Business Executives, IT, and Mental Health
I'm quoted in a detailed article just published by Information Week.
The article, by Richard Pallardy in the IT Leadership section of Information Week, is titled, “What Can Executives Do to Improve Mental Health for Themselves and Their Teams?”
Andrew Shatté and I are the two main references. Andrew is an executive and co-founder of meQuilibrium, a human resource management company. I founded Braided Matrix, Inc., a business software development company. I closed Braided Matrix 15 years ago when I became a psychotherapist.
The article’s subtitle is, “IT execs -- CIOs, CISOs, and CTOs -- are experiencing unprecedented mental health strain. So are their teams. What can they do to address the problem?” The problem is that technical departments are poorly prepared and incorrectly organized to deal with personal issues.
The answer is to think more broadly and create an environment that’s able to address personal and interpersonal issues. This is contrary to both the management, training, and personal styles of information technology, which is basically a branch of engineering.
Business environments are changing. The combination of expanding markets, conflicting agendas, the extension of computers into people’s lives, and the upsetting of traditional hierarchies is causing chaos. We see this politically, economically, socially, and personally.
“An onslaught of cyberattacks, severe staffing, and skills shortages combined with indifferent C-suites have created a set of stressors that are nearly impossible to cope with. IT execs have begun to raise the alarm -- they are not OK. A toxic conflagration of factors has resulted in a typical work environment that frequently results in severe mental strain… An enormous suite of issues have contributed to the mental health crisis among IT execs.”
This is where I come in. I know the three levels that are involved: the technical project, business organization, and our mental health.
Shatté comments, “If anyone is going to get turned off by the concept of self-care, it’s going to be people in an IT role.” This actually makes the solution easier because it highlights the problem. The solution is personal resilience and a reframing of the issue to include group stability.
Personal stress has to do with overload, psychological conflict, and lack of direction. Mechanical stress is an engineering problem with clear causes and effects. Personal stress absolutely is not. It is defined by a lack of clarity in both regards.
The key to mental health support is working with your strengths. If your strength is closed minded analytical thinking, then that’s where you start. I use hypnosis, which I don’t expect anyone to understand, to lead narrow thinking into a larger field of possibilities.
I am not educating you, I’m encouraging you. Mental health is what you can find and foster, not what anyone tells you.
If you’d like to understand more broadly the issues affecting you, then…
I close the article in Information Week with the comment,
“I encourage people to engage with disorder, because that’s where things are happening that you don’t understand, and that’s where you need to be involved.”
You can read the full article here:
What Can IT Executives Do to Improve Mental Health for Themselves and Their Teams?