Gesunde Führung – »Arbeit im und Arbeit am System«

Abstract

Healthy leadership – working in and on the system. Experiences about the development of personal and organisational competence for healthy leadership How to remain healthy in a demanding and often stressful work environment is not a new question. But the statistics show that absents as a result of depression and burnout are increasing within the last decades. Obviously it’s not because work is physical harder, but the increasing complexity and volatility of organizations, workflows, markets, that’s causing psychological pressure and stress for both employees and managers. To meet the challenge of this critical development organizations have to create new ways of maintaining and supporting health in the workplace – research shows that the role of health promoting leadership is crucial in this issue. The development towards a health promoting leadership-culture is a learning process for individual managers and the organization as a whole, that goes beyond a traditional training for stress management – it requires an approach of organizational development that supports different dimensions of learning: self-management regarding health and dealing with stress, leadership and social competences such as appreciative communication, feedback culture and constructive conflict management – and finally a system related competence that enables managers to reflect the effects of workplace design and the quality of cooperation within and in between working teams and design organizational change on a small scale. Finally the article shows a case study development where different methods and approaches are bound together in an organizational development-architecture.