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🎉 A Special Milestone: Episode 500!
This episode marks a major milestone for Leadership Powered by Common Sense — our 500th episode. Thank you to every guest, every listener, and everyone who has been part of this journey. Here’s to the conversations that have shaped how we lead, and to 500 more.
Introduction
Today we’re going to dive into a topic that is somewhat near and dear to my heart, because I hear it expressed in concerns that a lot of my clients bring forward, and that is the notion of the pressures and burden of leadership creating kind of a mental health issue. And it is common that I think people try to power through it. They don’t really want to address it, they don’t want to admit it. And they feel like they should be better than that. And there’s a whole lot of things to talk about around that concept. My guest is a person who has done some training in this area. She is a former therapist. Her name is Melissa Doman. And Melissa, welcome to the show.
Hi. Thank you for having me. I’m so excited to to talk about this. It’s a very, as I like to say, spicy meatball concept, so I’m excited to talk about it.
You and I were chatting in the ramp up in the green room, talking a little bit about some of the data, and I don’t remember now exactly how I worded the question, but it was along the lines of is the mental health crisis among leaders bigger than anyone wants to talk about.
Why Leaders Are Finally Being Seen as Human
It is, and it always has been. And I think that, you know, now we’re there’s enough leaders who are starting to reluctantly pipe up that people are being forced to see them as humans with limits, not just symbols of stability. And, you know, especially leadership these days in comparison to their predecessors. I stand firmly in believing that leaders even 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago may not have been able to handle the volume and intensity of pressures that leaders have today and the speed and, you know, even just separate from the emotional toll of being a leader. That’s not even including the mental health issues that any human being, regardless of title, bring into the workplace. And leaders are not exempt from that. So it’s if we want leaders to do what we are demanding of them. I literally don’t understand how supporting leadership, emotional health is not a core part of standard leadership development.
I think, great point, and I think I know in the circle of coaches that I have it, we do talk a lot about the mental health aspects, but it’s probably more in terms of not the technical clinical aspects of it, but it’s in terms of things like resilience and resilience. Favorite word resilience being the ability to kind of refuel and recharge in motion. You can’t always just unplug and exit the the environment as much as you might like to or want to. Therefore, you have to find alternate ways to recharge your batteries so you can go back into battle. And me being an ex-military guy, I do talk about the concept of even in the military, in intense battle, we rotate troops off the front line. We, you know, we we send fresh, you know, healthy people into that frontline situation. Give those that have been there a while a chance to to disconnect and recharge. Restore their strength and in this case, maybe even their mental health. And, we don’t get to do that in business.
It’s a constant sport, if you will, and in perpetual motion. So that that creates a huge challenge. What I’d like to do to get specific about this, I’d like to maybe frame this one way. And please tell me if you think we should do it slightly different. I would like to explore this with a the idea of a spectrum in mind, and at one end of the spectrum is what you might call lesser impact issues that are coming up. Things like fear, anxiety, frustration, a little bit of anger maybe, and things of that sort And then way out. On the other end of the spectrum is, is the heavier clinical thoughts like various various psychoses and, and meltdown type, you know, inability to operate and function kind of conditions. Is that a fair framework to to go in?
Mental Health Is a Spectrum
Absolutely. Mental health is a spectrum. And so, you know, when I talk about mental health I’m talking about our general baseline social, emotional and cognitive functioning.
I’m talking about all the emotions that you named that we come pre-programmed with out of the box to let us know how to respond to stimuli in our environment and how to respond to feelings within ourselves. And then you also have, you know, the mental illness spectrum, which can range from really light, things like a six month adjustment disorder all the way to incredibly debilitating forms of mental illness where people have to go on FMLA. And then in between that, I kind of look at it as a as a Venn diagram where you have chronic stress, which can impact both general mental health and forms of, of mental illness. So when we’re talking about leadership, mental health, we’re talking about all of it. And so I think that that looking at that as a spectrum or a Venn diagram absolutely is the way to look at it.
And speaking from a coaching standpoint, there’s there’s a slippery slope when we’re talking to clients about mindset and having the right mind to approach your situation or your ideas. And there are plenty of people that when you start leaning that way, wanting to explore some of that thinking, they roll their eyes and they go, that’s woo woo.
I don’t want to go there. You know, I don’t want to do that. I, you know, let’s let’s not talk about that. Sure. And the challenge is, you know, there’s an undeniable power. Our our brain helps us formulate our thoughts and our thoughts. Oh, yes. Do what they drive our behaviors.
Reframing the Conversation: Functioning, Not “Feelings”
Yes. Yes. And you know what I. And that’s one of the main reasons that when I talk about, I really look at it from a functioning perspective. I really look at it from like a science based, functioning perspective, because there are so many people that when I even say the words mental health, they, they roll their eyes. So when I look at talking about emotional health in the workplace, regardless of of the title you have or where you sit, we’re literally talking about just emotional and cognitive functioning at work. And I try to use more concrete, ironically, less feeling language. And I find that that’s a lot more accessible and less like, quote, icky for some people.
Where I look at it as you are spending all this time with these people each week, you know even more in some cases than, you know, family and friends and stuff like that. So don’t we want to focus on how to help your functioning in that space so you can perform, get what you need, get what you need from others and others can get what they need from you. Like I’m very brass tacks about it and they go, whoa, when you put it like that and it’s the same conversation, it’s just with different words.
I really like that idea. I think the ultimate question from a leadership perspective is your ability to influence and impact things, things and people around you.
Right.
And therefore it implies and requires, I think, you know, a high functioning capacity if you’re really going to be able to do that. And as. As one of my mentors and a lot of people know him, John Maxwell, he said, you know, leaders see more than the people around them, and they see it before the people around them.
And the having the cognitive ability to do that requires a certain amount of focus and attention. And if you’re if you’re struggling with something that has been brewing inside for a while, you’re going to have difficulty executing at that level.
Discomfort Tolerance and the Stoic Leader Myth
And I think that positioning it that way is so important. And when you’re talking before about, you know, resilience, our ability to healthfully bounce back from adversity. And I often tend to focus on discomfort, tolerance because I look at, well, how can you bounce back from things you won’t face because a lot of people don’t like facing and sitting in discomfort. And when you’re talking about leadership, mental health. That can be very uncomfortable because we, you know, leaders have been historically conditioned and are still conditioned to act as if they are consistently a most emotionally impenetrable stoic with no variations in behavior. And so what I tend to look at is really, well, I don’t understand at all logically how that feels sustainable leadership, because it doesn’t. And I think the more helpful thing is when they are, dare I say, humanizing themselves to the people they lead as actually having capacity limits.
Even though we keep pretending like we can increase the size of the tank when we can’t, it’s just a matter of how do we refill it? And I you know, I find it ironic that endless leaders are trained on emotional intelligence and that this is a highly prized skill in the workplace and as of 2025, is one of the most highly demanded skills in the workplace. And I find it ironic that for two of the areas where of emotional intelligence, where you’re supposed to be self-aware and be able to self-manage. The last time I checked, those are skills that are needed to manage emotional health. So how can we ask leaders to be emotionally intelligent, both intra personally and interpersonally, and then remove the permission for them to be aware of and manage their emotional and cognitive health so they could do the job? And I sit here going, I can’t be the only person seeing this, because when you lay it out like that, it’s irrefutable, you know. And so I understand that that history and narrative and bias are strong and I just don’t care.
And I say, no, there’s a lot of really bad leaders doing a lot of bad stuff out there, and it’ll always be that way. So if we want the folks who are not doing bad stuff to be able to perform better and lead. Wouldn’t logic dictate that we try to shift this narrative to. To allow them to have less? Opportunities where things can go wrong? Yeah, yeah. But maybe I’m alone in my principles.
Oh, no, I, I think I could quickly join in and gravitate that way. I like the way you’re framing this. And part of what was going through my mind as you were describing that there’s. How I say this there, there’s, there’s kind of an evolutionary aspect to leadership and management, depending on the organization that you’re a part of. There’s an undeniable culture in the upper echelons of the business and good people that are already operating, operating with a high degree of their own emotional intelligence and Modernized strategy about dealing with the people around them. They get promoted up and then there’s this weird run off.
They start wanting to emulate the the former leader in that role or leaders around them at that level that may or may not have good leadership ability. All of a sudden, for instance, if you get to the right level of a company, all the execs are perceived as stoic and unapproachable. And here’s a guy who’s done good at at building teams and expanding businesses and growing markets, gets elevated to an SVP level or something, gets into that stratosphere, and all of a sudden it’s unapproachable. It’s like, are you kidding me?
Social Identity Theory: Why We Change How We See Leaders
There’s a reason for that. There’s something called social identity theory. So in in my book. So the the second book really focuses on this. It’s called Cornered Office because we love a good pun. And within that I talk about the psychological and sociological theories and explanations for why we we think this way. And so in social identity theory, you know, we view a group of people in a certain way with a certain, you know, list of characteristics and attributes, and people within that group also view themselves in a certain way with a list of characteristics and attributes in ways they need to represent themselves and the group they represent.
Now, on top of that, when people look at leaders, they are they create these mental representations of what they believe leaders are, how they should act, are they trustworthy, etc. and that’s also informed by previous experiences with leaders, and that informs where we are now. Kind of like a once burned or or, you know, it’s all about the expectations and even the baggage that you that you bring in. And on top of that, there are, and this probably won’t surprise you at all. There are a lot of needs that people want to get met by leaders that exist from outside of work. So the minute someone gets to a certain level, it automatically triggers this change in trust where they’re like, oh, because of this label, things automatically change. And it’s it’s, you know, the fancy term is mental heuristic. It’s basically just a shortcut for the brain where they’ve been filed into a new cabinet in terms of how they can interact with this person. So it’s gone back, you know, from since the dawn of civilization.
You know, we did you see the film air about Michael Jordan and had like Matt Damon. And I love that movie, even though I’m not a sports buff. And Sonny Vaccaro had this wonderful monologue that described it perfectly, where the then pre famous Michael Jordan. He was saying, we’re going to build you up into this thing, and we’re going to expect you to be that thing. And when you’re not that thing, we will tear you down. And it’s the most repeatable pattern in human history. And that’s what we do with leaders in terms of, you know, just the optics and perceptions based on the sociological assignment of power and not the individual in that role. And so it’s it’s a really tough nut to crack, because I’ve lost count of the number of leaders, whether it’s middle management, C-suite, etcetera, who will crack in private sessions with me saying, you know, it’s too much pressure. People view me this way. I’m just a person. And it’s, it’s it’s really hard where we expect leaders to wear this veil of leadership, but then when they pull it back, we don’t like it either.
So it’s very it’s very much a double standard in a lot of ways.
The Tall Poppy Syndrome
Yeah. Boy. So many things packed in there, I I’ll, I’ll start with one aspect and talking about the pressures around you as you rise up in advance in an organization. I had a guest on the show a couple of years ago who introduced me to the concept of the tall poppy syndrome. And and we don’t hear that in America so much. And I and.
We the UK.
Probably right.
In Australia. Australia.
Oh, okay.
It is where he was first introduced to it. And apparently it’s pretty prevalent there. It’s like it’s this social norm that says who are you to rise above us? You know, the, the poppy that grows a little taller in the field. And there’s this. And apparently some psychologists have studied this pretty intensely there. There is a notion when that poppy rises, there’s this force, there’s cutters in the environment that want to intentionally cut them down, get them back to size.
And he. My guest was a neurosurgeon, and he he had experienced it in his own life. He had. He had focused on his work, done his study done his practice, and got. Recognized by the organization and elevated and literally no pun to your book, but got moved into the corner office and immediately started feeling these forces around him, trying to undermine what he wanted to do. And then he was subsequently introduced to this Australian concept of tall poppy. And he said, there you go. You know, there’s and the point is that in every organization there are going to be cutters that exist in.
Oh yeah.
Whether intentional or otherwise.
Oh yeah.
That just don’t suffer the elevation of certain people and want to do what they can to betray the trust and undermine the progress.
That actually happened to me once, where I was working for an organization where I was it was a temporary contract, and I in some ways was performing better than the person I was covering for. And that person’s manager that I was reporting to didn’t like it and actively sabotaged my work and made sure that my temporary contract did not turn into a permanent role.
And when people are elevated in an organization, people that used to be their peers, that can bring up a whole festival of triggers and unmet needs, insecurities. You know, there’s a lot of stuff in in the workplace. And I honestly look at the workplace as an adult playground. We’re all just older and have different toys, and so that can bring up a lot of stuff for people around self-efficacy, self-esteem. You know, their race with themselves, race with others. And you know, when someone begins to have more, more power that can really get sticky. And I’ve seen this a lot in organizations I work with because my clients are companies. And I see those those group dynamics play out in such interesting ways. And, you know, having been a former therapist and now I do organizational psychology, I always joke with people. I’ve seen the back end and the front end. And so when I see these dynamics playing out, when focusing on emotional health, communication, team dynamics, you know, it’s all playing out in a way that makes total sense to me.
Because if we’re going to zoom out for a minute, you know, the concept of work, every service, every good, every company, every role is human created, inclusive of the norms and the rules that we use to hopefully govern those places. And within that that living, breathing ecosystem, we have very flawed humans. And so when we look at these sorts of dynamics, I think that a lot of organizations miss important intervention opportunities to talk about these sorts of shifts, because they’re just so busy on checking the box, getting the person in their new role and racing towards the bottom line. And I think that’s a huge miss in terms of not only how leaders need to function in those new roles and how they can go, you know, it can tip over when it can be avoidable, but also really negatively impacts morale and collaboration and trust and all the things that Patrick Lincoln talks about in his book The Five Dysfunctions of a team, right. And I love talking about this stuff. And when I see teams starting to act out and I go, oh, how fascinating, because I have the luxury of being an outsider.
Right.
The Promotion Trap: From Best Doer to Leader
As do I and I, I applaud the companies that have consciously decided to invest in coaching and mentoring for their leaders, because modern business suffers a really strange dynamic that I’ve always questioned. On one hand, I’ve been the benefactor of it, so I got to be careful about how far I go with this argument. But the idea is this we we look at our team and we identify the best individual contributor, whatever field they may be in. And we say we need a team leader. How about you? Yeah. And they they get moved into management and there’s little, if any, understanding of what leadership is above and beyond management. Management is inevitably about process, and that person that makes that first promotion starts thinking, I got recognized for my performance. I’ll double down on performance and that.
That’ll.
Get me where I need to go. And ironically, a lot of times it does. Now they become the unit manager and there’s three team leaders and so many people.
Yeah.
And it starts becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And the individual gets sucked into a trap of how do I double down again? And because.
It’s never enough.
Now I’m starting to feel my capacity constraints. I’m. I’m overextended, I’m frustrated. I’m feeling all this anxiety and I’m not getting it when what they should be informed about or coached about is. Yeah, we know that. No, we don’t want you to be the doer anymore. We we want you to be the leader of these people. We want you to focus your attention on developing them to.
You know.
Different.
Skill set.
A totally different skill set that that good performer might not have, and they might not even have the potential to take it on. And the good news is, for many there, there is training opportunity. There are things to be learned and considered that might get you into that role. But for some, they never should have left the front line. You know, they they really would have been better and happier and more productive just staying where they were.
The Leader’s Plate Is Actually a Trough
Well, and it’s in addition to it being a wholly different skill set, the cognitive and emotional impact of that different skill set is is highly underestimated. And if you think about focusing on a skill set and output as an individual contributor, there is a difference between that impact in terms of, we’ll say, volume on you versus the impact of managing other organisms, other people and the the electricity from other people that comes towards you as a leader and their stuff and managing their outputs. And it’s just so much more complex. And then you not only have volume and speed, but now you also have intensity. You also have much deeper complexity in terms of the factors that you have to manage. It’s a totally different animal. And in the book I talk about, you know, the popular adage like, oh, you know, the leadership plate is very full. In the book, I completely disagree with that. And I say it’s actually more of like a trough that leaders are strapped to, and it just keeps refilling and refilling and refilling.
It’s not a plate. That’s an insult to what leaders have to deal with now. So and I go into some pretty uncomfortable imagery and describing what it looks like. And that’s on purpose because I want to make people not just, you know, the validation of what is, but to show how incredibly real it is. You know, why? Why keep using a metaphor that doesn’t make sense anymore.
Right?
You just inspired a thought for me in that back to the productivity and output for for whatever that individual contributor might be tasked with doing in, in a generally optimized business world that’s fairly clearly defined. You know, the widget is going to look like this. You know, we’re going to. We’re going to do a hundred of these a day. You know, whatever. But when you move into that leadership role, your what’s coming at you is highly individualized. Oh yeah. Personalities, mindsets, behaviors that are all over the board. There’s no standard in there to achieve and.
Cut.
Cultures and backgrounds and family stuff and all all those things.
Right, right. Everybody shows up with a very unique and specific bag of, of issues that they’re going to dump on your desk. And you as a leader, have to figure all that out.
Leadership Mental Health Archetypes and Boundaries
And there’s also a fine line between kind of being like the nest that people fly back to versus never encouraging them to fly. And they’re, you know, I came up with these leadership mental health archetypes that focus on the different sorts of behaviors that end up unintentionally sabotaging a leader’s own functioning and even some of their teams. So it’s like, you know, the father, father hen and Mother Goose, or the grain mill or the frustrated martyr and things like that, where there is a fine line between supporting teams versus really robbing them of the opportunity to, to not only in some cases support themselves, but dare I say, where even in some moments they can support the leader. I do believe that that that support can in certain cases be bidirectional. And there is such a, I would say, dismissal of the fact that everybody in the workplace is a chronologically aged adult.
Notice I didn’t say mental age because they’re not always the same. But I think that there is really just a missed opportunity where the the self-sacrifice that leaders put themselves in, whether it’s the servant leadership model or whatever it is, that they are so fuzzy on the boundaries that that’s where they get swallowed and lost, and it can get really tough to wrangle in.
Yeah, you’ve hit on something that. That’s why I generally advise all of my clients at some point in our journey together, to consider doing some work to really dig deep and create a, a definitional framework of who they really think they want to be as a leader 100%. How do they really want to show up? And you can call it values, principles, beliefs, whatever. But there needs to be the work done to identify your own persona so that you are equipped and ready to go. Recognize when the wind is blowing another way and that’s not what you want to do, or that’s not who you want to be.
Build a Fence, Not a Steel Door
Oh, same thing goes for mental health.
You know, I, I’m very honest with leaders. You know, for example, there are some organizations, teams, even industries where this conversation may never happen. And there are some organizations where they’re saying they don’t want it to happen. So I’m a big fan that when when people are telling you who they will and will not be, listen to them. So if you are in a position where you are in an organization where that is a psychologically safe conversation, you need to decide why you’re going to have it. I’m not encouraging leaders to build a steel door or have an open playing field. I encourage them to build a fence. Decide what you’re going to let through. Decide what you’re going to keep out. And if you’re going to engage in a conversation like this, you need to determine why you’re going to talk about it, how you’re going to explain why you’re talking about it, what you’re going to share, what you expect people to do with this information, what you’re going to do with this information.
Be be very pragmatic and framework focused about it. Because if you don’t, when you’re not accounting for power dynamics, when you’re talking about emotional health as a leader, it’ll go off the rails really, really fast. So I’m I think that leaders need to decide very individually if they’re in an environment where they can have that conversation. Start with your desired outcomes and work backwards from that. Because if you’re going to shift that narrative, you better be prepared to fill in those blanks or other people will write.
Absolutely. And again, that goes back to the kind of osmosis evolution of of behaviors based on what predecessors have done or what your perception of a company culture requires. And if if you. The issue that I always find 100% of the time is if an individual has not done some of this work to really think about how they truly want to be and how what they aspire to represent in their work, they are going to be subject to pinging back and forth and whatever the new demand sounds like. And, you know, okay, two levels up there asking for this behavior and you’re going, oh, okay, maybe I can do that.
Sure, I’ll do that. And and ultimately, if it’s not a good fit for you, it it it leads to burnout and frustration and a lot of other.
Things.
Usually does.
Yeah.
Closing Thoughts
Yeah. Always. Well, Melissa, this has been wonderful. I feel like we’ve probably left a whole lot on the table that we haven’t had a chance to get to, but I think our time is about up. But to tell people the best way to get in touch with you.
So the best way to get in touch with me is Melissa Diamond. And I help organizations to upskill to talk about mental health, communication and team dynamics in the workplace all over the world, across industries. You’re welcome to add me on LinkedIn. Both of my books are available across all major retailers online. A cornered office why we need to talk about leadership, mental health, and my first book. Yes, you can talk about mental health at work. Here’s why and how to do it really well. I’m also on Instagram at The Wandering Mill and I’d love to hear from you.
So please reach out.
Wonderful. Well, folks, as always, we’re going to have those links in our show notes, so feel free to check that out and would love to advocate for healthier discussions about mental health. How about that as a as an oxymoron?
Absolutely.
It is very important for our long term sustainability in roles of leadership. Check out our video version of this show on YouTube. It is a channel by the same name. Leadership powered by common sense. Would love to hear from you. Leave us a comment or join the channel if you will. We, we publish twice a week, so there’s a lot of content coming at you. But for now, I’m going to sign off, say goodbye. And like I always say, go out there and make it a great day.
Meet Our Guest
Melissa Doman, MA is an Organizational Psychologist, Former Mental Health Therapist, Founder of The Workplace Mental Health MethodTM, and author of Yes, You Can Talk About Mental Health at Work (Here’s Why And How To Do It Really Well), and the forthcoming title, Cornered Office: Why We Need To Talk About Leadership Mental Health [February 24, 2026 | Wiley]. She is a LinkedIn Top 10 Voice on Mental Health and has worked with companies across industries and around the globe, including Google, Progressive, Estée Lauder, Microsoft, and Salesforce. Melissa has one core goal: to equip companies, individuals, and leaders to have constructive conversations about mental health, team dynamics, and communication at work.
Links:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissadoman1
https://www.instagram.com/thewanderingmel/
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