Your People Are Not All Right

“People are not OK,” professor and author Brené Brown told an audience in October.

She’s right.

The mood she points to — “emotionally dysregulated, distrustful, and disconnected” — is visible everywhere you look. We’re seeing public CEO meltdowns, as well as pervasive well-being challenges on a worldwide workforce scale. In one stunning study, fully 73% of employees surveyed said that mental health struggles had had a negative impact on their job performance — a 42% increase from the year before.

People are not OK. In our day-to-day lives, we all see the struggle affecting our coworkers, our leaders, our teams … but also our families, our friends, and, let’s face it, ourselves. Brown pointed to an array of causes for this pervasive lack of well-being — everything from political turmoil to scary “AI is coming for your job” rhetoric — that has put us in the dangerous territory of grappling with more uncertainty than we can handle. She astutely advised leaders to create “thinking space” even as events move at high speed, and to apply systems thinking to understand how and why things seem to keep spiraling.

It’s great advice. Let’s build on it.

The challenge of people not being OK (yourself very much included) may be one of the toughest things you grapple with as a leader. There are no canned solutions, and even somewhat helpful best available options, like employee assistance plans, can seem woefully inadequate in the face of worsening crises.

I’ve researched and worked on this topic extensively, and I’ve personally been challenged, in terms of myself, my team, my coworkers, my leaders, and my clients. I can’t offer a silver bullet, but these five strategies will help you make progress.

1. Recognize all the ways that ‘not OK’ shows up.

When I speak to audiences about creating healthy and effective workforces, I get one question almost every time: “I want to help people who are not OK. But how can I tell that someone is not OK? It’s not always obvious.”

It’s a fabulous question. Much like an antelope in the wild might conceal physical pain and keep walking to avoid being targeted by a lion, humans conceal weakness at work — to avoid being placed on a list for layoffs and other bad outcomes. A million cultural guardrails, like taboos on crying at work, hold us firmly in place, and we learn to conceal our feelings from a very young age. I’ve long held the theory that the Disney song “Let It Go” was such a massive hit because young kids already feel pressure to hide their emotions — and so the idea of getting a break from doing so is intuitively appealing.

Leaders, then, must be alert for a wide array of cues that someone might not be OK, including fairly hidden and surprising ones. Here’s a starter list I’ve developed over the years to help leaders identify people who are not OK as early as possible:

• Keep an eye out for an array of emotions: sadness and frustration, yes, but also anger, confusion, or even a flat affect (where the person shows no emotion at all).
• Look for both more action (more outreach to you and others, more outbursts in meetings, more unhappy emails) and less action (uncommunicative behavior, shorter/terse communication, not showing up for meetings).
• When something goes wrong at work (a missed deadline, an angry client, team friction), keep an eye out for anyone who behaved or reacted in an uncharacteristic fashion. For example, if Bob has a bombastic style and a team member gets irritated with him, Bob is probably OK — that’s par for the course with Bob, and they’re both probably OK. If Sally is generally interpersonally adept and a team member gets irritated with her, perhaps Sally or that team member is not OK.
• Stay humble about how much you don’t know about coworkers’ personal lives, and don’t make assumptions based on your limited information. We all grapple with challenges outside of work. The same matter — a serious illness, for instance — may affect individuals very differently depending on their situation and psychology. So as you add up personal and professional challenges for different people, the math may work differently.
• If people say they’re not OK, for Pete’s sake, take them at their word. Same deal if someone flags a struggling coworker to you. No one is doing this lightly.

When ‘Not OK’ Crosses the Line

One unfortunate consequence of a business world in which many people are not OK: We are seeing more cases where someone is not OK to the extent that they risk genuine harm (generally mental, but sometimes physical) to themselves and/or the people around them. I’m shocked at how frequently I’ve seen or heard about these cases during the past few years.

2. Help the struggling individual in a counterintuitive order: Mitigate impacts before you search for a cause.

When someone is not OK — or a whole group of folks are not OK — our brains may reach first for an explanation. We figure that if we know what’s causing the issue, we can come up with a solution. It’s absolutely natural to think this way, but it’s not the most helpful way to proceed.

Instead, focus on the impacts resulting from the person not being OK, starting with the impact on them. If someone were choking, you would give them the Heimlich maneuver first and discuss the food item later.

So begin compassionately: Emphasize their safety. It’s possible to make a person in crisis spiral further if they believe that harm will result (like being placed on indefinite leave) as a result of your addressing the crisis. Ask them what they believe they need, and take that as some of the answer. (They may need other things that are hard for them to think of while in a crisis state.) Often, just taking seemingly small things off someone’s plate can truly help.

Be creative about what help looks like, too. People can benefit from an array of strategies: everything from simple one-on-one vent sessions all the way up to a complex reengineering of their project load (which we’ll talk about more in Tip 3).

Make sure you are aware of and ready to deploy the mental and physical health resources of your organization, but don’t practice without a license. You can suggest and refer, but you can’t diagnose someone. Uptake of these resources will also vary wildly depending on an individual’s personal beliefs and, sadly, lingering taboos around addressing mental health.

3. Look in on teammates’ well-being.