Mental health: The new leadership imperative

In recognition of Mental Health Month and the challenges facing the nonprofit sector, our features during May and June 2023 will focus on mental health.?Visit our website?to find a list of resources to support your mental health initiatives.

by Charles E. Owubah, CEO, Action Against Hunger, Forbes Councils Member

After the upheaval of the past few years, mental health is increasingly seen as an organizational imperative. Yet, engaging around sometimes complex mental health topics hasn’t traditionally been on everyone’s shortlist of leadership competencies essential to growth and success in a philanthropic career. It’s time to change that.

As leaders, our new job description must include promoting psychological well-being internally with our colleagues, as well as using mental health as a lens for the services we provide to the people we serve. Few leaders I know have an approach that works perfectly for everyone all the time, and I’m no exception. These are many-layered issues. That’s all the more reason why we should share our approaches and learnings.

Here are three insights I hope will spark additional thinking and action from the inside out.

1. Mental health and organizational health are linked.?Prioritizing emotional well-being is the right thing to do. It also directly impacts our ability to carry out our mission: 68 percent of Millennials and 81 percent of Gen-Z workers?report?that they have left roles at least in part for mental health reasons. As mental health issues increasingly take center stage, ignoring employee mental health becomes synonymous with, as a recent article from the?Stanford Social Innovation Review?puts it, “ignoring the well-being of the company itself, since cultural and behavioral changes that address the mental health of [the] workforce are a pre-condition for growth.”

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