How to rid yourself of anxiety before mental health and performance conversations
July 11, 2024
And in breaking news “Brave Managers heroically avoid looking like this guy (see below) before Workplace Mental Health and Performance Conversations”.
In a stunning new workplace trend, more managers than ever are now refusing to feel anxious before those potentially awkward conversations with their employees about mental health and performance. It seems managers are saying “enough is enough”. I spoke to one earlier today.
Manager: “Yeah, look I have for a long time now woken up in the middle of the night having just dreamt about workplace mental health and performance conversations with my staff. I remember one when I blew a gasket with my employee in a performance meeting and was met by a barrage of accusations including that I was a bully who made the workplace psychologically unsafe. It was a debacle. I completely lost my train of thought, threw my toys out of the cot and called an abrupt end to the meeting”.
Me: “Wow that’s some dream”
Manager: “No that wasn’t a dream, that really happened last week. My dreams are much worse”.
Me: “So what have you done about it?”
Manager: “well for a long time I’ve just lived with it. I thought there was no one who could help me. But now I have realised I can change this. I don’t have to put up with these terrible knots in my stomach and spend the hours beforehand not being able to concentrate on my work – all because I am anxious about one conversation. I got some really good help.
Me: “what did they advise”.
Manager: “As a start, he helped me get my mindset right. Listening to my self-talk it was all negative so he gave me strategies to change my self-talk and it massively reduced my anxiety.
Next, he told me how to prepare. From understanding the circumstances, identifying what I don’t know, considering the location of the meeting, which documents to reference all the way through to how to prepare a plan for the conversation, it was comprehensive.
After that, he told me how to begin a conversation with a positive intent statement so that I set the scene in a way that reduces both parties’ natural apprehension and clarifies to the employee that I will be fair and reasonable. This section also included what good questions look and sound like.
The penultimate strategy was how to deal with responses from the employee including unhelpful ones and he showed us a process with some clear steps that you can repeat and therefore apply to a range of responses. This gave me real confidence that I had a method I could remember and follow, and that with practice, it would become easy.
The final piece of the puzzle was wrapping up the conversation with solutions and agreements with another clear process in how to give the employee the opportunity to shape these or if they are not forthcoming from the employee, how to shape them yourself.
Me: Well, you must be a changed man.
Manager: Ken Oath. I even look forward to them now. And no more bad dreams!
