Culturati: LIVE Recap — At The Breaking Point: How Do Managers Lead?
By: Culturati Team
Tags: Mental Health, Management And Leadership, Covid 19, Racial Justice

What are some of the challenges facing front-line managers today?

Mayerland Harris reflected on how the pandemic started. With H-E-B being a first-line responder to emergencies, COVID wasn’t supposed to be any different. However, we all entered March thinking this would pass in a few weeks, then realizing this pandemic would be prolonged, we had to adjust our to running a marathon rather than a sprint. We’ve had to adopt a different pace to avoid burnout. This has meant learning a new way to work. How do we manage a crisis like COVID while still maintaining typical operations? How do we provide support for employees in their personal and professional life? How do we discuss sensitive topics such as mental health and racial and social injustice?

We are all dealing with no less than 5 crises at any given time.

Professor Ethan Burris reminds us that we are not just dealing with a pandemic, we are dealing with multiple crises at once. We have the pandemic, the murder of George Floyd and the unrest that followed, the economic crisis as a result of COVID, the blending of work and home life, and the political crisis. We are all dealing with no less than 5 crises at any given time. Darren White, Ph.D. reminds us of a sixth crisis, the information crisis. As managers are trying to support employees, we are also receiving conflicting messages from trusted institutions. Put that on the backdrop of the election and now these messages are being polarized. Managers are in a unique place where they have to communicate these important messages to all types of people with different backgrounds and thinking.

Professor Burris cites recent research indicating that employees, on the whole, feel powerless and as they have been forced into a reality where life is on a screen for everyone to see. That loss of control and loss of contact creates a situation where employees fill in the gaps when clearly receiving communication from the top. As we learned from the last Culturati: LIVE Energy Management for Executives, be transparent and over-communicate.

So what tools can we use to alleviate these challenges?

It is critical to note that creating a culture of well-being and productivity is not as simple as providing one outlet for people to submit grievances in order to check a box. Companies need to create an ecosystem of tools to understand how to better engage employees. Here are a few tips shared by our panelists:

Spend time NOT discussing work. This can look like taking the first 10 minutes of a meeting to discuss anything but work, creating a meeting specifically without an agenda, creating spontaneous interactions such as a Zoom lunch (ex. “I’ll be taking lunch at 12, here’s my Zoom link if anyone wants to join”)

Take walking meetings or if you are within proximity to other co-workers, encourage socially distant interactions. Encourage virtual happy hours. People are starving for connectedness.

Create “in-between moments” to replace what has been lost in commute time or breaks between meetings. Outlook has a function that automatically schedules 60-minute meetings as 50 minutes. Use those 10 minutes to decompress before your next scheduled task.

Engage in both active and passive listening. Darren gives us the acronym, LEAP (Listen. Engage. Activate. Predict). Passive listening is becoming more important, such as using tools with natural language processing to analyze coaching calls or internal communications to gauge internal morale.

When someone gives feedback, don’t sit on the information. Act on it by creating a dialogue to discuss the issue so that your employees know that their voices are heard.

A recurring topic that came up in this conversation centered around mental health and wellness. Many of the tips above are general in their approach and do not address the very real impact that mental health is having in the workplace. As a manager, how do you straddle the line between coaching and treating?

Addressing the issue of mental health and wellness

During this time, it is critical that managers watch for signs of declining mental health and wellness, not just in their employees but in themselves. Mayerland cites that while H-E-B is doing particularly well during this time, that does not mean that an employee isn’t married to someone who has been laid off or is not caring for elderly parents. We used to only see the work-self and we are now being confronted with the whole-self. While this trend of bringing your whole, authentic self to work has been growing, COVID has accelerated this trend.

Part of viewing your employees as their whole-selves means acknowledging the issues that so many people are facing such as depression, loneliness, and a general feeling of disconnect. Leaders have to be intentional about talking about these kinds of issues and focus on the well-being of their teams just as much as their ability to get the work done.

Professor Burris reports that the first question he receives about management relates to cultural maintenance vs any type of performance management. Being more purposeful about how to build and maintain culture is key. Pre-COVID, people could work on culture at the same time, now with everything being segmented, we have to be purposeful about our time together.

For so many, work is an outlet. Now that the work outlet, among social and familial outlets have been diminished, people are feeling its effects. Sometimes as a manager, you may be the only person who sees a difference in an employee's performance or personality. Pre-COVID, if you didn’t hear from someone, you still knew they were ok working in their office. now if you don’t hear, something may be wrong. With the uptick in suicides, it is so important for managers to be aware of any signs and to be vocal if they have concerns about an employee. It can be as simple as “Hey Luis, you’ve seemed a bit down the last couple of days. Is everything alright?” Everything could be fine but you’d be surprised to know that your concern could mean the world to this person.

With the uptick in suicides, it is so important for managers to be aware of any signs and to be vocal if they have concerns about an employee. It can be as simple as “Hey Luis, you’ve seemed a bit down the last couple of days. Is everything alright?”

Both Mayerland and Darren have noted that there is some hesitancy among managers to get involved with their employees past their performance, mostly out of unease at the subject or fear of giving incorrect advice. Managers are asking, “We know something isn’t right, but how do I help them?”

This is where an ecosystem of strategies to deal with mental health comes in and why it is so important to have more than one outlet for employees and managers to turn to.

Consider H-E-B’s multi-pronged approach to mental health. Upper leadership has created H-E-B Cares, shared video vignettes to discuss their own struggles with depression or other mental health issues in an effort to remove the stigma from the subject. All employees have access to 6 free counseling sessions before their deductible kicks in. H-E-B has hired counselors and professional psychologists to help both their leaders and employees, including, specific counselors to help leaders manage their employees. All in addition to offering resources such as webinars, literature, and videos.

Another way to combat the unease of feeling unqualified to coach someone is to have a robust list of resources to refer employees out when it is clear they need a different professional’s help. Darren reminds us that it is equally important to provide training to managers so that they know where and when to refer out.

Discussing racial injustice vs mental health

As attitudes towards mental health improve and companies are more comfortable with discussing this previously taboo issue, both Darren and Mayerland are seeing reluctance in managers and companies to discuss the ongoing issue of social and racial injustice. For many BIPOC employees, these injustices play a large part in their well-being and can be a huge source of stress and other emotional responses.

They cite that people are struggling to have these conversations because they don’t want to say the wrong thing. So how do we combat this?

The first step is to recognize that there is work to do. Darren notes how he had considered himself to be fairly read on the subject of race but after 9 hours of DEI training, he realized how little he actually knew. He recognizes that there are not enough tools out there to help support managers in having these conversations. However, DEI training is a huge step in making progress towards having open and honest conversations within corporate structures.

An important question…

Now that we’re working from home with no commute, when do you take time to reflect on your day?

Professor Burris responded that he is at his best in the morning. By the time he gets to the end of the workday and then the second shift with kids begins, there is no time to reflect. He is reminded of a book by Cal Newport called Deep Work. This book makes the argument for different types of work, “deep” and “shallow” work. The “deep” work is the meaningful work you do whereas the “shallow” work is the work you do where at the end you feel like you haven’t accomplished much. The book gives a number of different tools and techniques to recommend how to organize your time to make sure that you include time for “deep” work.

Mayerland is also a morning person and believes that the best time to reflect is when your energy is highest. She has to put the time to reflect on her calendar otherwise something else will take its place. She has to be intentional about taking this time and is candid about her struggles to maintain this practice.

Darren breaks his reflection time into two categories: decompression and reflection. He admits it is somewhat embarrassing, but his reflection time is in the morning with an extended shower or a bath at night. That is where most of his time for deep thought comes in. To decompress, he recommends doing an activity that takes your full attention. For him, this could be mountain biking or skiing, both of which would be dangerous if he was thinking about how his day went.

Eugene recommends freestyle writing as a good practice for people who want to reflect or decompress.

Closing Remarks

Professor Ethan Burris cites an old Gallup surveying attributes that employees look for in a manager. He says it’s relatively simple. Employees seek trust, compassion, stability and hope. If you break things down into a few questions, what am I giving my employees to make them trust me more, to give them compassion for where they are, to provide them some sense of stability that we’re going to be okay, and to provide hope for a future where we get out of this? When building off of these core questions, things start to get a lot simpler.

Mayerland Harris encourages managers to have grace and mercy for yourself and your team members. We are so hard on ourselves and so are our team members so remember to have that grace.

Darren White, Ph.D. has a lot of hope for the future. He knows how resilient Americans are and having grown up in 3 different countries he has never been more proud to live here. We have been through so many crises and we’re are getting through them. He thinks at the end of this that communities and companies are going to step up and be the north star for others. Leaders are going to develop into incredible leaders and we will build resiliency for a long time looking forward. He believes two major changes will come out of this. The first is that there will be normalization around mental health conversations. The second is that the workforce will be democratized. As we move to remote and have to listen better, we may let go of some not so great structures that are in place. Overall, he thinks we’ll come out of this a lot better than we entered.

What this conversation and the past 8 months have demonstrated is that we now have permission to care. We have the perfect examples and great emphasis on the need to care as a demonstrable management tool that impacts performance.