Managing Mental Health

If there’s one thing I’ve learned as the manager of a team of 50 people, it’s that managing people really correlates to one’s ability to gauge and manage both emotions and mental health.

For me, the easy part when becoming a manager was reading emotions (well, at least in most cases). I typically pride myself on my ability to pick up on someone’s mood by noticing the little things. I can appreciate bad mental health days or periods. Unfortunately, I think it takes one who has suffered themselves to be able to understand the true impact of mental health on performance. I don’t even mean work performance but just life performance in general. I try to put myself in other peoples shoes, set realistic goals, and promote open communication so I can be a support for my team members. I always tell them- if I don’t know what’s going on, I can’t help. I really mean it too. Everyone has bad days. That is why it makes it that much more important to make the good days count and outweigh everything else.

Being a newer manager, I still find myself struggling, although greatly improving, to be blunt with drawing a line and keeping it when mental health seeps into performance. I’m overly sensitive myself and know that emotions can be crazy when you aren’t feeling yourself or aren’t in the best mental state. I’m not trying to come in on some high horse, pretending I don’t have my own issues, and knock someone over the edge accidentally by adding more stress to their plate. On the other hand, I have come to accept that there’s a department that needs to be done and it’s my job to do so. If there’s a job to be done and it’s being neglected and becoming a problem, it then becomes my problem.

It’s all about the balance. I’m not quite sure that I am an expert, but I do feel proud of the progress I feel I’ve made in having difficult conversations where I am able to be supportive, yet productive we identifying a problem and helping create an action plan to fix it.

What’s your least favorite thing about managing people? Any experiences where mental health made things get out of hand?