Principles of mentally healthy leadership

What is positive leadership?

Management and leadership approaches—demonstrated by everyone from senior management to team leaders—set the tone and behaviours within an organisation. Positive leadership approaches model behaviours that enable mentally healthy and productive workplaces.

Senior management, executives and boards are responsible for building and enabling a mentally healthy strategy and culture, but all managers and supervisors play a key role in shaping workers’ day-to-day experiences at work.

How you can build and refine positive leadership 

Effective leadership that is personable and authentic involves reflective practice and professional and personal development. It allows people to self-lead as well as lead others. Being open, approachable, reflective and acting with integrity and balanced judgement tends to foster higher levels of engagement, inclusiveness, commitment, performance and wellbeing among team members.

Positively oriented leaders also work with their teams and others to identify and leverage areas of strength. This does not mean ignoring negative workplace behaviour or poor performance, but rather taking a strengths-based and transparent approach in dealing with these issues.

Positive leaders don’t ignore problems, inappropriate behaviour or poor performance. The difference is they find ways to use people’s strengths to address these issues. 

These are some key areas of practice for mentally healthy people leadership:

• Understand and manage workplace stressors, (e.g. prevent harm to mental health that can occur through inadequate assessment and control of psychosocial hazards or workplace stressors).
• Improve awareness of, and actively enhance, positive factors such as alignment of purpose and meaning, reward and recognition, social connection and belonging, learning and career development, flexible working arrangements.
• Provide workers with a voice and involve them in decision making.
• Improve communication between managers and workers including those working remotely.
• Develop positive performance (e.g. help people to achieve in their role or to gain new skills).
• Support and model mentally healthy workplace behaviours (e.g. demonstrate empathy and compassion to colleagues).

Invest in developing managers and supervisors

When selecting, developing and advancing executives, managers and supervisors, consider how these individuals contribute to creating a mentally healthy culture. As well as general management and communication skills, people in these positions should have the knowledge, skills and resources to protect, promote and support mental health and wellbeing in their organisation.

Training can help build the capacity of people in management and supervisory roles. It should include the following topics:

• duty of care and legal responsibilities
• identification and management of psychosocial hazards
• common mental health-related situations and challenges that managers and supervisors need to address
• measurement and reporting on workplace mental health indicators.

Some people will have positive leadership skills naturally; others can develop these skills over time. But all leaders need training and opportunities to apply and hone positive leadership skills.   

Importantly, on-the-ground management practices should reflect policies and strategies. Optional mental health and wellbeing training can work against this. Executives, managers and supervisors need time to attend training and may need support to complete other duties as they take time for professional development.

It is good practice to evaluate training, to track outcomes and identify potential improvements. You may also consider creating performance criteria that encourages managers to put training into action. For instance, performance indicators related to the mental health and wellbeing of teams could be embedded in managers’ job descriptions and appraisals.