We need a new standard of thriving to guide our organizations—where “engaged and thriving” is the norm. When pressed, I think most leaders would say that people who are engaged at work produce better outcomes than people who aren’t engaged. Yet, the Gallup organization, canvassing a staggering 160 million employees worldwide, found that if employees are engaged at work, but not thriving in their lives, the organization is likely struggling. Employees who are “engaged but not thriving” show considerably more stress, worry, and burnout than employees who are both engaged and thriving. The organization bears a productivity and financial loss too; employees who aren’t thriving report greater absenteeism, health challenges, and disease due to depression, anxiety, high blood pressure, chronic pain, heart attack, and diabetes. I wasn’t surprised at these recent Gallup findings. For over 30 years, my teams have been guiding leaders to prioritize ‘thriving’ in their work cultures and brands, as well as in how they lead people, tasks, initiatives, and teams. Early on, we realized leaders who are perpetually overextended, tense, or depleted, are more apt to lack the stamina, clear-headedness, emotional balance, and world-centric acumen to bring about the best decisions from others or themselves. They cannot draw from the reserves…

Inaugural Report Identifies Important Relationship Between Wellbeing & Paradoxical Leadership Now Required for a Post-Covid World Colorado Springs, Colorado – July 6, 2021: Wisdom Works Group releases inaugural Be Well Lead Well® Research Insights report, Effectively Leading Through Paradox, as part of a new research division to showcase insights gleaned from the Be Well Lead Well Pulse® assessments of close to 1000 leaders from around the world. The timely report underscores the fact that leaders today must guide organizations through an unprecedented degree of uncertainty, complexity, and change in our globally connected world. This inevitably means leading in environments full of contradictory demands, or paradoxes, where solutions are never clear or simple. The report showcases the pivotal relationship between leaders’ wellbeing and how they navigate paradoxes with “both/and thinking”, an orientation which recognizes that conflicting perspectives can be an impetus for innovation, learning, and growth for people and organizations alike. The research revealed that leaders who score high in wellbeing are 38% more likely to report engaging in paradoxical leadership behavior than leaders who score low in wellbeing. This suggests that leaders who experience high levels of wellbeing may be better equipped to draw on both/and thinking to handle the…

As the world continues to face the ripple effects of the pandemic, we know many areas of people’s lives and work have taken a wellness hit. Global employment has gone backward, more children worldwide have fallen below the minimum reading level, face masks (a necessary measure of precaution during COVID-19) have become a new wave of litter harming the environment, and our mental health has collectively suffered. Relaxing is an effective wellbeing leadership tool This past year may also have left you experiencing a free-floating unease you can’t seem to shake, a sense of languishing without a clear purpose or aim, or the feeling that you’ve hit the pandemic wall. You may appear calm on the surface, yet like a duck swimming in a pond, find your feet paddling as fast as they can to respond to the wellness challenges of others. In your efforts to juggle so many demands in life and work, you may even be physiologically living in an always-on beta brainwave pattern and a fight-flight-freeze-fawn system of reaction, reinforcing a state of high alarm that has become your new normal. So, it’s possible—indeed, probable—you’ve forgotten that relaxation is one of your most effective wellness and leadership tools. Intentionally shifting into relaxation awakens the parasympathetic nervous system; counters the drawbacks of overplayed stress…