What is Health Oriented Leadership?

Leadership is the most crucial factor in driving improvements in employee wellbeing. Leaders formulate the business strategy and ultimately decide where it sits on the agenda. However, 70% of CIPD respondents said that while leaders had employee wellbeing on their agenda, only 42% think they encourage a focus on this through their actions and behaviour. Therefore, it is important for leaders to address this and lead by example.

Research has shown that adopting health-oriented leadership can have a positive impact on employee health, wellbeing, job satisfaction, performance and engagement. This approach highlights the leader's active role in promoting employee health and wellbeing by looking after themselves (Self Care) and their employees (Staff Care). These two components—self-care and staff care—are built on three key dimensions: value, awareness, and behaviour. To lead in a health-oriented manner, leaders must be classify health as important (value), be aware of their own health status (awareness), and actively care for their own health (behaviour). Strong self-care practices in leaders and actions to take care of their staff, enable them to serve as role models, encouraging employees to practice their own self-care.

To learn how to implement health oriented leadership, contact me for information on talks, workshops and training available on this topic.