We need more leaders to anchor conversations about mental health – can you be one of them?

Editor’s Note: Thought leader Grace Ueng is CEO of Savvy Growth, a noted leadership coaching and management consultancy, celebrating its 20th anniversary.  Grace writes a regular column on Happiness & Leadership. Savvy’s core offerings are conducting strategic reviews for companies at a critical juncture and one-on-one coaching for CEOs and their leadership teams.  HappinessWorks is one of their key workshops, to promote employee wellness and engagement.

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RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – May is both Mental Health Awareness (MHA) Month and Asian American and Pacific Islander  (AAPI) Heritage Month. These are personal to me.  As a Chinese American, I enjoy giving my “Breaking the Bamboo Ceiling” talk and doing workshops for employee resource groups around “Creating the Active Asian Voice” as well as “Personal Branding.”

I also suffered from a severe depressive episode not too long ago, and have since been drawn to helping others in this dark place.

Grace Ueng

Combining Mental Health + Asian American

Perhaps most rewarding is combining the two, which I got to do this past month!

I was hired by Cisco’s Filipino Professional Network and their global wellness agency to deliver Savvy’s HappinessWorks workshop in a power hour, in recognition of Mental Health Awareness month. All of Cisco’s affinity groups were invited and actively participated. One participant’s feedback reminded me of why I have invested hundreds of hours of study and preparation to create this body of work:

“Thank you for your incredible presentation – it made a difference in my life.”

We all want to have impact, and to make a difference. This is a key component of mental well-being.  In his book, From Strength to Strength, Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life,  Professor Arthur Brooks shares the four phases of life, and suggests that we devote the back half of our lives to serving others and leveraging our accumulated wisdom (Lessons in Leadership and Happiness).

We are all different

My story is not unique. We all have our differences, if not ethnicity, it can be a personality or communication difference.  Many of us are breaking some type of ceiling –  glass, bamboo, or other – by speaking up about what we believe in where we have an uncommon point of view.

What is your difference?  What ceiling are you breaking?

Anchoring a Conversation creates safety for others in the room

Over 1 in 5 of us is currently living with a mental illness.

Speaking up vulnerably and sharing anchors a conversation, normalizing a “disability” or “disease” that others are also experiencing, or a fight for recognition that others also seek in their lives. When others speak up, especially company leaders, that is when others feel safe to use their voice.

AAPI Heritage Month (in its earlier rendition) has been around since 1978, and MHA month dates all the way to 1949.  MHA and AAPI Heritage month fall under the umbrella of diversity and inclusion, and 71% of companies today are investing resources in D&I (KPMG 2022 DEI progress survey).  Yet, many organizations are still in the midst of figuring out how to recognize AAPI Heritage month as well as how to best provide resources to improve mental health for their employees.

At least one person on your team is likely living with a mental illness right now.  Many companies do not have a proper mental health plan in place. Kelsey Meyer, the president of a content marketing agency, shared in a Harvard Business Review article 5 steps her company took to rewrite their mental health policy and included a link to her actual policy verbatim.

We need more leaders to anchor more conversations about mental health.  Can you be one of these leaders?

Why invest in the mental well being of your teams

The trend line for mental health has accelerated in the wrong direction in the decades since the founding of Mental Health Awareness Month. The age of the onset of depression has been cut in half in recent decades to the age around when a student enters high school and the incidence of depression has increased 10 fold.

With complex/chronic mental health diagnoses on the rise, many employees are still not getting help due to stigma, costs, lack of awareness of benefits or resources. Twenty-five percent of employees are actively considering changing employers in the next year and their current job’s negative impact on their mental health is a top 5 reason (Lyra’s 2023 State of Workforce Mental Health Report).

A growing number of companies are stepping ahead by offering high quality mental health care and focusing on creating the supportive culture that today’s employees expect.  They are doing this by putting in place more listening opportunities, psychological safety, check-ins, and workshops to help keep employees mentally healthy.

Investing in happiness is a smart business decision. Happy employees stay in their jobs 4x longer, commit 2x more time to tasks, and have 65% more energy.

How can you help your people?

My regular readers know that I have a passion for the study of positive psychology, the science of human flourishing. I am incredibly excited about joining other leaders applying the science of happiness and well being to their work, to study in person with Marty Seligman, the founder of the field, in the inaugural Leadership & Happiness Symposium hosted by Professor Arthur Brooks at Harvard Kennedy School Center for Public Leadership next month.

I’d be happy to speak further to anyone interested in offering HappinessWorks at your company.  Here are Workshop Details.

About Grace Ueng

Grace is CEO of Savvy Growth, a leadership coaching and management consultancy founded in 2003. Specialties are strategic reviews for companies wanting to reach the next level and  conducting 360s for leaders to uncover their blind spots.

A marketing strategist, Grace held leadership roles at five technology ventures that successfully exited through acquisition or IPO. She started her career at Bain, then worked in brand management at Clorox and General Mills. She is a graduate of MIT and Harvard Business School.

Grace and her partner, Rich Chleboski, develop and implement strategies to support the growth of impact-focused companies and then coach their leaders in carrying out their strategic plans. Their expertise spans all phases of the business from evaluation through growth and liquidity.

Contact us if you have a challenge you’re facing to schedule a complimentary consult call.

The post We need more leaders to anchor conversations about mental health – can you be one of them? first appeared on WRAL TechWire.

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