Supporting your team’s Psychological Wellbeing

Leadership through Crisis – Supporting your team’s Psychological Wellbeing. 3 ways in which Leadership Care and Empathy work

Emintell is a high-quality provider of conscious leadership and executive coaching services, based in the East Midlands. Since 2011, we have worked with organisational clients, both nationally and internationally supporting them build their leadership capability. Predominantly, we work with senior leaders and their teams, in both private and public sectors, across a diverse range of industry sectors.

This is second in a of a series of articles exploring how senior leaders and teams support themselves and their people, maintain focus, commitment and their psychological health as they navigate through this extraordinary period of ambiguity and adaptation

During a recent virtual call with our eldest son who is confined to his apartment in London, working for a technology business, he showed me the contents of a pub quiz care package, a senior account manager within the business had sent him. It was a case of beers together with a quiz book and answers. The impact of this simple but very thoughtful gesture had on my son was immediate. I could tell it in his voice. The gesture of care and thought had given him a lift, had supported him in feeling recognised and connected to this account manager and to the business. These gestures can easily be effected by senior leaders and leadership teams to show their teams that they care about them, individually and collectively.

“The capacity to Care is the thing that gives life its deepest significance. ”
Pablo Casals, Spanish cellist, composer and conductor

In psychological terms, here are three ways in which showing care and empathy improves team members engagement, motivation and psychological well-being in your organisational teams.

Need for recognition and affirmation

According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, model the need for recognition forms an important pillar. The need for Recognition is fundamentally about social cohesion. Being recognised fuels our self-esteem, our sense of identity and is essential for re-charging our positive emotional energy.

In psychological terms, we all need to achieve and to gain recognition from people with whom we work and live with.

The amygdala is responsible for the perception of emotions such as anger, fear, and sadness, as well as the controlling of aggression. The amygdala helps to store memories of events and emotions so that an individual may be able to recognize similar events in the future. The amygdala is activated when we perceive any threat (real and imagined) either to ourselves, people we care about and projects or items that are of real importance to us. A gesture of genuine caring or other thoughtful gesture that shows a member of a team that they are recognised helps to interrupt activity in this region. Minute doses of the bonding chemical Oxytocin, which gives us warm close feelings, often referred to as a “feel good” chemical, are released into the blood stream, when we feel connected to others and cared for. This is all part of the human systems mammalian care giving system.   Being recognised, re-inforces our sense of identity both in individual terms and in our inter-relatedness with others.

Need for belonging

“Much of what human beings do is done in the service of belongingness.”
(Baumeister & Leary, 1995)

Our need to belong is a fundamental need and to satisfy it, we are driven to form close interpersonal relationships with several different people. It also relies on regular and effective two-way communication, ideally face to face, with people whom we like and trust. Related to the need to be recognised, the need for belonging is a much more fundamental need.

We are hardwired to belong to a tribe, a community, a network of people where we can feel psychologically safe and enabled to thrive, achieve our optimum performance, and utilise our skills and talents.  We seek other people either with similar interests, values, similar socio-economic backgrounds, skills and talents.

Where we work provides people (usually) with the conditions to have this most primary of needs to be satisfied. When people work in trusting, transparent and cohesive teams, this need for connection and belonging, of meaning and purpose is met in full. During this crisis, when team members are suddenly working from home, furloughed, uncertain about their future and their place in their tribe, it is easy to understand how these feelings of alienation, of being “outside the tribe”, can quickly escalate to high levels of anxiety, stress and for some into depression or other serious mental illness.

Every gesture of care and connection offered by the business leadership and their own team leadership and members, will be crucial in minimising these feelings of alienation and “unbelonging”. In developing strategies to maintain the wellbeing and good mental health of your organisation’s teams, early and continued interventions of active connection, practical support and care will be invaluable both in the short and longer term.

Empathy in Leadership

A common Leadership myth about empathy is that it displays emotional weakness; that you cannot be strong and empathic at the same time. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Being empathetic is one of the most powerful emotionally intelligent skills that any leader can demonstrate. The crucial point is that this approach helps builds trust in the leader and their decisions, in way, few other approaches do, especially during the midst of a crisis situation.

An excellent leadership example is the New Zealand prime minister, Jacintha Arden. Most commentators agree that, as well as her clear and timely direction throughout the pandemic, she does so with a deep undertone of empathy, recognising and validating the difficulties the crisis and her decisions are having on the nations’ population. The real impact of this empathetic but strong leadership style, is that people’s trust in her decisions is extremely high.

Practical approaches to supporting your team’s psychological wellbeing

To ensure that your senior teams keep engaged, motivated and connected through this period: –

1. lead with strength, blended with a tone of empathy and genuine understanding of their real concerns. This style of leadership will go a long way to retaining real trust in your business-critical decisions.
2. Provide forums and opportunities for regular and meaningful connection to give them a real sense of belonging,
3. Identify simple ways you can show your care. A handwritten card, or a letter to a whole team. A simple verbal “Thank you for all your efforts, which I appreciate”, delivered at an appropriate time is one of the most impactful examples of individual or whole team member recognition.
4. Thoughtful care packages delivered to their home while team members are working or furloughed at home
5. Provide some opportunities for the team members to have much needed light fun and a psychological break from unhelpful thoughts and concerns and celebrate every small victory on the way back to hopefully, full capacity in the near future.

Emintell is an enabler of conscious leadership solutions for senior leaders, senior managers and their teams, which it delivers through specialist support;

Master Level Executive Coaching   Team Coaching   Resilience and Wellbeing Services

If you are interested in having a conversation with us about how we can support you and your teams through this crisis period and beyond,  please call Emintell on 0203 733 2335 or email hello@emintell.com