Business management
Matthew Cooper (pictured) quit his role as CEO of EarnUp to prioritise his own mental health.
confessions, meanwhile, corporate titans from Google to Virgin have all made the positive noises about guiding staff through bad patches.
See what happens
“We live in a white capitalist culture that tells us our productivity defines our self-worth. Exhaustion is seen as a badge of honour.”
Matthew Cooper 3 in 4
The proportion of CEOs who have recently been concerned about their own mental health.
60%
The percentage of people with diagnosable
conditions who don’t discuss them at work.
Stanford Social Innovation Review 46
after themselves, even as the pressures of keeping a company afloat fall mainly on their shoulders. This is frustrating – and not just for the trauma it inflicts on CEOs themselves. Both Cooper and Fisher agree that leaders play a fundamental role in promoting mental health across a business, something Fisher can attest from personal experience. “I’ve always received a lot of positive feedback from people within my organisation when I’ve been open and honest about my personal struggles with anxiety,” she explains. “I think it’s very important because it breaks down stigmas and creates a psychologically safe work environment where employees feel comfortable speaking about mental health.” That’s particularly true, of course, in a hierarchical business, where bosses can exert subtle influence on how their staff should act. Fortunately, there is some evidence that CEOs are increasingly taking the psychological bull by the horns. As long ago as 2017, the CEO of Olark, another Silicon Valley startup, congratulated an employee for taking a mental health day. “You are an example to us all,” Ben Congleton told his colleague, “and help us cut through the stigma.” And now that the pandemic has upended many of the more unpleasant arguments around corporate life, other CEOs have followed suit, with some embracing the same searing honesty as Matthew Cooper. Akash Nigam, for instance, is CEO of tech firm Genies. As Nigam put it earlier this year: “When we went into lockdown, you take a lonely job and you make it even lonelier, you kind of step into severe, severe depression.” Beyond these individual
There are clearly moral imperatives involved here. No company is too important, no project too great, for CEOs to ignore the wellbeing of their staff – let alone their own. At the same time, however, businesses still have to make money somehow, regardless of how their employees are feeling. Fortunately, there’s plenty of evidence that these obligations aren’t mutually exclusive. As a study by the University of Oxford discovered, happier workers are 13% more productive than their dispirited counterparts. That this research was done in concert with multinational telecoms giant BT, moreover, suggests that companies understand the link between contentedness and content. Indeed, it’s a connection that’ll doubtless become more apparent as miserable workers continue to escape stressful positions. In April 2021, to take but one example, four million Americans left their jobs. All the same, warns Cooper, it’s important that employees keep their CEOs to their word. After all, it’s easy to release fluffy statements about mental health – but far harder, and more expensive, to actually institute the right policies. “If mental health is valued by an organisation then the resources of the organisation should align with this value,” Cooper argues. “There are lots of ways to promote better health for employees, some of which cost money and some of which require time and focus.” Fisher makes a similar point. For her, programmes, policies and benefits go “hand-in-hand” with a firm’s corporate culture, adding that you “need both to empower workers to take care of their mental well-being.” It goes without saying, too, that some executives can be toe- curlingly cynical about what ‘well-being’ really means. A prime example is JPMorgan, which boasts a ‘Centre for Workplace Mental Health’ – even as Mary Erdoes, the bank’s CEO, recently told junior staff she expected them to work 80-hour weeks.
Despite these challenges, Fisher is basically optimistic about where things are moving. “We still have a long way to go, but I do see a change in how society and organisations are talking about and addressing mental health,” she says. Cooper concurs. He believes in a future where mental health is discussed compassionately, adding that the openness of sportspeople like Simone Biles meld into a wider cultural conversation. For his part, Cooper is doing better personally, saying he’s “finding joy in a quieter pace of life”. Even so, for as long as corporate culture prays at the altar of the bottom line, mental health advocates like him will need to stay vigilant. As Cooper says of his own future: “We will see what happens.” ●
Chief Executive Officer /
www.the-chiefexecutive.com
Matthew Cooper
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