The biggest lever for your mental health

William Lennan
2 min readJan 22, 2024

or what Don & Paul got right

Our mental health is horrible. Most employees (75%+) are not engaged. Artificial Intelligence is waiting to take all our jobs. Leaders are struggling to meet revenue goals. Sounds like a tragedy.

But a happy ending is possible.

Don and Paul

were amazing leaders and managers.

They maximized revenue per employee, had very low churn, and gave us a lot of freedom. They also payed us very well, had great benefits, and scheduling flexibility.

Working for them was very low stress.

We had challenges but both Don & Paul were supportive in helping us solve them and never cast blame.

Don and Paul were in completely different industries, didn’t know each other, and I consider myself lucky to have spent years working for each of them.

Those were the happiest employment years of my life.

Why?

Don & Paul did multiple things well.

  • Set clear expectations of our work responsibilities.
  • Communicated how our work was benefiting the business
  • Checked in on us regularly, made sure we were happy at work
  • Gave us an advancement career path
  • Gave us internal role flexibility
  • Encouraged cross-department communication (we were very tribal)
  • Fired customers who treated employees badly
  • Gave people “test employment” to see if they were a good match for the teams
  • Charged more than most competitors — and had raving fans for clients

Opportunity

Leaders have an opportunity to see their teams, their people, as the most valuable resource in a company. As much as we all love our tech, without the people, companies are nothing.

If you are a financial type, investing in leadership coaching has a very positive ROI. From a low of 24% improvement to a high of 788%. Who wants a piece of that investment?

Heartbeat

We had hard challenges working for Don & Paul, both were new businesses, both were growing rapidly, both had big traffic fluctuations — and we all saw it as worthwhile, even fun. I can’t say it was easy but I’d take it again in a heartbeat.

That’s the kind of work environment that supports mental wellness — and the bottom line.

If you want to know how — talk to us. At #40PB, we’ve reverse engineered excellent leadership into consistent repeatable processes that anyone can learn and replicate.

These are battle tested strategies across industries, cultures, and hybrid work environments. hello@40pb.com

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William Lennan

Mental wellness fan. Ardent believer in effort. Parent, partner, persistent, physical. Co-Founder The HAERT™ Program. DBT is awesome :-)