How to be a transformational, supportive leader during COVID-19 [PODCAST]

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“The behavior of managers and supervisors in organizations affects the mental health of their employees. This is especially true during times of uncertainty, such as a global pandemic.

Does a leader’s health and well-being change how they lead?

Early evidence shows that when leaders are experiencing challenging conditions, they are more likely to become resource depleted and exhibit negative behaviors, such as passive leadership or abusive supervision. You know the kind of boss who doesn’t give you any credit, puts you down in front of others, or is simply never around?

When leaders are resource depleted and are experiencing poor health (e.g., lack of, or poor quality sleep; excessive use of alcohol), they are more likely to act abusively. The good news is that leaders are often well-equipped to deal with stressors that affect us all, like the impacts of COVID-19, and can take steps to prevent passing their difficulties on to their employees.

Three styles of leadership can help support employee well-being during difficult times.”

Kara Arnold is a professor of organizational behavior, Memorial University, St. John’s, NL, Canada. Jennifer Dimoff is an assistant professor of organizational behavior and human resources, Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa.

They share their stories and discuss their KevinMD article, “How to be a transformational, supportive leader during COVID-19.”

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Hosted by Kevin Pho, MD, The Podcast by KevinMD shares the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from.

Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show, where we share the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from. My name is Kevin Pho, founder and editor of KevinMD. Today on the show, we have Kara Arnold and Jennifer Dimoff. Kara is a professor of organizational behavior at Memorial University in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada, and Jennifer is an assistant professor of organizational behavior and human resources at the University of Ottawa, also in Canada. Kara and Jennifer, welcome to the show.

Kara Arnold: Thank you so much for having us, Kevin.

Kevin Pho: So we’ll get into your article in a little bit, but first off, I’m going to ask each of you to share your story and your journey to where you are today. Kara, can you go first?

Kara Arnold: Sure. So I’m Kara Arnold, and I’m, like you say, a professor in organizational behavior here at the faculty of business at Memorial University. I study the intersection of leadership and well-being, mostly from an employee point of view in the past, but I’ve shifted to look at leaders’ well-being and how that can also be important in terms of how leaders lead, and whether they can be positive in those positions or not.

I came to academia by a very roundabout route. I thought I wanted to be a clinical psychologist, and then I sort of took a different path, and I found organizational behavior as I did my MBA. I did a lot of odd, different jobs here and there, working for different places and for many different kinds of bosses. When I got to the point where I was studying leadership, I was really interested in how leaders’ behavior impacts employees’ attitudes. So that’s how I ended up here.

Kevin Pho: So, Kara, for my clinician audience on the show, can you explain what organizational behavior is?

Kara Arnold: I would say that it’s really the application of the principles of psychology, sociology, and human behavior to the organizational setting. So there’s a lot of psychology involved in what I study, because I study it from what’s called the micro point of view, which is more individual-based.

Kevin Pho: All right. And Jennifer, can you share your story and your journey to where you are today?

Jennifer Dimoff: Yes. Mine is also a bit unorthodox, like Kara’s. My bachelor’s degree is actually in biology, very heavy on the physical sciences, and I thought I wanted to be a medical doctor. I’m the only non-doctor doctor in my family; they’re all physicians, mostly GPs. My PhD is actually in a field called industrial-organizational psychology, which is basically the study of people at work and of people and their interactions with the workplace.

Through my biological background and training, I was really interested in the impact that the workplace can have on these more physiological systems and neurological systems. So I’ve been really studying the intersection between leadership, mental health and mental illness, and occupational safety and health in general in workplace environments. I’ve done some work with health care organizations and workers.

As I said, from a personal perspective, I’m the only non-doctor doctor in my family, and I like to stay as close to the phenomenon as I possibly can, to really ensure that the research that I’m doing is impacting practice. As part of that, I’m really listening to what’s going on in practice, so that I can use that to inform research questions that are actually going to make a difference to people who are on the front lines, or who have boots on the ground.

Kevin Pho: Fantastic, and I’m looking forward to further discussing that intersection between organizational behavior and health care today. So let’s get into your KevinMD article, “How to be a transformational, supportive leader during COVID-19.” Kara, for those who didn’t read that article, can you just walk my audience through it, and maybe share the story of why you and Jennifer decided to co-write it?

Jennifer Dimoff: So the article really came together as a result of a partnership grant that’s being led by Dr. Ivy Bourgeault, who’s also at the University of Ottawa. She’s a leading expert in public health, gender, and women’s issues, especially within the context of health care, and through the grant, she assembled an amazing team of experts. In our role in the grant, we’re really looking at how leadership intersects across a number of different professions, and we’re particularly interested in looking at that through a gendered lens.

What’s really unique about this larger study, this partnership grant that’s facilitated through two really large granting agencies in Canada, is that it’s really focused on the experience of professionals. So much research in organizational behavior and in industrial-organizational psychology is not as targeted at professionals: physicians, accountants, and people who fall under a profession umbrella. So it’s really unique to be looking at those particular populations and the experiences that they have with that intersection between mental health, mental illness, and return to work, and we’re part of the leadership team for that grant.

So Kara and Amanda, the other co-author, and I are really very focused on the impact that leaders have on their employees in terms of supporting their mental health and well-being, but also on the impact that employees can have on their leaders. It’s this kind of reciprocal relationship, where the more leaders understand about the behaviors that are going to make a tangible difference for employees’ general well-being, the more they can make a difference to help mitigate mental illness and improve mental health, and in turn result in a more psychologically healthy workplace environment.

Kevin Pho: So, Jennifer, what are some of the specific characteristics, traits, and techniques leaders should have, especially in guiding their organizations during the pandemic?

Jennifer Dimoff: Sure. So it’s been interesting. There have been a couple of studies that have looked at gender in terms of mortality rates. There’s a study published recently about governors who were women and had lower levels of mortality rates in their areas than governors, who are leaders, who were men. So there’s that kind of trait-based perspective on this with the pandemic, just looking at one demographic variable of gender.

But a lot of the research that we tend to do, or at least that I tend to do, is less on the trait side and more on the behavior side, because often leaders are in roles that they may not have been actively selected to be in. So there’s not necessarily anything we can do about who they are, but we can do something about what they do. This is about training the behaviors so that they can be more supportive, and a lot of that comes down to, and you’ll see this in the article, emotionally supportive leadership behaviors and instrumentally supportive leadership behaviors.

From an emotional support perspective, it’s really about doing the little things that show you care, and not just about the person as a worker, but as a whole person: getting to know them, asking about their families, understanding their home challenges or their personal challenges as well as their work challenges, by doing simple things like asking how they’re doing on a regular basis, and actively listening when they tell you how they’re doing.

It’s also looking to sometimes read between the lines, because sometimes people will say, “Oh, yeah, everything’s great. We had a great time looking for Christmas trees with the kids over the weekend. We’re planning for Thanksgiving.” And other times they’re saying exactly the same thing, but very differently: “Oh, yeah, you know, we’re really excited about Thanksgiving. And yeah, the kids and we went looking for Christmas trees.” So it’s really about training people to recognize those nuances and then follow up on them by providing things like instrumental support.

That is really about making sure that people have access to the resources that they need to be as healthy as possible: providing employee assistance programs if you’re in a position to do that, and encouraging people to use benefits for psychological as well as physical health and well-being. Instrumental support is also just about providing people with the tools they need to do the job, whether that’s providing PPE, providing training on telehealth, or making sure that the telehealth options are as robust as possible for people for whom this is a new experience. That applies in all industries, not just in health care, but certainly they need the tools to do the job, and that can help to alleviate a lot of the stress that people are experiencing right now.

Kevin Pho: Kara, we are entering almost the ninth or 10th month of the pandemic, and I was wondering, from a health care leadership standpoint, have you seen any missed opportunities that leaders aren’t taking to help support their groups during the pandemic?

Kara Arnold: The leaders in our health care systems are doing their absolute utmost to serve their patients and to help those who are in need right now. Probably one of the things, which I think we alluded to earlier, is that as a leader, your behaviors influence your employees. I would say that in health care, your behaviors are also influencing your patients, right?

But it’s also really important, I think, at this time for leaders in health care in particular, I think for all leaders, but particularly in health care at this point, to take care of themselves as well. So it means being able to think about taking that step back, and maybe making that time that you need to make for yourself, because being in a leadership role has always had some additional stresses that people experience, but in the context of today’s world with the pandemic, that’s probably tenfold what it was.

So really allow yourself to just say, “You know what? I need to take a step back. I need to take care of myself at this moment in time, as well as my employees and my patients.” I think that would be something that a lot of times leaders don’t necessarily think about or actively do for themselves.

Kevin Pho: And Kara, what kind of advice do you have for leaders going forward, and what do you think are some of the challenges that they may face in the coming months?

Kara Arnold: One of the things, I think, and I mean, for some clinicians it will be in terms of that interaction, virtual interaction, if you’re having virtual interactions with your patients or with your employees: How do we do that as effectively as we used to do in person? To be honest, in terms of our research, we don’t know a lot about that, but I think that’s one thing going forward that we need to think about.

Jennifer Dimoff: I think that’s, you know, I think this is the nature of this beast: It is ever-evolving. When we were first writing this article, and when we were first starting on this research, it was March and April, and some of the research studies that we’ve conceptualized and that I’ve been a part of over the last seven months look very different than how we thought they would seven months ago, even in terms of the variables that we’re capturing.

So one of the really interesting phenomena that we’ve seen, that I would implore leaders to pay attention to, is this unprecedented reality that we’re all dealing with right now, especially in health care, where we have this unique combination of stressors. We have daily hassles, so the little things that we mostly cope with on a regular basis; they’re kind of annoyances. We have those morphing into chronic stressors, so the bigger things that are causing the more chronic health issues. Then we have catastrophic and traumatic stressors occurring, with loss of life and fear of loss of life, and no crystal-clear end in sight.

It’s just recognizing that and internalizing that this is day by day, and communicating that with people, providing transparency and communication as much as possible with your people. That’s something that, certainly, in some of the other work that I’ve been doing this summer on COVID, where we have stuff from health care workers, both physicians, nurses, and long-term care providers, is the one thing they’ve been saying is most appreciated, certainly from administration: just transparency. Even if it’s bad news, it’s better than no news. So even if it’s, “We have PPE for the next three months,” and then, people did better with that than with not having any information about it at all. So transparency where possible seems to be really appreciated by people, and that generally tends to lead to lower levels of strain.

Kevin Pho: We’re talking to Kara Arnold and Jennifer Dimoff. Kara is a professor of organizational behavior at Memorial University in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada, and Jennifer is an assistant professor of organizational behavior and human resources at the University of Ottawa, also in Canada. Now I’m going to end by asking you both the same question: your take-home message to the KevinMD audience. Jennifer, why don’t you go first?

Jennifer Dimoff: I think the biggest, and kind of in one sentence, is that in order to lead well, you have to be well yourself.

Kevin Pho: Wonderful. And Kara, what is your take-home message to the KevinMD audience?

Kara Arnold: I’m going to be very unoriginal and just underline what Jennifer has said. It’s one of the main things that we know from the research: The better that we are in terms of our own health as leaders, the more we can be there for our employees, and that’s really what it’s all about.

Kevin Pho: Fantastic. Well, thank you both for sharing your time and insight, and thanks again for being on the show.

Kara Arnold: Thank you.

Jennifer Dimoff: Thank you. Thanks for having us.

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