Leading for Well-Being: Building Your Organizational Leadership Development Strategy

The quality of an organization’s leadership directly correlates with employee well-being and mental health outcomes, and managers who demonstrate emotional intelligence and support with staff can significantly reduce employee stress and burnout levels, according to presenters during a session held at the SHSMD24 Connections conference in October.

This is supported by recent research. For example, a 10-country survey conducted in 2023 by the Workplace Institute found that nearly 70% of individuals believe their manager influences their mental health more than their physician. Another study, conducted by the United Kingdom–based Wellbeing Project, found that nearly 25% of an employee’s well-being can be accounted for by their manager.

Research shows that leadership has an impact on physical health, too: Negative social interactions, lack of support from supervisors, not feeling secure in a job, being treated unfairly or disrespectfully, or having just simply too much work can increase a person’s risk for developing a chronic disease by 35% to 55%.

“Basically, if you have a crappy boss, it can feel like it ruined your life,” explains Morgan Weber, a leadership development advisor with the health system and one of the presenters during the session.

Conversely, an organizational leadership development strategy that focuses on building emotional intelligence, fostering trust, and helping them create environments of psychological safety can yield great outcomes, Weber says, with employees significantly less likely to leave their jobs and organizations reaping benefits, such as significantly greater engagement and major decreases in lost-time accidents. Middle managers have more burnout than any other work group, according to Bridgette McCullough, MPH, a former leadership development advisor at OhioHealth.

“That role is really hard. You are tasked with managing your own well-being, the well-being of the individuals on your team, the success of the team, and driving strategy and outcomes for the organization as well,” she explains. “The reason this happens so often is because we promote individual contributors who are super great at their job into leadership roles, and we don’t give them the training, support, and development they need. The skills they need for that are very different from those they needed to be very successful in their individual role.”

The OhioHealth Academy

A 16-hospital health system with 35,000 employees and approximately 1,650 leaders at the manager level and above, OhioHealth has created a Leadership Academy, staffed by certified executive coaches, which emphasizes the importance of emotional intelligence in leadership development.

“The skills we work on include empathy, emotional intelligence, forgiveness, flexibility, integrity, courage, kindness, patience, vulnerability, humility, and building trust—what so many people like to call ‘soft skills,’” McCullough says. “I don’t like that. These are human skills. These are power skills. These are the skills of the future. This is what we need for our leaders.”

What does that look like in practice? The Leadership Academy combines cohort-based experiences with individual leader and executive coaching, leadership learning forums, monthly “connection” emails featuring articles and videos, and a regular “Leading to Well-Being” podcast.

“Some of the cohort-based experiences are just a couple of hours, while others are multiday, and they’re focused on topics like leading with emotional intelligence, courageous conversations, and leadership skills for success,” McCullough notes. “This is especially important for first-time leaders, but something we are learning a lot is that as leaders continue to get promoted, you can’t just stop developing. When you reach a certain level of success, you might start to think, ‘I’ve got it right. I’ve figured this out.’ But as soon as we adopt that mindset, we stop growing. So many of these skills are lifelong. Emotional intelligence is not a ‘check the box’ one and done.”

OhioHealth’s leadership learning forums are one-hour virtual learning sessions designed to create an open space and dialogue for leaders at all levels to share their challenges, successes, experiences, and ideas around critical well-being topics, like building trust with your team, dealing with difficult emotions, the power of recognition, leading with healthy boundaries, leading through change, and giving and receiving feedback.

“We listen to what leaders say is top of mind for them now, and we create new topics,” McCullough notes. “It’s a safe space to come together and hear about what’s worked well for somebody else or even just to know, ‘I’m not alone in this. You’re struggling with this too.’”

The Leadership Academy also offers spot coaching for leaders working through particularly challenging issues.

“You can get a coach and just have one or two sessions to work through that,” McCullough says.

Leading to Well-Being

In mid-2023, OhioHealth launched its “Leading to Well-Being” podcast, which brings together leaders from throughout the system to talk about leadership issues, challenges, struggles, and successes. The podcast is shared with the health system’s leaders, but is also available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

The growth of the Leadership Academy has had a significant impact on the organization. “We have found that the group that is most engaged with our leadership development experiences ranks in the top 15% of our employee engagement survey scores, so they are outperforming their peers,” McCullough says. “And in one year’s time, we found a 6.2% increase in the positive response rate to the ‘my manager cares about me as a person’ element on that survey.”

How can other health systems apply these lessons to their leadership development efforts (Figure)? “Smaller organizations should consider starting with training focused on emotional intelligence and empathy building, and consider a book, article, or podcast club,” McCullough advises. “Just bring leaders together in a safe space and talk about some of these topics. Give them something to listen to or read, and just get people together and get them talking. It’s so powerful when you do that.”

For larger organizations, she recommends building a bridge between leadership development and well-being strategies, offering safe-space leadership sessions where leaders can share their challenges and ideas, making data on well-being a core competency in leader performance reviews, and considering training and/or coaching for all leaders.

“Leadership behaviors have a profound impact on the health, well-being of your workforce,” she says. “Investing in human-centered leadership development initiates an amazing cascade of impact, positively affecting leader and employee well-being, organizational outcomes, and even contributing to a thriving society. Regardless of size or industry, there are steps you can take to bring human-centered leadership to your organization.”