The BRAVE Leadership program is designed for leaders to develop psychological and behavioral tools that are needed to promote mental health and wellbeing in the workplace in our changing world: the “VUCA” world characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. This experiential program integrates leading research and evidence-based practices in building leaders’ capacities to create organizational wellbeing from the inside-out.
Organized using a holistic systems’ approach, the program spirals through the BRAVE Leadership Toolkit that highlights actions at the individual, team and organizational level to promote individual and collective wellbeing. The vision of humanistic and values-based leadership explored in the program highlights skills that promote psychological safety in all its aspects, including recognizing and addressing stigma and bias, and emphasizes the agility needed to proactively promote optimal mental health and wellbeing in a context of current, ongoing and future complexity and crisis.
This program is designed as the “next step” in mental health leadership learning. Moving beyond the basics of mental health awareness and managing employees experiencing mental health challenges, this program develops a holistic vision of BRAVE Leadership that supports leaders in proactively creating a climate of wellbeing that supports individuals, teams, and organizations to thrive, even in contexts of challenge and change.
Promoting workplace mental health and wellbeing is essential for organizational success. It leads to higher employee retention, increased productivity, enhanced creativity, and improved job satisfaction. Prioritizing mental health and wellbeing creates a positive work environment and fosters a culture of success. While most organizations have some understanding of the importance of mental health and wellbeing, in order to adapt to the complexity of the changing world around us and to thrive, mental health and wellbeing must be factored into all aspects of how we approach organizational development and growth.
Building a culture of wellbeing at work requires a proactive and holistic approach that accounts for the complexity of the human experience, the interrelationship between people and their environments, and a wide array of organizational factors that impact collective wellbeing and performance outcomes.
BRAVE Leadership involves more than management and support for people presenting with mental health challenges in the workplace. It’s about being proactive, including identifying and addressing factors that potentially deplete wellbeing in the workplace as well as actively fostering conditions that support the collective wellbeing of individuals, teams, and the organization as a whole. Rather than taking a checklist approach it’s about cultivating agile and flexible leadership skills that support movement away from reactionary leadership strategies that deplete wellbeing.
The program consists of 3 x four-hour instructor-led sessions. Once the classroom sessions are successfully completed, participants will be registered in our learning management system to complete the eLearning review program which includes an action plan and exam.
Upon successful completion of the entire program, participants are awarded a Certificate of Completion from Queen’s university.
At the heart of the program are three fundamentals that are explored and applied throughout the modules of the program, supporting leaders to create their own BRAVE Leadership Toolkit.
The toolkit has three areas of leadership skills that are built throughout the program in the individual, team, and organizational context: emotional agility, compassion and courage.
Leaders who participate in this training will cultivate knowledge and skills that will enable them to respond effectively to challenges and crises and to support themselves, their teams and their organizations to be successful through the transformations needed in our changing world of work.
Module 1 explores the importance of mental health and wellbeing as core to organizational success and introduces the BRAVE Leadership approach as a key business imperative in the volatile and changing 21st century global context.
In this module, leaders will build an understanding of a systems approach to mental health and wellbeing that emphasizes the interconnectedness of individuals, teams and the organization, and examine “additive and depleting factors” that can support or create challenges for mental health at work.
Leaders will develop foundational skills to help them with their own wellbeing and begin building their BRAVE Leadership Toolkit that will enable them to respond compassionately and effectively to ongoing, current and emergent workplace challenges that impact individual and collective wellbeing.
Learning Objectives:
Module 2 focuses on the “how” of building climates of inclusion and mental wellbeing amongst teams and reducing mental health stigma, bias and workplace exclusion. Habitual work practices that lack psychological safety and foster untenable stress levels are explored, including common behavioural, cognitive and emotional traps. Leaders will explore how exclusion and discrimination, socio-cultural factors, and stigma contribute to workplace mental health challenges. Leaders will explore the importance of kindness at work and practice ways that the BRAVE leadership skills of compassion, emotional agility and courage can be employed as antidotes to common workplace challenges.
Learning Objectives:
Module 3 prepares leaders to understand and respond to challenges and crises impacting system 3: the organization by examining organizational factors that impact mental health, wellbeing and performance outcomes. They will explore areas of influence allowing them to act as agents of change in their organizational context, including the role of organizational values as benchmarks to support BRAVE Leadership actions as an ally and advocate in the workplace. Module 3 brings all systems together with opportunities to explore BRAVE Leadership strategies that support conditions for flourishing at all three systems levels.
Learning Objectives:
Module 4 begins with an eLearning program that guides participants to review key ideas explored in Modules 1-3, guides them through finalizing their BRAVE Leadership action plan, and helps them prepare for the exam. Upon successful completion of all program components, including a passing grade on the exam, participants will be awarded a Certificate of Completion recognized by Queen’s University.
