Hello and welcome! I decided to split this episode in two. This part includes the practicalities of our topic today: A new skill set for leaders called well-being intelligence. The other part is for subscribers only and what I call an After Dark episode. I will send that part via email soon.
I think I’ll approach many of these posts that way because nearly everything in the organization includes some deeper, darker, philosophical matters that need consideration if we want any hope of achieving real change and true sustainability, but not everyone is here for that. Feel free to check out the darkness……or don’t, it’s your call.
Let’s talk a bit about the idea of well-being in the workplace. Some of these ideas will be from me and some from Roulet and Bhatti (2023), who recently suggested that a new intelligence is required as we manage yet another complex stage of work life. They call it well-being intelligence.
The authors in the linked piece above don’t operationalize well-being, so let’s just take a minute to acknowledge that we have no one shared definition of well-being. You can read more about the complexity of the construct of well-being via the CDC here, but for the sake of this argument, let’s consider well-being as a long-term state of positive functioning, specifically in the area of mental health.
Our authors do make the distinction between emotion (a temporary state) and well-being (a long-term state), whereas the CDC is a bit murkier on that issue in its read of the literature1. For our discussion today, let’s keep the difference in mind, acknowledging that emotional state does have a relationship to well-being but that these dynamics differ in their nature and influence on an individual.
Let’s consider well-being at work as a long-term state whereby individuals feel more positive emotions than negative about our work and the organization on the daily, an overall sense of positivity about our work and the organization, optimism about the future, engagement in the work of the organization — a feeling that what we’re doing matters, a sense of belonging with colleagues, and work-related stress and anxiety that are only situational and episodic, not long-term or serving as a state of being.
I don’t know how much context we need here to situate this discussion, and I want to assume that if you’re in an organization, you’ve witnessed or experienced what appears to be a decline in overall well-being in the workplace.
People are more stressed, anxious, and depressed than ever, and our authors here cite some studies about the rise of absenteeism (the highest it has ever been in the US), an increase in the number of sick days employees take for mental health reasons in France2, and the doubling of costs associated with mental health declines in organizations in the UK.
Anyone working in an organization and as part of a team probably already sees these dynamics. And if you’re a leader who doesn’t see that, I wonder why.
Some of us in orgs have seats closer to the action simply because we are who we are; not everyone feels they can disclose challenges to others, but if you’re a person with whom people are comfortable sharing that information, well. You already know what’s up.
As I was parsing through this research and the model of well-being intelligence the authors propose, I also saw a fantastic model of what not to do in organizations if we want to support overall well-being.
Are you familiar with “it’s hot on the bottom”? Here’s a link, if you haven’t seen it: Compilation of videos.
Basically, a mom wants to hand a pot off to a kid. She’s holding it by the handles and says, “it’s hot on the bottom.” Kid attempts to take the pot by putting hands on the bottom. She repeats herself. Kid repeats the attempt, in the same way, not making the connection that it’s hot on the bottom means that I need to handle this pot by the sides. Eventually, mom raises her voice, repeating the same information in the same way and expecting a different result, getting angry at kids these days.
This situation is pedagogy 1013. Saying the same thing in the same way but louder won’t achieve the expected result for any number of reasons, including basic differences in how individuals process information, how individuals can and cannot react in situations involving power differentials, and how we interpret subtext.
It’s obvious these kids weren’t making the connection, so a simple change in communication could have solved it: “It’s hot on the bottom, so grab it here by the sides.”
Imagine that this situation plays out routinely in an organization: Employees are uncertain or unclear about what to do and how to do it, so managers just repeat themselves in the same way, assuming that the problem is the employee.
One of the complaints among employees is that the expectations in the workplace are unclear, a situation that erodes well-being. I am of the mind that people will do whatever you want them to do provided the expectations are clear and they have the tools to complete the job. I believe that in the classroom, too. Clarity is one manifestation of kindness in my own practice, and I’ll link you back to 2021 for a post on that subject.
So in my mind — as both a practitioner and an org specialist — we can reduce uncertainty and anxiety and increase well-being in our workplace practices through better individualization, calibrating our communication and teaching approaches based on the unique needs of individual brains (individualized consideration, by the way, is one of the hallmarks of transformational leadership).
What that requires, though, is a deep understanding of how those individual brains work, and we can only gather those insights through relationship building and trust. Everything comes back to trust in the org, doesn’t it? It really does.
One path to developing well-being intelligence — a place where we can recognize and understand the needs of others and calibrate our approaches accordingly — is through self-assessment, according to our authors.
They suggest that people in leadership should reflect on their experiences at work to determine where their own stress manifests, suggesting that identifying whether episodic events — such as budget timelines - or more generalized anxiety — such as feelings of dread about work — emerge.
I need to add a note about this suggestion, though, because we cannot ignore the impact of power. People with positional power may interpret their personal data differently; they might not feel the same type or level of stress or anxiety about work as line employees.
Having more power — power over one’s schedule, flow of activities, work output, work environment — reduces work-related stress. Therefore, in this process of self-reflection, I suggest that we should also position ourselves in the mindset of the people with the least power on our teams, considering how their days look in the org.
This type of self-reflection, according to our authors, should bring with it calibrations to leaders’ approach to work. For example, meetings are killing us in many organizations, and that’s a whole other discussion. But our authors share that managers who implement “focus time” for themselves and who protect their time off also protect their own well-being, reducing burnout and developing insights into how to also enhance their teams’ well-being.
This point reminds me that we need to take strides to work against some serious cultural forces as we “protect time off.” You can hear more about how the very nature of our culture influences our approach to work in the After Dark part of this episode, but the spirit is captured in that meme about the differences between French and US workers. My loose paraphrase:
French office workers’ auto reply: It’s August and I am out of the office. I’ll return your email upon my return next month.
US office workers’ auto reply: I’m out of the office for a kidney transplant today so I’ll be unavailable from 11am-1pm but will be checking in this afternoon.
Improving our individual relationship with work is important, but it sits within the context of the larger organizational culture, one that often replicates the values of the overall culture. It’s not easy to work against those forces.
The authors suggest that we need to change org norms in order to increase well-being, including calibrating how we provide feedback and direct work, as I already noted in the “bottom is hot” example, and also including how we talk about the use of sick time as well as well-being.
Leaders who openly mention well-being are great; however, when that vocabulary is not supported with actual changes in the organization, words are just words, and what they’re really doing is relegating well-being to the realm of the individual and the private (more on that point in the After Dark episode).
Thus, the authors suggest a deep dive into organizational practices to uncover the dynamics that do and do not promote well-being, suggesting that organizational matters directly influence overall well-being. They’re right.
Orgs will want to deep dive that data; I suggest using the stay interview protocol for this kind of investigation. And given the sensitivity of this type of research, an outside agent is almost always the right choice. We’ll want to vacate the idea that the “anonymous HR survey” is an appropriate tool for data collection. It rarely is.
One reason it’s so difficult to establish a culture of ongoing well-being is that doing so requires a rejection of deeply ingrained ideas about work, performance, and “ideal workers.”
Right now, the system is functioning perfectly: Our current modes of operation are designed to elicit the challenges we’re facing. Period. These are natural byproducts of what we do and how we do it, and I talk more about that in the After Dark episode, specifically addressing the “do more with less” ethos in higher ed.
We can’t expect to keep doing what we’re doing and achieve a different outcome. Well-being intelligence requires a rejection of those modes of operation, and that process can be very difficult.
So let’s recap. What can we do?
Define what we mean by “well-being” in our context. It’s not easy to operationalize the idea of well-being, but it’s a crucial component of figuring out what we’ll do, how we’ll do it, and how we’ll measure the impact.
Take a deep dive into our current modes of operation to determine what is and isn’t working to support well-being in the org.
Engage in org learning about how well-being looks and why it matters: What are the indicators that well-being is eroding, and what should we do in our context as a result?
Take an individual approach to our own work life to identify what contributes to or erodes our own well-being, and then advocate for changes in the org as a result.
Make visible, public changes to our vocabularies and modes of operating in the organization, reducing the stigma of taking time off to address our well-being, protecting our time off, and promoting healthy balance.
Change org norms: Improve leaders’ ability to calibrate based on individual needs. Sidebar: I suggest we do some serious org learning on the matter of neurodiversity, too, understanding that everyone learns differently, processes information differently, and requires different communication and learning approaches.
Access support for the process: Collecting data on sensitive matters requires outside agents.
Change is hard, but change is necessary if we are serious about well-being in the organization.
The CDC, for example, says that the absence of negative emotions is part of overall well-being and then lists depression and anxiety as examples, but those are states, not emotions, right? Conceptualizing, defining, and operationalizing well-being is not easy!
Are we seeing an increase in more mental health days simply because we have more vocabulary around mental health and have started treating it as a valid and legitimate reason to use “sick time”? I’m not sure.
A hot pot and/or a power imbalance can easily raise the threat level in the brain. When the brain is flooded with cortisol, our ability to reason effectively exits the building. Here’s a link back to a prior discussion on the importance of maintaining low threat levels; these ideas matter in micro interactions like handling a hot pot — where we want someone to do something new — or in big situations like org change.
"Well-Being Intelligence"