This mental health awareness week I have seen so many personal notes on people’s experiences around mental health in the workplace. Many of these resonated and I kept coming back to a conversation I had not so long ago with a financial leader who asked me about mental health in teams. “What I don’t understand,” they said, “is people saying ‘I can’t come to work because of my mental health’. What does that mean? And how can I support them?”

As a Dramatherapist for nearly 15 years and a decade working in leadership teams in the charity sector I’ve worked with a lot of mission driven teams. These are staff who give it their all and then some. Who believe in what they are doing, and their empathy batteries are plugged in and running hot. I’ve known staff who are so dedicated they dial into a call straight after a dental procedure from the car, who chair that one meeting even though their child is home with a tummy bug, who answer that email on their day off and write that report at night. We all have been there, thinking that’s what we need to do and feeling a little indispensable, turning it into a sign of strength and dedication.

Working with those who lead these teams, equally dedicated, committed and impact driven leaders, the question of mental health and staff resilience often comes up – combined with the caveat “but I’m their line manager, not a therapist!”. They see what their teams are giving and are worried. Worried about burnout, worried about sickness, worried about staff leaving. While at the same time seeing the amount of work that needs to be done. This can lead to ‘staff resilience’ or ‘professional resilience' being misunderstood to mean to ‘just keep going in the face of adversity and power through, to thrive despite demands on us going beyond our capacity’. There is a dark side to resilience, as Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and Derek Lusk point out.

I’ve seen teams trapped in this eternal pressure and capacity loop, their leader wanting to simultaneously protect them and demonstrate their own tolerance to adversity, taking on more, working harder, while their team models their culture on this. The problem with this is two-fold. Firstly, it can inhibit effective collaboration and delegation. We rather hold on to whatever we can, not wanting to add to the burden of those around us while also showing just how much we can deal with.

The second problem is that all this can creep up and stagnates a team’s momentum by not allowing team members to flex, learn and grow. Combined this can be mentally and emotionally draining. To thrive we need to have one foot firmly planted in our competency zone and one just outside of this, where we feel a bit of a stretch. If both feet are in either of these spaces simultaneously, if we’re just working in our competency or are yanked completely outside of it, we can start moving towards that space often referred to as ‘burnout’.

So how can we look after our and our team’s mental health and resilience in the workplace? Firstly, we need to be clear around what we mean by professional resilience, which goes beyond just coping with stress and pressure, and equip ourselves and our teams with the capacity to deal with the demands and adversity in the workplace and in life.

Secondly, we need to foster an adaptability to change, enable meaningful collaboration and delegation. I have seen real magical transformation happen in teams that shifted from fractured and demotivated to balanced, happy and impactful.

It’s the reason I do what I do and am so passionate about professional resilience. It helps make teams more effective, team members happier, leaders more confident and creates the capacity for sustainable impact in the work we do