Executives as counsellors at work
Stressors at the workplace
The workplace is a zone of looming stress and conflict. Unavoidable and inevitable these form part of each one’s everyday personal and professional life. All workplaces are defined by high stress, intense emotions, competition, mergers, diversity, and pressures. Those who cannot bear that burden succumb to these pressures. Depression, anxiety, phobia, social avoidance; are negative outcomes of demands which exceed the capacities of employees.
Helping oneself
In its most ingenuous definition, counseling is a method to help people help themselves. Friendship is distinct from counseling. Yet friends and colleagues can be counselors if they adopt scientific principles of counseling. Adopting that patriarchal role, organizations can partake in this responsibility to make meaningful difference in the lives of those around them.
Autocracy to Mentoring
Gone are the days of autocratic transactional leadership where superiors were feared and loathed for their authoritarianism. With the new age contemporary leadership movement, team members look up to their leader for task and goal accomplishment as well for personal upliftment and feedback. Each one must possess that ability to help others help themselves.
Need to act
Stress is unavoidable, but the degree of stress endured can be modified by changing the environment or by changing the individual’s coping mechanisms. Stress management in the workplace is an important component of organizational behavior. Personal empowerment through workshops and psychotherapy helps those who approach professionals, but senior staff at work play an important role in building psychological wellness in their own teams.
MINDFRAMES: Reframing counseling at work
We target stress management at a narrow set of individual-level interventions (e.g., education, relaxation training, biofeedback, meditation) and at broader organizational level stress interventions. Part of this included empowerment of team leaders in interpersonal and empathic skills to counsel their team in times of need. Resilient employees have greater productivity and impact their organization with their exemplary performance.