68: Self-care in Support with Ryan Klausner

Charlotte Ward: 0:13

Hello and welcome to episode sixty-eight of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. The theme for this week is self-care in support, so stay tuned for five leaders talking about that very topic. I'd like to welcome to the podcast today, Ryan Klausner. Ryan, nice to have you back. The topic for this week is self-care and support, particularly the challenges that are involved in leading teams that work in a very stressful environment, deal with problems all day long, and it's just a never-ending hamsters wheel.

Ryan Klausner: 0:51

Mental health and self-care within support, of course, all of us and the majority of our teams are very empathy driven. They're taking in a lot of emotion from our customers, but often we don't check in with ourselves as much as we are checking in with our customers. How can we foster a dialogue with our teams is something that I am often thinking about to encourage mental health days to be taken proactively. We often will take off to go to the doctor in some form, you know. Oh, I have to be out this afternoon, I'm going to the doctor, or not feeling so well, I'm going to get some rest this morning and I'll check back in around lunchtime and see how I feel. That's what we do when our bodies not performing optimally, but we don't necessarily do the same thing. And often within corporations, we're concerned it's a sign of weakness if we don't just power through. So making sure to foster that dialogue internally is important. Yeah, so for instance, I'm taking a mental health day this week. I'm posting that in our daily stand-up on Slack that it's a mental health day. Um I'm communicating what it is to my team. Uh so encouraging this and leading by example, I think, is really important. And also encouraging it as an actual opportunity to do a digital detox during that time as well.

Charlotte Ward: 2:10

Do you think that that we should, as leaders, encourage people to not communicate when they're off du