Leading by Example Benefits Employees
April 15, 2024 | Kelsey Tillema, Allison Budzinski
"Do as I say, not as I do," is, unfortunately, not an effective slogan for anyone in a leadership position. While you may at times find it necessary to justify skipping a lunch break, responding to emails after-hours, and occasionally working a weekend here and there—creating a habit of these may not just impact your own work-life balance, but those of your staff as well. So, how do leaders lead by example?
ASTHO's Workforce Technical Package, Strategies for Enhancing Governmental Public Health Workforce Well-being and Retention, recommends four main supports to address employee well-being, burnout, and retention—chief among them is creating effective and skilled managers who set the tone for other staff. Applying a trauma-responsive approach to daily leadership habits can positively impact the employee unit. Trauma-responsive leadership is founded on recognizing toxic stress and trauma, and how it affects the individual as well as workplace culture. This leadership style does not require a psychology background; rather it hinges on using tools, strategies, and skills to disrupt continuums of harm and implementing policies that can mitigate the effects of trauma and foster an environment of psychological safety and well-being at work.
Three Reminders and Considerations for Supervisors
Leaders’ Boundaries Mold Staff Boundaries
Whether in a hybrid, virtual, or in-person work environment, a leader’s boundaries inform how staff navigate their work-life balance. Leaders can empower staff by not only encouraging them to use their well-being benefits and vacation time, but by doing so as well. Setting policies for after-hours emails and lunch breaks are important, but by ensuring leaders follow these guidelines empowers staff to do the same. By demonstrating a healthy work-life balance, leaders offer autonomy to staff to use boundaries and benefits to fit their unique needs instead of sacrificing their needs for work.
ASTHO’s PH-HERO Learning Community, an initiative created to support health agencies’ with their workforce well-being goals and supported through the Public Health Infrastructure Grant (PHIG), focuses on enhancing leadership and management skills to positively impact organizational culture. One PH-HERO agency member, Idaho Department of Health and Welfare, has been focusing on “change starting at the top.” Supervisors have been encouraged to model the way when it comes to honoring break times and lunches, reducing their number of meetings and duration, investing in trauma-responsive leadership practices, setting boundaries, practicing good listening skills, and taking time off (and feeling good about it). Since committing to this model of leadership, Idaho Department of Health and Welfare reports that they are already noticing positive outcomes among their staff.
Vicarious Learning Is Vast
In addition to modeling work-life boundaries, staff also learn agency norms and practices through signals leaders send. Leaders who multitask during virtual meetings are encouraging their staff to do the same. This is one example of implicit knowledge transfer, where staff absorb small nuances of communication and decision-making through observing supervisor behaviors. Since staff often behave congruently with leadership, it’s critical for leaders to assess daily practices to determine which behaviors amplified across an entire team are desirable (if any).
Practice and Promote Psychological Safety
Demonstrating vulnerability and humility in the workplace is a powerful way to build a culture where staff feel safe to express ideas, concerns, or questions without hesitation or a fear of consequences or retaliation. This is not limited to a work-related brainstorm session. Staff must feel safe to be their whole selves and “exhibit their race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, background, family status, and all other parts of their identity without judgement,” as described by Michigan State University. Psychological safety is a subjective experience and interplays with diversity, equity, and inclusion principles. Therefore, supervisors must champion an agency-wide effort to build it.
Finally, supervisors must be supported in order to support their staff. Therefore, learn more about strategies and best practices from the PHIG Partner website and the ASTHO Workforce Resource Center. For more information about ASTHO’s workforce development programs, peer networks, or technical assistance opportunities, please email workforce@astho.org.