Who Looks After the Leader?

In this episode of Inside Out: Mental Health at Work and in Life, I'm joined by Jodie Marshall, Founder and Managing Director of social enterprise A Mind Apart, and founder and owner of her consultancy and coaching company Mantleco Ltd.

We start with a question most workplaces skip: who looks after the leader? Jodie is honest about her own burnout, and about how a burnt-out leadership can never build a team that isn't burnt out too. She explains why she deliberately put a therapist on her board, so that when hard conversations come up there is someone to bring the human angle, and so she has support of her own.

From there the conversation widens into something rarely tied to mental health: money. Jodie makes the case that financial sustainability is a wellbeing issue. When an organisation is firefighting, wellbeing, training and development are the first things dropped. Get the business right, and you can reinvest in the people. We also talk about the fear running through employment right now, the young people entering work who are the COVID teenagers, and Jodie's argument that mental health belongs under the Equality Act, not just the HR inbox.

🔑 Key Topics

• Why a team can't be well if its leadership is burnt out, and who supports the leader
• Building a board on purpose, putting a therapist in the room
• Financial sustainability as the foundation of staff wellbeing
• "What is not serving you?", the courage to drop what is draining the team
• Fear-driven employment: probation, rights from day one, and getting stuck
• Neurodiversity and treating a team as individuals, not one 40-hour mould
• Shared responsibility between employers and workers, and the generation now entering work

💡 Did You Know?

After A Mind Apart brought in creative therapy and proper wellbeing support for those they were working with and their team, serious safeguarding incidents with the young people they work with fell dramatically, from something close to a daily occurrence to a handful across a whole year. When you resource the people doing the work, the work itself changes.

📝 Actionable Takeaways

• Look after the leadership, not just the team, and ask your board to resource it
• Treat financial sustainability as part of your wellbeing strategy, not separate from it
• Ask of every service and commitment: is this still serving us? Be willing to stop
• Do the market research before you launch. Piling untested ideas on your team is a wellbeing cost
• Have the conversation about someone's working pattern and needs. Letting people lead it is not saying the wrong thing
• If you are an SME without HR, get external support in place before you need it, through a chamber membership or ACAS

🗣️ Join the Conversation

If you lead a small organisation, who looks after you? And what would change if you treated the health of your business and the health of your team as the same question?

Connect with Jodie: LinkedIn, A Mind Apart, Mantle

1. https://www.linkedin.com/in/jodie-marshall/
2. https://amindapart.org.uk/
3. https://www.mantleco.io/