Fighting Mental Health Dragons

by Kent Aitken

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The Clerk of the Privy Council recently released the 22nd Annual Report to the Prime Minister on the Public Service of Canada. Which, as everyone else has noted, we should all read.

One of the three priorities for the coming year is mental health: "building a healthy, respectful and supportive work environment." I'm glad that it's being flagged as a public-service wide issue. The statistics and figures are jarring. But the change will come at the person-to-person level, through empathy with what individuals experience — or at least, understanding that what others experience will not, cannot, and should not match what you experience.

Reasonable orders

In the movie How to Train Your Dragon, there’s a scene where Gobber (a big, burly viking) tells the protagonist, Hiccup (the only non-big, non-burly viking), “If you ever want to get out there to fight dragons, you need to stop all... this.”

“But you just pointed to all of me.”

He can't follow that advice, and it's crazy to ask him to.

People see the world in different ways. People experience the events and environment of the workplace in different ways. Susan Cain’s book Quiet argues that modern Western culture — including our workplaces — is built around an ideal of extroverted people. Demographic divides have long played a role in success, and people tend to hire people that look and think like them. Mental health is definitely not yet fully understood or appreciated in the workplace.

In How to Train Your Dragon, the status ladder was created by big, burly vikings for big, burly vikings. Likewise, certain types of people have built our institutions in their image.

In the workplace, we run programs, develop internal policies, restructure organizations, navigate relationships, manage employees, and provide feedback and advice. There are times when we do these things fairly and constructively. And then there are other times, when our demands sound to the recipients like “Y’know, it’d be great if you were a different person altogether.”

Telling someone with interpersonal anxiety to speak up more in meetings. Suggesting that women adopt male stereotypes to get ahead in their career (hat tip to Suzanne Huggins for a great post). Telling someone with ADHD to focus. (And it doesn't even need to be telling. Norms and culture do the job.)

"Stop all... this."

Over the last few years I've had more and more conversations with people that are on the short end of a workplace built for the average, not the distribution, of people and personalities. It does not surprise me that mental health is the problem it is today, and it will require a massive leap forward on all of our parts to improve. And we need to do it.

Imagine someone telling you that to be a public servant, to respond to that calling, “You need to stop all… this,” and pointing to your whole life.

I Don't Have It All Together

I don’t have it all together.

Not that anyone is suggesting that I do. But it's easy to get that impression about others. We all have a capacity for selective disclosure through any forum - Facebook, Twitter, and blogs like this one being obvious examples - so we have a tendency to see the interesting, virtuous, or easy sides of others’ lives.  (This can be seriously damaging to our mental health.) So I’d just like to put it on the record that I don’t have it all together.

Not by a long shot. Struggling to keep on top of correspondence and to-do lists? Always. I’m sure I’m letting some slip, too, without even knowing it. Feeling like I’m barely keeping my head above water? Often. Starting projects I can’t finish, that I really should know that I can’t finish? Afraid so.

Screwing up at work? Of course. For someone who spends so much time thinking about how the public service works (probably over-thinking), I completely floundered in a new position in the last few years. It was pretty bad for a while.

Self-doubt? I barely go a week without questioning my path in life, which includes my career. It’s the rest of my life. I think it merits that level of concern. I almost as regularly reflect on the appropriateness and usefulness of what I write on CPSRenewal.ca.

Mental health issues? Yes. (And I don’t mention this as an explanation or excuse for anything else.) Mostly social anxiety, but a few other quirks in the mix, too.

I don’t have it all together.

I don’t need to. That’s life. I’m generally comfortable and confident about my imperfect state of affairs, even on those days when it’s a fight to keep things between the lines.

And I’m certain that most people who suggest that they have it all together - by words, by deeds, or by the strategic absence of certain words or deeds - are chalk-full of shit.

We can Not Have It All Together together, and make some good things happen anyway.

A thank you and hat-tip to Dave Fleming. Specifically related to this post, also in general.

Personal Stories and Testing Assumptions

by Kent Aitken

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Recently a few of us spent an evening deconstructing the idea of storytelling: why we're drawn to it, how it works, and how we use stories personally and professionally.

(I've written about storytelling on CPSRenewal before (see: Towards a New Professionalism in Government), as has Nick, probably multiple times (see: Purposeful Story Telling).)

We looked at a number of angles, but the one that stuck out for me might be called the stories we tell ourselves. Ashleigh Weeden opened this rabbit hole for me with her fantastic blog post on the subject, and most of my post, today, is just encouraging you to go read it.

Humans have a deep-seated tendency to find patterns, categorize, and sort things in our minds. These can turn into heuristics about how we see ourselves, which could be as simple and innocuous as saying something like "I'm very intuitive." It might be true, or it might just be rationalizing shortcuts on decision-making. In other cases, some stories that may well have been true at some point can outlive their usefulness. And they influence how we approach the world and our jobs, for better and for worse.

Examining our stories is an incredibly useful exercise, a healthy testing of assumptions. But we also noted two things about this kind of introspection during that evening:

• it's deeply uncomfortable - and full of cognitive dissonance - when we realize that some of the things we tell ourselves and others aren't true
• it must be highly deliberate, with others challenging us and prodding; it would otherwise be as easy to rewrite our stories with just new, different fictions

I'll forgo the temptation to apply the above to public service renewal and change initiatives.

All of that to say. If you're interested, and you should be, you should read Ashleigh's excellent and courageous post. With the warning that it may lead to an uncomfortable but ultimately worthwhile exercise of introspection. 

CPSRENEWAL.CA Weekly: Some Reflections About Renewal

Just prior to the holiday season I had the opportunity to attend a renewal mini-workshop put on by my friends at PCO's renewal secretariat and sponsored by outgoing Deputy Secretary to the Cabinet, Jim Lahey; it doubled as his unofficial retirement party, one of Jim's last attempts to spur on the renewal conversation.

This was my first interaction with Jim and let me say that, while I can't speak to his overall contributions to the Public Service in sweeping terms, his demeanour, candour and passion were inspiring. I also had the opportunity to meet some other great people, most notably Katherine Baird from the Public Policy Forum (who co-authored Canada's Public Service in the 21st Century: Destination: Excellence) and Bob Chartier, the GoC’s resident leadership expert.

There was a lot to take from the workshop. Here is just a small taste of the conversational flavour of the evening.

Katherine and I had a very interesting discussion on what the ramifications would be if we simply started to change the physical space within which we worked. How would breaking down the cubicle walls, creating open and bright collaborative workspaces while retaining a handful of shared offices for private meetings affect the work culture? Mike and I have often discussed enough, we even ranted about it once. I doubt this idea will gain much traction but if there is a manager out there willing to experiment, why not give it a whirl? You may find that your team is more innovative or collaborates more frequently if you liberate them from the physical rigidity of the typical workspace. Involving them in the physical act of tearing down the walls between them may even increase the magnitude of the impact on their approach to working together. So why not leave the accommodations people out of it? Consider it a team building exercise.

Bob and I spoke about the need to simply engage in conversations about some of the problems within our work culture(s) or rules-based systems something we don't do that well in the Public Service. More often than not we are quick to self-rationalize as to why we can't have the conversation, even if we know it is one that should be had or that could bear fruit. We need to move beyond avoidance and into engagement. Jim added that he often hears public servants say that they want to take risks without facing consequences, yet there can be no risk without consequences. We then got into a conversation around the fact that the risk adverse culture within the public service is confusing given the difficulty involved in terminating employees and documenting poor performance. If anything, we should be expecting to see more people taking risks than avoiding them altogether.

If this is not evidence of learned helplessness, I don't know what is.

In that spirit I want to try to drive the blog back to the discussions about work culture that originally prompted its creation. I don't think we have gotten away from that altogether; however I feel as though we focused a lot on technology in the workplace, and there are clearly other determinants at play.

In Jim's closing remarks he spoke a bit about leadership’s 4 components: courage, judgment, love and humility. Courage and judgment reside on one axis, love and humility on the other. Good leaders are courageous enough to get involved, to take risks, to stand on points of principle, and to call nonsense by its name. Good leaders temper their courage with judgment. Judgment, says Jim, can only be learned by making mistakes. Often the gain to one's faculty of judgment is of a similar magnitude to one's mistake. Good leaders love what they do, they are passionate and inspire passion in those around them. Yet good leaders remain humble, and know that without others, they lead nothing and can accomplish nothing.

The most important thing that I took away was something that Jim said to me when I was leaving. I was explaining that I am trying to direct my career so that I can be one of those leaders he spoke of. He looked at me and said, "Don't wait - do it now".

Round-Up July 21

In the News

Cynthia Münster has an article in this week's Hill Times entitled PS employees' stress, mental health issues not being dealt with properly and money wasted: expert

Here is an excerpt:

"As an employer, the government is going to get a very clear, gripping, challenging picture of the inadequacy of mental health care in this country, the confusion, the consternation, the loss of investment, the perpetuating loss of productive capacities ...”

... unfortunately you need a subscription to read the article. Here is a quick tip - you can often find a copy of the Hill Times in your DGO or ADMO.

Have a good week!