Setting an example: Leaders open up on mental health

In early February, Davina Goodchild realised she wanted to share her story. It was Time to Talk Day, an initiative from mental health charity Time to Change. LionHeart, the benevolent fund for RICS members was holding an event at which volunteer mental health ambassadors were opening up about their experiences. Listening to their speeches, LionHeart chief executive Goodchild felt the need to speak up herself. “It felt like there was an elephant in the room but I was the only person who could see it,” she says. That elephant was Goodchild’s own challenges with her mental health, struggles that she had kept from all but the closest of colleagues. In the summer of 2020, with pressure in her personal life piling up, she found herself struggling. “I just didn’t feel quite right. I wasn’t sleeping very well, had these invasive thoughts, couldn’t focus in meetings. I was really disconnected to what was happening, almost like I was watching what was happening through a window.” Two colleagues encouraged Goodchild to see a doctor, who said she had suffered burnout. She took several months off work, finally making a phased return. However, she didn’t talk to anyone at work about what had happened other than those two colleagues. “I didn’t want to be seen as attention-seeking,” she says. “And I also didn’t want to burden people.” But witnessing other professionals speaking as openly about their mental health, Goodchild realised the most powerful thing to do would be to join them. “I decided the tell the whole team,” she says. “I sent an all-staff e-mail and the relief of being able to say ‘I was ill, this is how I felt, I’m OK now but am still going through things’ was huge. “The response from the staff team was wonderful. There were a few e-mails from people saying ‘I’ve been going through this thing and I haven’t felt I could talk about it, and the fact that you have has signalled to everybody that we all can’. “We can say when we are not OK. We can share with each other.” Ups and downs Goodchild shared her story on EG’s last wellbeing and mental health podcast of the year, which explored how company leaders can prioritise wellbeing from the top of a business – often through making clear their own vulnerability and sharing their experiences. Pushed higher up the agenda by the Covid-19 pandemic, the topic is now front of mind for most senior managers. “Wellbeing has always been an important part of the culture… [but] it was focused on physical wellbeing,” says Judith Everett, executive director for purpose, sustainability and stakeholder at the Crown Estate. “We had begun to talk about mental wellbeing the year before the pandemic and that grabbed a huge amount of attention.” At the Crown Estate, that attention resulted in a number of initiatives to help team members deal with the challenges of lockdowns, not to mention a growing importance for the company’s mental health champions. And it also meant, at a simpler level, more talking and more listening. “It has really forced us to be much more open with each other,” Everett says. “It has created intensity. The shared experience of everybody having to cope with a really difficult environment has forced us to be more open in a positive way.” That’s not to say it’s easy for leaders to put themselves in the spotlight, particularly as they work to keep the day-to-day business on track throughout the challenges of a period like the pandemic.  “It’s really difficult as leaders because you want to make things right. You want to be strong. You want to keep morale up and you don’t want to burden people with how you might be feeling about something,” Everett says. “Certainly during the pandemic, you wanted to keep people’s spirits buoyed and it was a difficult period for everybody. So being that open and that vulnerable is really important.” In the high-pressured world of real estate finance, Glenhawk chief executive Guy Harrington watched younger team members suffer from a lack of socialising and, for many, homes unsuitable for homeworking. “For me, it became a massive goal to try and help everybody in their personal lives as much as we could, whether it was helping them relocate because they needed outside space and we help them with removal costs, or help them personally with furniture or various bits and pieces,” he says. “A lot of positivity has come from it. We decided to implement unlimited holidays for the team, and the availability of mental health services to the team was put front and centre.” For Harrington, too, transparency is key. “I’ve been open about my struggles,” he adds. “Someone [in the business] will come and sit with me and go, ‘Guy, today I really didn’t feel like getting out of bed and coming to work’. And I’ll say, ‘Well, I felt like that the other day, sometimes I get that’. “They’re shocked. ‘Really? How? You don’t show it’. But some days I do feel like that, and it’s just making everybody realise that it is OK to have these up-and-down days. It is OK to be confused. It is OK to be anxious. And it is encouraging people to talk about it.” More than a token The encouragement runs through the to-do lists of EG’s guests as each shared a goal for their own handling of wellbeing and mental health within their businesses. For LionHeart’s Goodchild, the goal is greater flexibility in how the organisation addresses the different requirements of different team members. “There are people who love working from home, people who don’t love working from home. People who need to be part-time, people who need to be full-time,” she says. “All of that is on a scale and that is a huge challenge, to find a way of working with everybody and making it suit everybody. Quite often you’ll find the common denominator and that will fit the people in the middle, but not the people on the end. So that, for me, is the biggest challenge: to figure out a way forward that is going to work for everyone.” Harrington wants to take Covid’s lessons and ensure an even greater focus on wellbeing, using that to attract talent and demonstrate that “we really care about our team and tough times come but they rarely ever last”. And at the Crown Estate, Everett’s goal is “really making sure that wellbeing is visibly something that all of us as leaders, myself included, support and do”. “It’s not just talking, but visibly doing it – visibly making the time and then creating an environment where it’s really part of our fabric and our culture,” she adds. “It’s not a token. It’s core to how we do business.”   To send feedback, e-mail tim.burke@eg.co.uk or tweet @_tim_burke or @EGPropertyNews