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Good ThinkingBy John Canfield
Management Consultant
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When I was a kid, not that long ago, people smoked like crazy. There was little talk about possible negative effects of going through a pack or two a day. Then people started confronting the data (friends and relatives passing away due to lung cancer), edging past denial, and accepting that all this chemical residue in your lungs was harmful.
So now we know far more about smoking and other health issues, and provide support to people in their company settings to try to redirect bad habits and develop healthy workers.
Wellnessproposals.com reports: “Increasing evidence supports the need for workplace wellness programs and more companies than ever are implementing health and wellness strategies to reduce injuries, healthcare costs and long-term disability.
“Preventable illness makes up approximately 80 perecent of the burden of illnesses and 90 percent of all healthcare costs. Employers are beginning to realize they can take advantage of this statistic and work to provide services to decrease the occurrence of those preventable diseases.”
Many companies have spent millions building and staffing the facilities to provide these services. To my knowledge these programs support exercise, good eating and lifestyle habits. Many companies are also doing this to improve their profitability by eliminating the enormous corporate waste due to poor health. Most of these programs support what employees and leaders do outside of the workplace.
I am recommending that you and your organization also address the significant health dangers occurring inside the workplace by improving your meetings, and improving your leaders.
It’s my experience that many companies, as evidenced by their willingness to put up with bad meetings and bad leaders, are stuck in denial that it really doesn’t make that much difference, and/or they really don’t know what to do about it.
Patrick Lencioni, author of Death By Meeting writes: “Bad meetings exact toll on the human beings who must endure them, and this goes far beyond mere momentary dissatisfaction. Bad meetings, and what they indicate and provoke in an organization generate real human suffering in the form of anger, lethargy and cynicism. And while this certainly has a profound impact on organizational life, it also impacts people’s self-esteem, their families and their outlook on life.”
And now, a new (to me) source of documented health dangers, inside the workplace: bad bosses.
If you read through the first book in my Good Thinking series, Think or Sink: A Parable of Collaboration, you know how predictable, boring and painful bad bosses are.
A few weeks ago my wife and I were sitting in our breakfast nook one morning, completing the crossword puzzle. With a minute to rest I pondered the day’s Dilbert cartoon: In the first frame, Wally the Engineer told the Pointy-Haired Boss about a Swedish study that showed that people with bad bosses had 40 percent more heart attacks. In the second frame, another worker sitting in the meeting seizes up and collapses with a heart attack. In the third frame, Wally says, “I should warn you that I’ll probably tell this story a few more times.”
I laughed for a while, wondering where does Scott Adams get his stuff and bothered to go to the Internet, and found a number of sources citing the same study:
One study at WebMD.com reported:
Nov. 24, 2008 — People who consider their bosses to be unfair, arbitrary, inconsiderate and generally deficient in managerial skills are at greater risk for having a heart disease event such as a heart attack, a new Swedish study shows.
Swedish scientists tracked the heart health of more than 3,000 male workers between 1992 and 1995. Their occupational health records then were matched with national registry data on hospital admissions and death from ischemic heart disease up to 2003.
The researchers suggest that companies take steps to improve managers’ deficient skills, as rated by their subordinates, to ward off serious heart disease of workers.
What was clear was that workers who felt their bosses had trouble communicating information — not just negative thoughts — were at increased risk of developing heart problems. Training of managers about how to do their jobs better might be a good start, the researchers suggest.
So now I’m working on getting doctors to prescribe this article series and the Good Thinking series of books. The article series is free, and the book’s a bargain. The second book in the Good Thinking series, Collaborate, should be out in March.
Independent trainer, meeting facilitator, speaker, and author John Canfield helps clients build high performance business teams. Reach him at 616-392-2634, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or visit www.johncanfield.com