Leader Well-being

Managers’ well-being matters both to the individual manager and to the organization: when managers are under pressure, it often affects employees and the quality of work. Experts Malene Friis Andersen and Katrine Bastian point out that stress is a pervasive challenge, but that in practice it stems from several specific conditions that often occur simultaneously. The main elements that affect the manager’s well-being are:

• Stress as an overall burden often covers several underlying problems.
• Conflicting demands from different levels, so the manager is under cross-pressure and cannot make everyone happy.
• That the manager often becomes the target of the employees’ frustrations with frameworks and conditions that the manager has not necessarily set.
• Resource issues – difficulties in attracting and retaining employees, increasing the workload and time spent on recruitment and training.
• Having to stand up for political decisions or decisions you do not agree with.
• A large workload combined with heavy time pressure, so that the manager does not have time for actual management.
  
  

According to Malene Friis Andersen and Katrine Bastian, well-being challenges affect all levels of management, but with different nuances: middle managers often face emotional demands, while top managers experience loneliness and time pressure. At the same time, the article points out that leaders who thrive have often worked with a personal leadership foundation, set clear boundaries, created secure relationships upwards and downwards, influenced their time and use the management team as support. The top management has a shared responsibility for creating a framework so that it is attractive and possible to stay and continue as a leader.

The above excerpt covers all the points from the article. You can access the original article here, however, please note that the article is only available in Danish: