Tag: #management

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Managers, Talk About Your Fears!

Supposedly, the days are over when newsrooms resembled macho hives, war reporters were the cool guys with armoured souls and journalists could only guess a colleague’s burnout by the length of a sick leave. At least that’s how Phil Chetwynd, Global News Director at the AFP news agency, sees it. While 10 to 15 years ago newsrooms were dominated by a culture of “don’t ask, don’t tell”, since then not only has the discussion about mental health in the workplace reached a different level; appropriate structures have also been put in place, Chetwynd said on a panel at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia. This was necessary, he added, as journalists worldwide were facing unprecedented pressure.

In fact, just scrolling through the festival program provides a good overview of all the pain points: Eroding business are squeezing budgets and AI is accelerating the pace of innovation, while authoritarian politicians and their vassals are discrediting journalism, threatening journalists and sowing mistrust or even hostility towards the profession among the population, which is expressed both online and offline. Nevertheless, it is safe to assume that some media executives have not yet understood this with all its consequences.

In fact, business models can only be made resilient if you take care of those who are supposed to do so. And for all the reasons mentioned, the media industry has lost its appeal. Many journalists and media managers are questioning their career choice or leaving for calmer waters if they can. And the next generations don’t even feel tempted to join. In editorial offices that operate according to the old principle “if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen”, things could soon become breezy. Starting your own business is an alternative. However, it is more suitable for workaholics and self-exploiters, as was made clear on one or two other panels. So even in start-ups, there is no harm in thinking about mental health at an early stage.

Journalist and consultant Hannah Storm – on stage with Chetwynd – has published a book on the subject in 2024. “Mental Health and Wellbeing for Journalists” is based on 45 interviews with media people and trauma experts from all over the world. Key is to create safe spaces for conversations about the topic, said Storm. And anyone who thinks of post-traumatic stress disorder primarily in terms of war correspondents is underestimating the extent of the issue. For example, those who view disturbing footage day in, day out may be more affected than those who work in the middle of the action, said Storm. Vicarious trauma is the technical term for this. Psychologist Sian Williams has developed some recommendations for newsrooms on how to deal with this.

Such guidelines should also be of interest to local editors, as colleagues who frequently report from accident scenes or are confronted with gruesome details when covering the courts generally receive less attention than those who are sent to crisis areas. And fact-checkers are particularly threatened online – to an extent, as Chetwynd reports, that they no longer sign their texts with their names at AFP. The non-profit company The Self Investigation has put together a toolkit on mental health specifically for this group.

For some it’s not the news that causes burnout, but the accelerated pace in newsrooms coupled with economic pressure and concerns that AI could make the job redundant – all this on top of the normal madness of family management that keeps many colleagues busy in key career years. And this is not only true in cultures where self-fulfilment and leisure time play a major role. At a change management workshop for a media company in Malaysia – I led the seminar – participants brought up work-life balance and mental health as top challenges for the industry.  

Emma Thomasson, now a consultant and previously a bureau chief and senior correspondent at Reuters, addressed the topic proactively at the news agency and met with such a positive response that she set up a corresponding internal program. Today, she is involved in the journalist helpline of the Netzwerk Recherche, which offers help to all those who feel that the stress of their job is getting too much for them.

But managers are not doing their job if they leave such offers solely to external bodies and the initiative of those potentially affected. It is important to create a culture in which employees can talk about such experiences without fear, said Chetwynd. This includes managers also showing themselves to be vulnerable. This challenge must be taken up by all those in leadership positions. At AFP, with its 150 offices around the world, that’s a lot of people, but that’s the only way it works. Chetwynd: “The only barriers to a potentially unlimited amount of work are the managers.”

Experts consider two things in particular to be important to alleviate stress: good preparation and regular breaks. Not every journalist, for example, is suited for every assignment simply because of their character and personal history. And managers should address the potential risks proactively before someone takes on a task – be it a disaster assignment or moderating online comments. Adjustment helps. AFP, for example, only lets crisis reporters go to the front lines once they have become familiar with the environment and culture in less exposed roles. And after a few weeks, they must take time off to breathe. This sounds simple, but in many traditional newsrooms as well as in start-ups, it is part of the culture to quietly let workaholics do their thing if they get unloved work out of the way or increase the fame of the brand. This may work in the short term, but in the long run such negligence can be expensive – not to mention the human cost of it. 

Media companies are generally well advised to think proactively about the current and desired corporate or editorial culture, put it in words and communicate it precisely to employees. Lea Korsgaard, editor-in-chief of the widely praised Danish news brand Zetland, presented clear principles on another Perugia panel. Everyone who joins the company gets an hour with her, “and then I explain the culture”, she said, adding: “If you want to create a human-centric product, you need a human-centred culture.” Any news organization who wants to play a part in the battle for talent should listen up.

This column was written for and published by Medieninsider in German (“Chefs, redet über eure Ängste!”) on 15th April 2025.

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The Power of the Middle – Not even media leaders themselves think that they have the best ideas

Middle management in companies more often than not suffers from its infamous reputation. They are branded as rule-abiding busy bees, nitpickers who stick to processes just as much as they stick to their own chairs, managers, definitely not leaders. If they were, they would have long been promoted to the top – or so it is taught in many a business school. Former Siemens CEO Peter Löscher once spoke of a “clay layer,” the term even survived his own career in the company. A word that is like a slap in the face of all those tireless getting-things-doners who not only keep the company running on a daily basis, but also strive for constant improvement and overhaul, whether there is a crisis or not.

In the media industry, bosses are apparently no longer so sure about that clay layer. In the new “Journalism, media and technology trends and predictions” report by Nic Newman, which the Reuters Institute in Oxford publishes regularly at the beginning of the year, top managers were at least refreshingly self-critical about their own capacity to generate top ideas. Only about one in four (26 percent) of the 234 executives surveyed from 43 countries said they were convinced that top management generates the best ideas. The problem, as Nic Newman frames it: Innovation might not come from the top, “but companies are still run that way”. The report is not representative, but it is a must-read in the industry precisely because the respondents tend to be leaders who are particularly concerned about progress.

But where do they see innovation coming from? Nearly three-quarters revealed that data and audience research were most likely to give them a leg up, 68 percent bet on mixed teams from different areas, and still just under one in two admitted to borrowing the best strategies from other media companies. Okay, according to the survey, editors-in-chief and media managers trusted middle management as such even less (17 percent) than they trusted themselves. But who meets in the mixed teams, who evaluates audience data and derives strategies from it, who attends the relevant industry meetings, reads up on foreign material and then reports to the C-level? That’s right, in the very most common case, it’s the mid-level.

It is often those who are not celebrated as heroes in any industry publication and who neither management literature nor research has an eye on. They are the ones who are closest to the difficulties – and often therefore to the solutions. But they are also the ones for whom demands from employees and customers alike pile up into a sandwich of expectations. They are expected to be both operationally reliable and to think strategically and manage change. And if something goes wrong, it’s up to them to pick up the pieces and rebuild them into something else – in management-speak this is coined as “celebrating failure.

This layer of dedicated and loyal drivers of innovation, many of whom are at an age and in situations where family work demands additional work from them, is – no surprise – most at risk of burnout. Lucy Küng, who researches cultural change in media companies that go digital, has revealed this in countless interviews, including in her latest book: “Hearts and Minds: Harnessing Leadership, Culture and Talent to Really Go Digital.” This results in a huge brain and talent drain, she emphasizes again and again.

Yet many managers consider the mid level worthy of support only as long as they themselves are part of it. As soon as they have made it into top positions, they recoin themselves as visionaries. Gianpiero Petriglieri, a professor at INSEAD Business School, calls this “leaderism.” Instead of valuing reliable and constructive management, which is so necessary especially in times of crisis, he says, people celebrate visionaries whose ideas all too often go down with them. The glorification of leadership on the one hand and the devaluation of management qualities on the other is a dangerous pair of opposites that is still taught, but does more harm than good, especially in crises, he eloquently describes in the essay: “Why leadership isn’t a miracle cure for the Covid-19 crisis (and what can really help).” It is time to put less hope in leadership and more humanity into management, Petriglieri said. Judging by the “Trends and Predictions” report, many media managers already understand this. Humility can be the first step toward innovation.

This text was first published in German with Hamburg Media School Blog on 15th January 2021, then translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator and edited.