by Damien Broad, Assistant Academy Manager, Bristol Rovers FC
Looking after people has huge benefits.
A caring, nurturing culture with a growth mindset at its heart will create better outcomes whether you’re running a business, a school, or a football team.
As a leader, having a team of people who perform to the best of their ability makes your job easier. But to get there, you have to invest in those people individually, and that means making sure their mental health is in peak condition.
Why champion mental health
As a football coach, I deal with people on a daily basis, so I get to see a range of mental health issues play out in front of me, from imposter syndrome to anxiety and depression.
But I’ve seen it in other sectors, too. I began my career as a special constable and dealt with some tricky situations. I’ve seen first-hand how poor mental health can contribute to poor decisions if not addressed early enough.
And I’ve seen it in industry, when I was championing wellbeing initiatives across hundreds of staff in the energy sector. Poor mental health can affect anyone in any sector, and it can have a knock-on effect on the wider team, as well as the business.
However, if individuals are looked after, treated well, and supported through difficult times, then everyone benefits. You’ll have higher-performing people in your team, which results in more successful outcomes for your business or institution.
It doesn’t matter what sector you lead in; mental health is a universal concern for anyone who works with people. Prioritise mental health, and you’ll foster a culture of growth, resilience, and, ultimately, high performance.
Supporting your team
For young players, missing out on their dream of joining the first team can be especially difficult, but mental health struggles aren’t unique to football; they’re prevalent in education and other workplaces, too.
Knowing how to support your team’s mental health, and building a culture where people are happy and resilient, is a vital part of being a good leader. Here are some of the lessons I’ve learned about putting people’s wellbeing at the top of the agenda.
1. Don’t judge
Our personal biases often make us judgmental, whether that’s stereotyping people negatively or diminishing people’s ambitions. But who are we to say what people can or can’t achieve? As a leader, it’s important to help people on their journey. Embrace people’s goals, wants, and dreams, and support them in getting a step closer.
If someone tells me they want to be the next England manager, I don’t laugh it off as pie-in-the-sky. I can’t make that happen overnight, but I can help with small steps that enable them to build the knowledge and skills they’ll need further down the road.
Don’t step on someone else’s ambition. Give them a leg up instead.
2. Be present, check & challenge
Being present and checking in with people is mental health 101. If you know your staff well, you’ll pick up pretty quickly when there are any issues. Yet a lot of leaders fail at this first hurdle, perhaps because it involves being vulnerable yourself.
To get to know people’s personal circumstances, you’ll have to open up yourself, too. But this approach can help catch any issues early on and help you to understand them better. Plus, it creates a more open and supportive culture, which is better for people’s mental health to begin with.
Sometimes, though, checking in is not enough, and as a leader, you must also challenge–that is, go deeper. Don’t just accept ‘ok’. It can be hard for people to open up off their own backs, so ask again. The chances are they might not want to address it there and then, but they may open up later. Or, at the very least, you make them aware that you’re available and open to helping them.
The challenging bit can be uncomfortable, but it is important.
3. Control the controllables
Football is a high-stakes environment, with young players and their parents often arriving with big ambitions. However, not everyone will become a Premier League star, so part of our role is to guide players through the challenges they’ll likely face, and ensure they always have options.
A positive, growth mindset is vital here to help people frame challenging experiences as growth opportunities. We encourage players to have more than one plan A, from a professional contract to study options or developing practical skills. That holistic approach, where there are multiple possible outcomes, gives players an element of control. Exercising your team’s ability to control the controllables is one way to reduce the pressure.
4. Foster resilience
Resilience is a key value at Bristol Rovers–for the players, the staff and the club as a whole–and to be resilient, you need a growth mindset.
Our supporters are proud to be known as gasheads, and we’ve taken that positive mentality to create an aspirational gashead persona–everything you’d want in a player or member of staff at Bristol Rovers. Our aim is always to maintain that gashead mentality, across all that we do. It’s a collective vision of how we want the club to be and be seen. We even recruit and conduct performance reviews based on these attributes.
It’s all very well encouraging resilience through a positive mental attitude like this, but we help our players and people with practical steps, too. Something we do frequently with the teams is to mix them up, and put them in different environments with different people. Taking people out of their comfort zone, in a safe, controlled environment, helps them to grow and build resilience.
Likewise, with our staff, we put them in training scenarios where they have to deal with difficult situations, from safeguarding to releasing players. No one really wants to have those challenging conversations with players and parents, but tackling them in the right way is a huge opportunity to build resilience. It also takes a burden off our staff if they know how to approach these things.
I believe honesty, early on, is vital. Honesty can help people focus on development areas, and as a result, they might even surpass your expectations.
5. Lead by example
I’ve been on the receiving end of bad leadership, and I know how it can impact your mental health. I once had a boss who was a micromanager, and the pressure and anxiety of it led to my own troubles. Back then, it took me a long time to realise that my mental health was suffering. Now, I know that the first step is to identify it.
But that can be hard. What I do, for myself and now for my staff, too, is to run through a series of questions and score the answers on a scale of one to ten. Ask yourself, do you want to be in this environment? Are you motivated? Confident? Mentally and physically fit? Are you happy? Do you have autonomy? I find this is a good way to assess where I am mentally.
Sometimes, it’s hard to make immediate changes to our work environment, but once you realise it’s not working for you, and why, you can begin to make those changes. Something you can do immediately, though, is to take a step back and take yourself out of that environment for a short while. Take the opportunity to do things you love: go off grid, spend some time with family and loved ones.
My tactic is to book an hour a week with myself, except I put it in my diary as a meeting I would never cancel. It’s vital you don’t cancel on yourself! In that hour, I’ve done Qigong, journaling, personal goal-setting, or just gone for a walk and stopped on a bench to take in the view. Regular self-reflection and making time for personal well-being are essential if you want to avoid burnout, and be present for your team.
Prioritise mental health
A caring, nurturing culture where individuals feel valued and supported is essential for fostering a high-performance environment. To achieve that, we can’t just ‘manage’ mental health when issues crop up, we have to actively champion it. Good mental health shouldn’t be a luxury; it's essential for success.
