Carin-Isabel Knoop

Changing My Organization and Beyond: How Can I Have a Greater Impact?

Ultimately, we cannot be effective ourselves and with our immediate teams if our organizations and communities do not change how they think about mental health and being part of this change is ultimately our greatest opportunity. This chapter helps readers better understand their own organization in order to change prevailing attitudes about and investments in mental health. While it might not always seem possible, in an ideal world, the enlightened manager must have the courage and support to lobby for organizational change when appropriate. This chapter argues that organizations can support mental well-being by supporting education to reduce stigma and make it easier to discuss work stressors on mental health; facilitating access to resources and treatment, including through technology; helping build organizations that embrace neurodiversity; and embracing generational diversity. The reflection enables you to analyze your organization along the stress vs support dimensions and consider how to improve it.

Mental Health and Work

This chapter provides a broad overview of our current understanding of the connection between mental health and the workplace and why work is so important to one’s mental well-being. It later highlights the essential elements of mental wellness and introduces the topic of stress and its physiological and physical effects. The reflection invites the reader to test his or her knowledge of mental health issues especially in the professinal context and to identify misperceptions about their impact on individuals, companies, and communities.

Building Blocks for Mental Health: How Do I Best Manage My Team?

This chapter offers building blocks for the promotion of mental health at work and suggestions on how to recruit, deploy, and manage employees to minimize the contribution that your own style, history, workplace, and team make to known stressors. The reflection suggests an approach to get to know your colleagues better.

Efforts to Foster Mental Health at Work

This chapter discusses key stressors that many individuals encounter in the modern workplace and how those stressors can impair mental wellness. Also introduced are government regulations and private sector initiatives, including employee assistance programs (EAP) and mindfulness training, that can enhance mental health in the professional context and help those who are mentally unwell. The reflection encourages the reader to consider whether and how his or her organization has followed some of these trends, what impacts efforts have had to date, and what more could be done.

Dare to Care: How Are Others Doing, and How Might I Help?

This chapter describes categories of employees that might be at risk and how to recognize warning signs. It asks the reader to consider a past or current situation involving an individual who might be struggling with a mental health issue and provides some suggestions about how to proceed in the short term. Most managers exhibit a mix of approaches, depending on their own situations, personalities, and organizational context. The reflection focuses readers on their default modes and asks them to consider their advantages and risks.

Mind the Mind: How Am I Doing and How Can I Do Better?

This chapter begins to address how managers can affect the mental well-being of individuals in their organizations. It asks managers to first take a personal inventory – including what type of leader they feel they might be and their understanding of mental illness. It then advances what type of leadership skills are needed to promote and build an organization’s mental well-being. It ends with an exercise that encourages readers to consider how they tend to behave when faced with mental issues in their teams and what costs each approach might have.

Conclusion: Toward Mental Health for All and by All

Looking toward the future, it is expected that mental well-being and work-life balance will become a necessary cornerstone to a successful organization’s mission and a central function of its management. This will require us as to reflect on our own capabilities and failings, abandon our fears of stigma and vulnerability, and adopt the courage to work with our employees, listen to them, and institute holistic change that will make for a more purposeful work experience and, ultimately, a more prosperous organization.

Stress About Stressors: What Are Key Inflection Points?

Individuals and companies remain exposed to inflection points that can strain even the best persons, teams, and organizations. This matters because providing appropriate support at crucial junctures can sometimes help reduce the chances of mental illnesses developing. The chapter describes the potential impact on mental health of changes in our personal lives (getting divorced, having a baby, etc.), generational transitions (dealing with the multi-generation workplace), and emotional inflection points (coming from an increasingly volatile, interconnected world).

The Challenges of the Modern Workplace: A Brave New Connected World

Despite positive changes, the workplace has become ever more challenging to our mental equilibrium, in part because we are constantly bombarded with information from our professional, personal, and media worlds. This chapter discusses the new world of intense connectivity and how technology has changed our world and blurred the lines between work and home, sometimes contributing to mental unwellness. We feel more connected and stimulated but also more lonely and lost as a time when economic and technological changes constantly alter the way we work and threaten many job categories. This chapter then introduces and describes three types of employment disengagement and invites the reader to reflect on the personal impact of these trends.