Leading Age - January/February 2011 - 28

Wellness and Leadership Must Go Hand-in-Hand
by Gene Mitchell

ging-services providers have an obligation to see to the wellness of their residents and clients. Such intense, missiondriven work takes its toll on the people who do it, and it’s far too easy for people in the field to put their own wellness on the back burner. How can leaders take a step back and see to their own wellness, and that of their staff? LeadingAge discussed this issue with Judy Sorum Brown, an educator, writer and consultant on leadership issues. She is a member of the design team and a lead facilitator for the LeadingAge Leadership Academy, and teaches Leadership for the Public Good in the Graduate School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland.

LeadingAge: Most of the focus of this issue is on the wellness of the seniors LeadingAge members serve, but surely the wellness of staff at all levels must be a part of the equation. Why is the latter so important and why should it be a priority for leaders? Judy Brown: I think the health of our staff depends on a balanced life, rest, exercise, and good nutrition. Those are a platform for the individual who is serving elders that allows them greater awareness, greater sensitivity, greater emotional intelligence and greater personal resilience for meeting elders where they are. In an unhealthy and stressed state we are less able to understand where the other person is coming from. That reduces the quality of care. The signals about health the leader sends to those in the organization are made up, at least in part, by the way the leader cares for himself. Part of that is a matter of “explicit modeling.” When the leader attends to holiday time, attends to being nourished and having a good exercise program and being rested, the employees see that pattern. When the opposite is true they also see that pattern. They intuit those as norms—how they are expected to be, expected to act. If a leader is always taking work home, always on duty mentally over holidays and the weekends, always passing up vacation, the employees begin to think that’s what’s valued or accepted. It begins to have a tremendous hold on the organization, and it emanates from the leader. LeadingAge: How can leaders build space for maintaining their own wellness in addition to all the other issues they must
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LeadingAge magazine | January/February 2011

deal with? JB: A leader has to be as disciplined about those priorities as [he or she] is about the agenda for the staff meeting. I just heard from a LeadingAge fellow who says he has a practice of two to three minutes of silence in his car in the parking lot before starting his day. In another organization, a really driven, high-level executive … developed a program called “Take 10.” She gets up from her desk and … starts a conversation somewhere with some staff person. She’s no good at small talk, but does this daily and calls it “take time for the team.” In the afternoon … she has the discipline to get up from her desk and go do something pleasurable and relaxing for 10 minutes, maybe take a walk or get a snack. She says she’s begun liking those morning conversations. Her work is going better because she picks up what turns out to be critical information in those undriven conversations. Also, her afternoon “take 10” means she arrives home and feels good, and her food habits have become much better. She goes to bed at a reasonable time and feels better in general. The bottom line is that it takes a disciplined structure—the same kind of discipline we’d want out of our board or expect of our employees. LeadingAge: What are the dangers to an organization of a stressed, tired leader and can such a person really disguise that for long? JB: When people sense that the leader is “off balance,” it creates tremendous anxiety on the part of employees, and additional uncertainties, and they step back. If our goal is

Leading Age - January/February 2011

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