Why I Hired an Executive with a
Mental Illness by ROB LACHENAUER Comments |  January 27, 2014 A few years ago, I was interviewing a candidate for a
substantial position in our firm. Although the
candidate and I had exchanged a number of emails,
this was our first meeting. We got along very well.
Then something unexpected happened: She looked
me in the eye and said that she struggled with “mental illness.” She added that she’d been on meds
for more than a decade, and that there had been no
episode during that time. But she wanted me to hear
about her condition directly from her, in case I had
any questions. We talked about her mental health, but only for a few
minutes. I had never been in this situation before, and
I honestly wasn’t sure what to say. I thanked her for
her integrity, and we moved on. My reaction to the candidate’s disclosure was,
frankly, disbelief — disbelief that she found the
courage to make herself so vulnerable before she was
hired. She had to be interviewed by other members of
the firm before I could invite her to join us, but we did
hire her — and over the past few years, she has become not only a core member of our team, but a
large part of the glue that holds the firm together. The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 prevents
employers from discriminating against people who
have a mental illness. But my experience as a
consultant at a very large strategy firm whose clients
are giant corporations had been that if someone
admitted that he or she struggled with depression or mental illness, that would often be career suicide.
Indeed, a former vice president of a major investment
banking firm, when told about this blog, warned me
against publishing it: “Clients are afraid to work with
firms that have mentally ill people on the professional
staff.” True, times are changing. We now read books and
newspaper articles written by people who are brave
enough to share with others their pain and their
resilience — but, typically, these memoirs are not
written by individuals who work in business. And
while there are stories about executives in the C-suite who suffer from depression, these stories are rare. I myself seldom heard people talk openly of
depression in the workplace until I left the consulting
firm where I’d worked to begin advising owners of
leading family businesses. Much to my surprise, I
found that these extremely successful family
business owners don’t draw a sharp (and artificial) line between “us” and “them” – the mentally healthy
and those less healthy. They don’t because they
know they can’t. Those who suffer from mental
illness are not anonymous shareholders, or nameless
employees, but rather brothers, mothers, cousins,
grandfathers, sons, and daughters. In family businesses, “they” are “us.” This universality of mental illness is not something
that is peculiar to family businesses. It is an integral
part of the human condition, and reliable
epidemiological studies confirm that there are no
families that are completely immune to mental illness.
Family businesses can’t escape these difficult emotional realities because they can’t just fire the guy
suffering from depression when he is the majority
owner. The successful families do find ways to work
together. But even then, things are messy in family
businesses, and it is out of this very messiness that
the human side of capitalism emerges. Businesses don’t have a great track record with the
mentally ill. Today, according to the National Alliance
on Mental Illness, some 60% to 80% of people with
mental illness are unemployed. In part, this is the
crippling nature of the disease. But a large part of the
problem that we have in hiring people who have some mental disorder is that we lack the sophisticated
vocabulary to talk and act regarding these illnesses.
How often have you heard it said that somebody “had
a nervous breakdown”— that vague 1950s
euphemism — and had no way to know exactly what
this meant? With problems of the body, we have plenty of words
to differentiate among, say, the common cold, the flu,
and pneumonia. Managers are comfortable with
physical illnesses. We can plan for how long the
employee will either be out of work or unable to work
at full tilt. By contrast, mental illness is thought of as “all or nothing.”  You’re either depressed, or you’re
not; mentally ill, or not. Yet the reality is that the
mental illnesses, too, are nuanced. We all have more
or less mental health at different times in our lives.
But the lack of a working language, together with the
terrible secrecy that festers around mental illness, makes understanding one another, and collaborating
effectively, extremely difficult. That’s a real pity, because sometimes it’s the person
with the mental illness who can provide the cohesion,
the humanity, or the breakthrough idea that separates
your organization from all the rest. I am not a person
who romanticizes mental illness. I do not believe that
people on the edge of mania, for example, are more productively creative, insightful, or more brilliant. But
I do believe that talented people who suffer from
mental illness can add to the mix some different, and
important, perspectives. It’s this diversity that is so
crucial to good decision-making, and which gives an
organization the competitive edge. In the case of my colleague (who gave her blessing to
this piece), what she brought to the table was deep
self-awareness, a keen mind, and profound emotional
intelligence. Working closely with her opened my
eyes to finding talent – and a different kind of talent –
where I had never seen it before. And when I am talking to candidates nowadays, in the final interview
round, I ask them to tell me something deeply
meaningful to them personally. Not everybody needs
— or cares — to be so open as my colleague was, but
if candidates can’t share some vulnerability, they’re
out. They may be good, but they’re not good enough to work in any business which demands that we be
fully human.