Study On Healthy Leadership and Leader Self Care

From what I’ve seen in my work, leaders often tend to focus on how they can help everyone before themselves. In highlighting how helping yourself can help others, I want to share a research study from 2022 that I ran across from the University of Bremen. There has been a lot of research showing positive correlations on employee health and self care and job performance. There has not been as many studies on leader self care and how it might influence the health and self care of employees. That was the topic of this study.

After reading through it, it looks like the study was essentially how does leader self care end up impacting the well being of employees? They explored a few different ways that it might and ultimately found a positive correlation between leader self care and employee health and perception of well being in a couple different areas.

The first area they found benefits can be summed up as leaders who take care of themselves are more likely to take better care of their employees. This was reported by both the employees and the leaders. This makes a lot of sense as we as humans tend to best help others when we are able to first apply the help to ourselves. It also reported that employees who received this additional support were more likely to engage in self care and report feeling healthier.

The other main way that leader self care helped employees is that leaders who took care of themselves were less likely to show and cause irritation with employees. Irritation has been found to be a negative for health and productivity. So while this is more of an indirect benefit, it still shows that simply feeling better ourselves is a great way to help our team.

The full study is a great read if you want to see more of the nuance in what helped employees and other hypothesis they were testing. It would be great to see more future research on the subject and stronger advocacy for leader self care. In conclusion, if you are a leader who wants to know how to have a healthy and resilient team, taking care of yourself is a great place to start. This can be hard as leaders since our employee’s well-being is often our goal, but this is proof that taking care of you can help take care of them as well.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9180678