Wellbeing is a Skill: The Three Components Critical to Honing It

At the start of the year, I asked everyone at McKinsey to set one New Year’s resolution: to strengthen the skill of wellbeing. I have the honor of leading a firm filled with committed, adaptive learners, but for many of us, prioritizing our wellbeing does not come naturally. While there are several structural factors that set the foundation for our wellbeing – including professional stability, financial security, child/eldercare and comfortable housing – there are also elements to our wellbeing that we can view as a skill that we need to cultivate and strengthen.

And like any skill, we will need to rely on the support of others to improve. We learn and teach skills related to problem solving, communication and leadership. We write goals for ourselves, and we aim to be honest about our progress in these areas. What would it look like to channel that same attention into improving our wellbeing?

There are many actionable ways that leaders can design and encourage their teams to integrate wellbeing as a daily, weekly or monthly intention, reflection and practice. In work and in life, I’ve found it helpful to focus on wellbeing in terms of three components: body, mind and purpose.

Take Care of Your Body

I've been an eight-hour-a-night sleeper my whole life. And as I have continued learning in my professional life, I have maintained that food, exercise and sleep are critical to performance and productivity.

Nutrition is essential to fueling our bodies. And regular physical exercise — whether it’s cardio, strength training, or just plain movement like taking a walk with your dog or playing with your kids — benefits both our physical and emotional health.

Quantity and quality of sleep offers us restoration and renewal that helps us think more clearly and relate to others more effectively. We have found that sleep matters immensely when it comes to effective leadership behaviors of solving problems, seeking diverse perspectives, supporting others and focusing on results.

I would also encourage team leaders to think of rest beyond bedtime and assess how your teams build periods of recovery into the workday. An analogy I use with my colleagues at work is the concept of high-intensity interval training (HIIT). We push up to our limits when there is a challenge before us, but then we must build in time for rest and recovery. If we commit to proper recovery every time, then we can count on higher levels of performance in the future.

Make Space for Your Mind

It’s amazing that we live in a world where an app on your smartphone can help you commit time to building self-awareness and mental resilience. But you don’t have to use an app, or any formal structure to practice mindfulness, which is simply the practice of being aware of your body, mind and feelings in the present moment to develop the ability to fully focus, anywhere, at will.

Another tool we can sharpen to support our mental wellbeing is emotional flexibility. Emotional flexibility is the practice of acknowledging the feelings, insecurities and sources of stress in our lives, and building the capacity to cope with them in an action-oriented way. I have seen stress at work manifest itself in tense, reactional situations.

Leaders can help their teams by modeling mental wellness. Reserve time to tune into yourself and your teams. Honestly take the time to disconnect — including from technology. Stepping away from video conferencing, emails and the digital pings that tether us to our phones is both more difficult and more important than ever.

In this COVID-19 era, employees are in need of and are demanding better mental health support. Among employers, mental health is among the top workforce health concerns with 9 out of 10 employers surveyed noting that COVID-19 is affecting their workforce behavioral health and/or productivity. Leading companies are heeding the importance of addressing mental health and taking action.

Some key strategies – especially for a stressed-out workforce – include opening the lines of communication between leadership and employees; understanding and addressing the impact of psychological distress, mental illness and substance use disorders on the workforce; knowing the signs of mental distress; making help available; and embracing and encouraging self-care. Of course, the particular form these strategies take will vary from one individual to the next, depending on where they are on the mental health continuum.

Reconnect With Your Purpose

Defining and living our purpose creates meaning and a deep sense of connection with others. I am humbled by the work of my colleagues who care for others, sharing their compassion and service without expecting anything in return.

Leveraging our collective talents, McKinsey has made meaningful impact in the past twelve months: supporting food banks and related hunger-fighting organizations, creating an online talent marketplace to help workers impacted by COVID-19 and enrolling more than 15,000 learners in our Black Leadership Academy.

I foresee a future where we value wellbeing as a skill essential for organizational and individual success. As leaders, we have the responsibility to model positive habits and prioritize our colleagues’ and peers’ wellbeing in concert with their technical skills. Certainly, the coming year will demand resilience and put our wellbeing skills to the test. Let’s commit to making progress together.