Does the model work if you are constantly on the go and need to be available?
Where is the fear of money and the future in the constant background?
Will the model work if people are increasingly concerned about mental health?
When, despite the effort, a few get better but many get worse?
More and more often I hear the same thing from managers and professionals:
“I’m tired, but I don’t understand exactly what. Rest doesn’t help either.”
It is no longer a story of individuals. It’s like a recurring mantra. A long-standing condition of being present, reacting, taking responsibility, deciding, adapting. And then they say you just have to develop your ability to adapt. The responsibility remains with the individual. To develop one’s capacity to adapt and cope with change. Coping with societal and organisational dysfunction is on the shoulders of the individual and, in a good case, the HR team. But the root problem “just is, learn to cope.”
When burnout, anxiety and emotional numbness become massive, it is difficult to argue that it is people’s personal coping skills that we are addressing with the help of development programmes with the capacity to speak. Rather, it suggests that the way we organise work and management today has not been working for some time. Today’s corporate logic requires people to make many contradictory combinations. For example:
– be always available but rest;
– make quick decisions but think strategically;
– be flexible but take full responsibility;
– be creative but don’t make too many mistakes.
In terms of the nervous system, this means constant preparedness over months and years. Many people don’t break down because of weakness, but because of biology.
Then we try to improve the situation: wellbeing programmes, coaching, mindfulness, therapies, mentors. These are not bad things. The problem arises when all this is added to a system that itself remains unchanged. A message is given: learn to cope better. Ok, we’ll pay for it for you. BUT the system is given permission to carry on the same way. The manager sends the person into these activities and at the same time puts the system back to business as usual.
And this is where leaders can change the way they do business in the world. Organisations are systems created by leaders. The world is a set of organisations today. Everything in our lives is organised by organisations and their leaders – the environment we live in, the schools our children go to, where we work, where and how we study, where we travel and what they show us, etc. etc. What is the intention and energy behind it all. The influence of leaders on the functioning of societies and groups is enormous.
If the system doesn’t work, it won’t change by itself. Change starts with leaders having the courage to challenge what we have come to accept as normal.
The courage to look honestly at what really wears people out. And from the courage to start creating something different, something that hasn’t existed before.
This is my mission: how to change the world through leadership to make it a better place to live as a human being.
