Why do we make leaders’ work environment a personal responsibility?

There is something strange about the way we talk about leaders’ well-being.

When employees are struggling, develop stress or experience some other form of mental imbalance, we have become fairly good at directing our attention towards the work environment. We examine the strain. We look at how the work is organised. At the culture. At collaboration. At leadership. We look for explanations in the conditions under which the work is carried out.

When leaders are struggling, something else often happens. We begin to talk about everything the leader can do themselves. Prioritise better. Set clearer boundaries. Achieve more balance. Become better at self-regulation. And perhaps get a coach or take a course in stress management. It is actually rather odd. Because we would hardly meet an employee affected by stress with precisely the same logic. Why should leaders be less affected by their work environment than everyone else?

Interest in leaders’ well-being has grown significantly in recent years, and that is a very good thing. In many places, the leadership task has become more complex, and many leaders experience increasing cross-pressure between financial conditions, employees’ needs, citizens’ or customers’ expectations and the organisation’s goals. At the same time, they are expected to create direction, well-being, psychological safety, quality and development. That is no small task. And yet we tend to talk about leaders’ well-being as something that primarily concerns the leader, and in doing so, we overlook something important.

From bad leaders to leadership quality

When employees develop stress or depressive symptoms, the debate often ends up focusing on bad leaders. In one sense, this is understandable, as people are easier to see than “structures”. But it is also an effective way of overlooking the conditions under which leadership is exercised.

A new Danish study from Copenhagen Business School and the National Research Centre for the Working Environment shows that employees’ depressive symptoms increase when leadership quality declines. Conversely, symptoms decrease when leadership quality improves.

The study thus confirms something that most leaders and employees already know from experience: leadership matters. Not only for solving tasks, but also for the psychosocial work environment.

But the results also point to something else. The discussion easily becomes about good and bad leaders, even though what is actually interesting is leadership quality. Because leadership quality cannot be reduced to the person sitting in the leadership position. It is shaped through an interaction between the leader’s competencies, the relationships, the task and the organisational conditions. This includes workload and time pressure, conflicting demands, organisational complexity, high emotional demands and the experience of having responsibility without sufficient room for action. These are strains that can rarely be understood or solved by the individual leader alone.

That is why the question of leadership quality quickly becomes bigger than the question of the individual leader. Which conditions make good leadership possible, and which conditions make it difficult? These are the questions worth answering.

Nor do we lack knowledge about what works

There are probably not many organisations today that lack knowledge about what contributes to a good psychosocial work environment; the importance of psychological safety, social support, role clarity, recognition, a learning culture and the balance between demands and resources is now well documented. The same applies to many of the factors that support good leadership quality. And yet we see the same challenges appear again and again.

The challenge is often less about a lack of knowledge and more about the ability to translate knowledge into practice. Most organisations are by now familiar with many of the answers, but everyday working life is also shaped by financial considerations, conflicting demands, management logics and ingrained habits.

That is why the interesting question is not only what creates good leadership quality. It is also what stands in the way of that knowledge having real significance in everyday practice.

Leaders also have a work environment

In the midst of all the talk about what leaders must do for others, we easily forget that leaders are also employees themselves. They go to work in the same organisations as everyone else and are therefore also affected by the culture, the collaboration, the conflicts, the priorities and the organisational decisions. In other words, they also have a psychosocial work environment.

And yet, when leaders come under pressure, the solutions are often individual: coaching, better prioritisation, more self-care or new strategies for creating balance. All of this can be helpful, but it does not change the fact that many of the strains leaders experience arise from their working conditions. That is why questions about span of leadership, simultaneous changes, clarity of mandate, conflicting demands and the leader’s own access to support should take up far more space in the debate.

Three conversations about balance - and the real question

When we talk about leaders in balance, several different conversations often become intertwined. One is about recovery, mental health and the leader’s personal capacity to carry the load. Another is about the leader’s ability to balance demands and care, relationships and results, as well as management and autonomy. Both perspectives are relevant, but they risk overshadowing a third and at least equally important conversation: the conversation about the organisational conditions for leadership. This is about span of leadership, resources, mandate, support, organisation and the conditions under which the leadership task is carried out. It is here that some of the most central questions about leaders’ psychosocial work environment are found.

The debate about leaders’ well-being easily becomes a question of how leaders can achieve better balance. A more interesting question is which organisational conditions need to be in place if leaders are to exercise good leadership and solve their task sustainably over time.

Leadership quality affects employees’ well-being and health, the quality of task performance and, therefore, the organisation’s results. This is why leaders’ psychosocial work environment is not an individual project. It is a shared organisational concern.

There are limits to how long one can expect world-class leadership under economy-class conditions.