Be Well, Lead Well – Executive Wellness Benefits Business Performance

When applied to Executives and our businesses senior leadership, the concept of wellness and leadership – being well to lead well – is getting a hearing on multiple forums. Executive wellness, along with mindfulness, are increasingly popular terms and feature more and more in close proximity to productivity in business literature, articles and in the business press.

In recent years I’ve taken my own journey in this regard, and the theme of Executive Wellness is a major focus for many of my clients, especially in my Leadership Coaching practice. I’ll offer up my contribution to this evolving debate here over a series of articles.

Certainly in regards to my own experience, I can reflect on the times when I disregarded my own wellbeing as being the periods during which my own productivity and Leadership suffered, often along with the outcomes of the people and the businesses I led. Working in cultures where extremely lengthy office hours equaled a productive work ethic, sitting up in bed in the early hours to write the ‘must reply’ client or internal email, and reaching for the device as soon as I woke in the morning, all sapped energy and vigour to the detriment of my leadership.

Concern for their wellness, and being mindful of it’s impact on their performance, is the most consistent theme amongst my coaching clients, be they entrepreneurial or corporate – they could do more for themselves in order to be better leaders in the workplace, better partners at home and parents to our future leaders.

Is there a productivity deficit when we have worked 100 hour weeks for 3 months straight? Are we at our most effective and decisive at the back of our 6th straight meeting? Especially when we flew in late from inter-state last night, slept poorly and bypassed breakfast? Does this put business leaders in the best state of mind to make the critical decisions their business’s depend on them for?

Recognising that these demands are the norm for the majority of Executive roles, and any shift in these working practices is both an expansive debate in of itself, but also impractical to dramatically change quickly, due to resource constraints, ingrained cultural expectations or personal habit. The key to me is to understand the detrimental impact on leadership and productivity such practices can incur, and proactively inform ourselves and act to put remedial practices into place, whilst making what changes we can in how, where and when we work.

An article last week in The Australian highlighting the challenges for small business in Australia listed a concern for their wellbeing in the top of the issues faced by the business leaders sampled.

To give an example from just one channel within Executive Wellness, the productivity influences of sleep. McKenzie Consulting recently released a series of studies focused on sleep’s benefits for Leadership and Organisational performance. Along with sleep, increasingly nutrition, exercise and self-focused rejuvenating downtime are creeping into the leadership development frameworks.

To lead well, be well.

In future posts I’ll discuss my reflections on these themes, including contributions from key thought-leaders and recommendations of their key works, along with recommendations of the books, apps and tools which have helped me and benefited my coaching clients.

Feel free to get in touch if you’d like to discuss your wellbeing and it’s impact on your leadership.

Thanks for reading and sharing this article,
Tim