Burnout doesn’t discriminate. In today’s workplaces, both employees and employers are increasingly running on empty. In small businesses – where owners can juggle accounting, marketing, sales and HR tasks all at once – the stress can feel relentless.
Advice and hacks for easing stress often centre around time management. But what if freeing up the calendar is the wrong approach?
As a founding board director of R U OK?, author and professional speaker, Graeme Cowan says SME owners wanting to protect their staff’s mental health should look beyond workloads and instead focus on wellbeing.
Cowan believes that when leaders prioritise care – starting with themselves – everything else follows.
“My message to small business people is to manage your mood, not your time,” he says. “When you’re in the right place, you can be creative, you can be innovative, you can be inspiring. If you run down your reserves, you can’t support others. You can’t inspire others.”
In his new book, Great Leaders Care, Cowan offers a playbook for business owners on how to keep high-performance teams resilient under pressure.
Self-Care Is Strategic, Not Selfish
Graeme Cowan held leadership positions at global corporations before developing what his psychiatrist called the worst case of depression he had ever seen. He has since devoted his energy to improving mental health at work, but fears the problem is getting worse.
“There’s a lot of turmoil in the workplace and that’s coming through in really high, severe stress rates for managers and also employees,” he says, citing worrying research suggesting 47 per cent of managers and 36 per cent of employees are severely stressed each week.
Part of the problem, he says, is finding the balance between high-performance and overwhelm. “Some stress is really good, you know, fires us up, gives us energy,” he explains, “but it can go over the top of the curve and start going down to losing sleep, feeling anxious, just being involved in black and white thinking.”
The instinct for many business owners is to push through harmful stress rather than address it. But Cowan says that mindset has measurable consequences for the people around them. “I really encourage people to adopt the mindset that self-care isn’t selfish,” he says. “We can’t look after other people if we don’t look after ourselves.”
He backs up his theory with more statistics. One study he references says 91 per cent of employees are engaged and motivated when managers champion work-life balance, dropping to 38 per cent when they do not. Another report suggests an employer contributes 70 per cent of the engagement and wellbeing of a team. This means in a small business, where the owner is generally the manager, their mood is not a private matter, but rather a pivotal influence on team performance.
The Moodometer and the Productivity Payoff
Cowan learned the power of mood firsthand in his corporate career, as he watched his own health deteriorate. “The market changed substantially, and I crashed and burned,” he recalls. “I was the co-leader of a recruitment business and what I realised was that I’d let my physical health go. I’d let my relationships with friends go.”
That experience shaped Cowan’s belief in ‘the moodometer,’ a framework for understanding how mental state directly affects output. “When we’re in the top third of that moodometer, we’re 31 per cent more productive. We sell 37 per cent more and we’re 300 per cent more creative,” he says.
The goal is to stay in the healthy green zone of the moodometer without straying into red, he explains. “When you’re in the red zone, you think very black and white. You don’t think of creative solutions.”
Cowan offers a practical structure for staying in that optimal top-third range. He calls it the VIP framework: Vitality, Intimacy and Prosperity. “You have to act like a VIP each day.”
Vitality covers physical energy: moving well, resting well and eating well. Prosperity focuses on career energy and purpose. Intimacy is about relationships, both in and out of work. Cowan says Gallup’s Q12 Employee Engagement Survey drives home this point: employees who strongly agree with the statements ‘My supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person’ or ‘I have a best friend at work’ are more productive, deliver better customer service and stay in their roles longer.
He sees the same sentiment in his own workshops. “I ask people to reflect on a great team they’ve been part of and, 9 out of 10 times, the top three qualities they nominate are ‘We cared about each other,’ ‘We had each other’s backs’ and ‘We encouraged each other.’ These are basic human needs and are part of something bigger and, hopefully, very meaningful.”
Cowan uses a self-care scorecard to identify what he calls mood vampires, the habits and patterns that quietly drain energy and pull leaders down the moodometer. “I learned this the hard way,” he says, referring to his five-year battle with depression. “Making time for things that are good for us and make us healthy and connected is the best sustainable performance thing we can do.”
A Caring Culture Begins With A Conversation
Protecting workers’ mental health has the added benefit of fulfilling compliance obligations. Under workplace health and safety laws, managers can face personal fines or imprisonment if they create toxic cultures where employees are bullied or harassed. Cowan gives the example of a recent case where a mining company was forced to spend $1 million rectifying systemic issues identified by two overworked accountants.
Despite the high stakes, Cowan’s observation is that many SME employers have limited understanding of the law, and he partly blames the terminology. “A lot of people don’t know how they reduce that risk. They think, ‘Oh, psychosocial, sounds complicated, only a psychologist can do that.’ But what they’re actually talking about is harmful stress,” he says.
Cowan says leaders often don’t realise they can start to build a caring culture in their business by simply stepping away from their desks.
“The very best thing would be to choose a couple of days a week where you just wander around and ask how people are going. Just being curious and empathetic will get almost immediate results,” he explains. For remote teams, rapport can be built by ditching video calls and picking up the phone. “A really good thing to stay connected is to actually ring someone,” he suggests. “Speaking to them and hearing energy in their voice or frustrations in their voice, can help us to understand things.”
Whether by phone or in person, listening is key, as illustrated in Cowan’s book by American businessman Bob Chapman, who built a $3.5b empire on a culture of caring. “A real foundation to his success was that you show your care by listening with empathy,” Cowan explains. “When people feel heard, when they feel understood. That’s when the best results happen.”
Guests on his podcast, The Caring CEO, say the same. “If you feel cared for, you are going to be more productive,” he finds. “If you feel cared for, you’ll go beyond what’s expected. If you feel cared for, you will look at other ways and innovations and new ideas to solve problems.This is a strong skill, having each other’s back. Encouraging each other and listening with empathy is what gets great results. So, it is a win-win.”
