “There’s much more research and evidence that employee wellbeing drives your bottom line,” says Jaelea. “If you’ve got staff, regardless if they’re working from home or working in an office, if they’re not functioning individually or as a team or don’t feel connected to the workplace, then the kinds of outputs and deliverables that affect your bottom line are going to be impacted.”

So govern with burnout in mind. Create a culture of vulnerability and psychological safety in the boardroom. Make it formal. Then let it flow on through the organisation. 

It might just help you sleep at night.

Governing for Burnout video series with Dr Jaelea Skhan, Director of Everymind.

 

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