Author Claire Genkai Breeze, Co-founder of Relume Ltd, is collaborating with a cohort of executives to experiment with new approaches that challenge the habitual thinking of workforce wellbeing.
On consideration of the fact that your body doesn’t know how much you earn, Claire explores the four pillars of resilience and describes some of the key findings that is leading to new approaches to leadership wellbeing.
The approach to this initiative started around a board table in a global insurance firm two years ago. Seated at the table were a group of executives willing to talk privately about their experience of extreme workload and pressure, but unwilling to admit to it more widely in their organisation for fear of being seen to be weak, not resilient enough or, in the words of one executive “not leadership material”. This was a business that was already taking the topic of resilience seriously. The HR team were offering a range of supportive interventions and services and yet there was a subtle conspiracy of silence amongst the senior people who had not found a way to access these services, whilst encouraging others who worked for them to do so. Since then there have been similar discussions taking place in banks, telecoms, pharmaceuticals, utilities and other industry sectors. They are not confined to any part of the globe, or gender. They are, however, defined by an increasing mistaken belief on the part of senior executives that their body mind continuum will somehow behave differently to other employees because of their position in the organisation and their financial package. This view may well be supported by the popular press; when one CEO took time out of an organisation for “exhaustion”, a public poll was taken to see how sympathetic the readers of the newspaper were to his situation. At the time over half the respondents felt no sympathy for his situation, based upon the size of his salary.
“The challenge is to work with methods that really help in today’s commercial context, not the workplace from the 1980s”
Diverse as senior leaders in organisations may or may not be, the common denominator is our physiology. This creates a very good platform from which to build understanding about this topic. There is a widening gap between our bodies and our work. The body has some sophisticated mechanisms for dealing with stress but they rely primarily on our mammalian roots of being able to cope with 20 minutes or so of stress reactivity followed by a period of discharge. When this rhythm works it enables us to react and return to a state of regulation in our body mind. Work however has taken another evolutionary turn over the past few decades. Describing a working day, the executives collaborating on this project talk about multiple channels of communication across time zones, extending the working day to accommodate it all and then being unable to rest or recover when away from work because periods of space suddenly seem very uncomfortable and, therefore, need to be filled with more activity. This cycle was not in the workplace three decades ago when the first wave of workplace stress management techniques was developed. The challenge is to work with methods that really help in this commercial context, not the workplace from the 1980s.
