Why I Stopped Rolling My Eyes at Mental Health Month (And What I Do Instead)

#24 || A Leader’s Field Notes on Leveraging Organizational Practices for Human Connection

This team knew how to connect and have a little fun, too.

Here we go again: another panel, well-meaning webinar, and branded Zoom background. March celebrated women, April tackled autism and financial literacy, and now May waves the flag for mental health. I used to be the eye-roller—sometimes even while sitting on the panel or designing the poster. Don’t we have enough to do? Shouldn't we focus on this year-round?

I realized these months aren’t HR marketing ploys. They’re reminders to drop the task list and talk to our teams like humans, because relationships are the real work.

Valentine’s Day taught me the same lesson. I never understood why people liked those crowded, prix‑fixe dinners and price‑gouged roses—until my mom reinvented the holiday. She ditched the December card scramble and started mailing hand‑written Valentines: red marker, heart stickers, a poem. Friends kept them on the fridge for months. It proved that any ritual can be reclaimed and reconnected to what matters to us. I’ve carried on the tradition—sending heart‑stamped cards each February (though I still refuse to go out to dinner on February 14).

Results Follow Relationships

Earlier in my career, during Pride Month, one of my team members quietly came out during our weekly one-on-one. "I’ve been wanting to tell you," she said, "but never found the right moment." She would be bringing her girlfriend to the upcoming summer party and didn’t want me to be surprised. I had posted the requisite rainbow emoji in Slack and attended the company panel, but I hadn’t created the space for real conversation. I hadn’t signaled that I was truly available to listen. That moment stayed with me. How many other conversations had I missed by treating these awareness months as HR initiatives rather than leadership opportunities? I’d forward the webinar invitation, share the resource guide, then dive back into what I considered the "real work"—projects, deadlines, emails.

But here's what decades of leading teams have taught me: when relationships fray, results follow. I saw it last year when a high-performing team slowly unraveled, not from missed deadlines but missed signals. Team members stopped sharing concerns early, offering candid feedback, and trusting that someone would listen or respond to the feedback. When performance issues surfaced, the underlying connections had already broken down.

The data backs up what I've been seeing: Microsoft recently found that 85% of us would come to the office to rebuild relationships, but we want it to mean something. Not just because someone told us to.

Now, with teams scattered across time zones and screens, these designated moments for deeper conversation matter more than ever. They're not interruptions to our work—they're essential maintenance for the human infrastructure that makes all other work possible. And this infrastructure needs more maintenance than ever. While we debate whether we're heading for a financial recession, researchers have already identified another one: a friendship recession. Pew Research reports that 53% of U.S. adults have only one to four close friends, while 8% have none.

Why Ambient Connection Matters

I felt the power of ambient connection when I left my last company. A colleague—one of the few of us who came into the office regularly (we lived a few blocks away)—told me quietly as I packed my things, “It’s going to feel lonely without you here.” I joked that he still had the snacks (those gummies!), but he was serious, and I understood. I would miss him, too. Even during heads‑down times, it helped to glance up and see him—and the rest of the team who came in that day—typing away. We could trade a question without opening Slack and duck into a conference room for a five‑minute brainstorm instead of launching a three‑day email thread.

Hybrid hasn’t killed that vibe; it just forces us to create it more intentionally. With a distributed team, I’d drop into video calls five minutes early and let everyone know I was there. Those unguarded minutes of small talk replaced what we’d lost in the hallway. One colleague held a weekly camera‑on office hours slot for work questions or catch-ups. Most people who showed up just wanted that catch-up!

Proximity has changed, but people haven’t. We still need deliberate touchpoints reminding us we’re not alone and are still in this together.

Communication ≠ Connection

Even as we recognize that relationships drive results, we keep making the same mistake: conflating communication with connection. We think more tools, touchpoints, check-ins, and updates will strengthen relationships, yet somehow, we feel more isolated.

More platforms, tools, apps, and newsfeeds make us “digitally lonely.” Feelings of disconnection keep rising, and the answer is not another AI friend (Thanks anyway, Mark). Many of my colleagues have even started stepping away from platforms like LinkedIn. Not because they don’t value connection, but because the content feels increasingly inauthentic—automated, performative, optimized more for visibility and communicating rather than genuinely connecting and contributing something. I’ve noticed myself stepping away, too. I’ve thought a lot about how to reconfigure what I write, share, and communicate in a way that is genuine to me and impactful to others. The more I learn about AI, the more I understand what many of us are also experiencing: AI tools are tools, not replacements. AI can help me structure a one-on-one, but it can’t make eye contact. It can’t notice when someone pauses before answering. And it can’t build trust. That’s on me.

OpenAI recently had to roll back a ChatGPT update because its AI became a people-pleaser on steroids. This is a reminder that even AI needs the proper guardrails to be truly helpful. These tools can enhance our work, but they need boundaries and us to verify their output and ensure they're actually serving their purpose. The lesson isn’t to stop using AI or any of these tools that help us connect—it’s to use them responsibly, check in with ourselves, and make sure our tools amplify our leadership and humanity, not replace it.

This balance between tools and human connection becomes especially critical during awareness months, when it’s tempting to let automated posts and pre-packaged programs do the heavy lifting. But just as AI can't replace genuine leadership, a corporate wellness webinar can't replace real conversation.

Three Practices for Mental Health Month (and Beyond)

As I wrote in ReCulturing, culture isn't just what we say—it's what we practice, consistently. Here are three ways to transform Mental Health Awareness Month from a corporate initiative into a meaningful connection:

• Turn a Panel into a Conversation: Instead of just attending another mental health webinar, use it as an opening to discuss in your 1:1. "That speaker mentioned burnout. Here’s when I have felt burnt out (share a story). How are you doing? How can I support you?" Let the silence hang.

• Create Safety through Structure: Use these themes to normalize tough conversations. During one Mental Health Awareness Month, I shared that I valued health. Going to the gym and meditating were core practices to my physical and emotional health. I also told them that my 3 PM appointments on Wednesdays were not movable since they were my therapy sessions. After that, nobody rescheduled their therapy sessions anymore.

• Make Mental Health Part of Work: Instead of keeping wellness initiatives separate from "real work," integrate them. During Mental Health Awareness Month, I asked a team member struggling with anxiety about how we were running our meetings to facilitate a meeting effectiveness review. Her perspective helped us cut unnecessary meetings and create tighter agendas. Sometimes, the best person to solve a problem is the one who feels it most acutely.

So this month, don’t just mark Mental Health Awareness Month. Model it. Let your leadership be the most human thing you offer. Because hashtags fade. Human connection sticks.

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The Small Mental‑Health Habits I’m Experimenting With

1. Dialing back the speed. No more podcasts at 1.5×. Listening at normal speed slows my brain enough to think while taking in new ideas, and I retain twice as much.

2. Long‑form journaling, daily. Writing by hand clears the noise. I’ve been dealing with writer’s block—Suleika Jaouad came just in time to help me through that. Her strength and resilience facing cancer for the third time inspire me—her Isolation Journals substack and her new book, The Book of Alchemy, are my daily companions.

3. Watching less, reading more. I moved unread books from the shelf to a chair‑side stack that stares at me until I open one. First up: Lorne—because talent development at SNL is a master class in leadership. And more reading makes for better writing.

4. Inbox dieting. I unsubscribed from almost everything. Now I dip into Substack, Every, or Pocket on my schedule—reading for insight, not inbox combat. No more cram‑reading just to hit inbox zero.

5. Leaving the scroll. I quit Instagram in January. I miss the photos and life updates, but I gained real‑life phone calls with friends I hadn’t heard from in ages, and made space for last-minute outings. Even a 30‑day break is worth it.

   

   With my nephew, Jacob, and Petra at Moth Story Slam Night in San Francisco—a somewhat last-minute gathering on a Tuesday evening

Your turn: What small experiments are keeping you sane lately?