Healthy leadership – why is is important?
The concept of healthy leadership plays an important role in daily management. This refers to a leadership style that does justice to
- the special responsibility of managers for the health, job satisfaction, and motivation of all employees
- the work-life-balance of the leadership
- the performance and outcome of a company
How to improve health?
This question will be addressed in my coaching on Healthy Leadership. The basis of this concept is the “self-leadership before team-leadership” approach. It has been shown that the person who can lead a team well is the one who
- reflects on him-/herself
- regularly questions his/her own leadership style or uses feedback
- constantly reviews his/her “what for”
This introspection prevents, for example, acting only out of feelings of power, loss of grounding, or out of weakness, fear or insecurity.
Here are some coaching ideas for initial inspiration:
- Self-reflection: examine one’s own actions and the impact on the team, perceive one’s own strengths and weaknesses, and continuously improve one’s own leadership quality.
- Self-care and care for others: create a work-life balance for employees and oneself, e.g. promote physical activity, provide support in coping with stress, offer healthy food in canteen, create external company social counseling, offer and use regular training, etc.
- Mindset and decision-making ability: think positively and see difficult situations as challenges in order to motivate oneself and others and to be able to make decisions
- Communication: speak transparently, clearly and openly with the team and thus create trust and togetherness, e.g. establish conflict management, involve employees in decision-making processes
- Operational framework: establish clear work processes, clear job profiles and competence assignments to keep stress levels and waste of resources low and create positive working conditions
- Social contacts: create joint activities, team events and team work to promote togetherness and cohesion.
This brief list alone illustrates how diverse and extensive a manager’s scope of duties is. In addition to the management skills, expertise is often expected in a specific technical field, along with moderation and delegation skills, empathy, visionary thinking, multiplier and transformer competencies, etc.
Management overload
It is understandable that managers also develop excessive demands and stress with this workload. Progressive digitalization alone is leading to task compression, task growth and information growth at a speed that is almost unimaginable.
This makes the concept of healthy leadership all the more important – regular reflection on the essence of one’s own work, on the relationship to the reality of the employees, the structural framework conditions and on the overriding corporate goal.
If you would like to learn more about this, please feel free to contact me. Additions and helpful comments – written below – are also welcome.
Cheers,
Stefanie
