Your Career

Are academe’s managers talking enough about mental health and wellness?

Working and leading through turbulent times make it difficult to put your best professional foot forward, day in and day out. Sure, the work still needs to be done. Managers still must hold teams accountable, ask for updates, and resolve problems. But if 2020-21 taught us anything, it’s that campuses won’t succeed in the long term if managers do not take care of the people they manage.

Leading through emotional exhaustion is not easy. It demands sophisticated soft skills. It means learning how to motivate a team, raise morale, and demonstrate empathy. It requires those of you who are managers to put aside your own feelings and focus on other people’s needs. That can be difficult with a large team, especially if the leader is stressed and emotionally exhausted, too.

Remember: A few bad days do not represent someone’s overall ability or personality. A few meetings where the tone of someone’s comments is off does not make that a habitual problem. A few mistakes or absent-minded errors do not make someone a screw-up. Yet leaders often spend more time offering negative feedback — harping on mistakes — than celebrating all the things employees do right. And, sadly, that is understandable in difficult times, when managers may focus on the negative because they are under pressure to “fix” things.

No one is suggesting that academic managers ignore repeated mistakes or avoid reprimanding employees if it is deserved. But we are in different times, and leaders need to think about why a problem in someone’s work is important to bring up now, and how to deliver the message.

Continue reading: “How to Manage Through Emotional Exhaustion,” by Kerry L. O’Grady

Share your thoughts and suggestions on the newsletter with Denise Magner, an editor at The Chronicle, at denise.magner@chronicle.com. If you’d like to opt out, you can log in to our website and manage your newsletter preferences here.

What we’re reading.

Here’s more on career issues and trends from around the web. See something we should include? Let me know.

• In “You Can’t Cure Your Employee’s Existential Crisis. But You Can Help,” a management professor offers three ways to retain employees who are seeking more meaning in their lives.
• An essayist in Science magazine writes about Covid impact statements, and wonders why it took a global pandemic for institutions to ask their scientists for a realistic account of their work challenges.
• Can you ask your colleagues if they’ve had a Covid vaccine? The New York Times’s Ethicist column tackles that question.
• Some institutions, including Penn State, are letting faculty members ask to teach remotely in the fall semester.