Practice 1: Leadership: Cultivate a Caring Culture Focused on Community Well-Being
Create a healthy and caring community and foster genuine community support and a sense of belonging. Engage leadership around a mindset that mental health and suicide prevention are important pieces of the overall health and safety concerns of the community.
Why is this important and what does this practice entail?
When planning and implementing upstream suicide prevention practices, leaders and managers must focus efforts that cultivate a culture of compassion and resilience by strategically aligning psychological safety initiatives with other core components of the organization. By honing and modeling skills of self-care, emotional intelligence and empathy, managers can demonstrate how taking care of one another is key to the mission of the work. Leaders can also decrease blame culture by empowering a learning environment for managers that gives them adequate training, supervision, and support resources.
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Action Steps:
1. Nominate/Select a leader or leaders at (or near) the top of the organization to help spearhead the implementation of the National Guidelines for Workplace Suicide Prevention.
2. Prepare this leader by giving them the Quick Reference Guide: https://workplacesuicideprevention.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/20191113-2-Pager-Workplace-Suicide-Prevention.pdf
3. Help leader(s) define their roles and responsibilities.