June 2025: Our Urgent Need for Deeper Conversation

• World events negatively affect employees’ mental health (Modern Health)
• Employee engagement has dropped to a 10-year low (Gallup) 
• People feel more disconnected from colleagues than ever (AppSpace)

Recent research gives solid evidence of something we already know intuitively: that people "thrive when they form meaningful relationships, and meaningful relationships are formed and sustained through high quality conversations. With that in mind, I believe that navigating the impact of traumatic world events requires deeper conversations at work -- about mental health and work-life balance, about identity and experience, and about cultivating understanding across differences.

Here are some ideas on what this can look like in practice, and how we can help leaders and teams to have more meaningful and impactful conversations:

• Mental health must now part of every leader's role. Many companies leaned into this during the COVID pandemic and the aftermath of George Floyd's murder in 2020, but my sense is that a lot of people saw that as an exceptional circumstance and have tried to get "back to normal." But the crises keep coming, so I strongly believe that leaders today need the skills, willingness, and bandwidth to tend to their team's wellbeing. This can include training on trauma-informed leadership, open conversations about mental health, and being proactive in managing workload and setting boundaries with executives about reasonable expectations for outcomes.
  
  
• Leaders need to know how to talk about identity and experience. Helping every employee feel seen, heard, and understood is critically important, especially when so many of the traumatic world events we're processing relate to aspects of identity -- race/ethnicity, national origin, immigration status, gender and sexuality, disability and neurodivergence, and more. This can include fostering psychological safety, offering space for people to share about identity and experience (here's an activity I use for that), and leaders deepening their own understanding of different cultures and identities.
  
  
• We need to strengthen our skills for conversations across differences. So much of what is causing stress in people's lives and work today is related to the polarization we're experiencing in our society between different groups and ideologies, whether political, religious, or other. Leaders and individuals alike desperately need practical skills for how to talk with people we disagree with, instead of avoiding them and retreating further into our own corners. There a few great books on having these kind of challenging conversations across difference that I highly recommend, including Beyond Your Bubble and Facing the Fracture by Dr. Tania Israel, and We Can't Talk About That At Work! by Mary-Frances Winters and Mareisha N. Reese.

This is a big area (as you can probably tell from this extra-long newseltter!), and one I'm continuing to think about and learn about. If it's something you're interested in taking a closer look at, for yourself and/or your organization, let's find time to chat!

And most of all, please don't forget to take care of yourselves amidst all of this. As the saying goes, "put your own oxygen mask on before you help others with theirs." As leadership developers, we put a lot of our own energy into supporting others. But remember, we can't support others if we don't also support ourselves.