WRITTEN BY FRIEDA LEVYCKY, FOUNDER OF BRAVING BOUNDARIES
A few weeks ago, something happened that I have not been able to stop thinking about. I was due to get on a call with a service provider, but, that morning, the call was cancelled because of illness. No problem, these things happen. We rescheduled for the following day and joined the call as planned. I asked, as you do, whether they were feeling better and it was what came next that caught me completely off guard:
“Yes, much better thanks. We had an off-site last week and I was pretty tired and not really feeling it yesterday, so I moved the call.”
Now, I want to be honest with you: my face probably twitched. Those of you who know me will know that my face has never been particularly good at hiding what my brain is thinking. However, what was far more interesting than my expression was what was happening inside my head. Two very distinct voices were clearly in combat at exactly the same time.
The coach in me said: “Hmm. OK. They took a mental health day. It is a generational thing. Keep an open mind.”.
The lawyer in me said something considerably less measured, which I will summarise as: “You actually thought that was an appropriate thing to say to a client?”.
There it was. The generational gap, playing out in real time. Not between me and the service provider, but between the two parts of me.
Before we explore this further, take a moment to think how you would react. Are you with my coach’s voice or my lawyer’s voice?
Why did I react so viscerally?
Before I point any fingers, I think it is worth sitting with that question honestly.
I was trained, professionally and personally, in an era where you did not bring your personal life into a client relationship. You showed up and you delivered. If you were having a bad day, a difficult week or a full-blown crisis, that was managed privately and it did not become your client’s problem to absorb. The boundary between the personal and the professional was clear and crossing it, particularly in the direction of a client, was simply not done.
That is not a generational flaw. It produced a great deal of reliability, accountability and mutual respect. It also, I will admit, produced a great deal of suppression, burnout and people falling apart behind closed doors because asking for help felt like weakness.
So, when I heard that explanation, my visceral reaction was not purely about professionalism. It was also the echo of a system I was shaped by bumping up against a system that is being actively dismantled by the generation coming through. That’s a positive. I mean, it’s something I am actively trying to change.
Is honesty always a virtue?
Here is where it gets genuinely interesting because I do believe in honesty. It is one of the values that sits at the heart of everything I do.
Honesty, though, is not a single, undifferentiated thing. There is the honesty that builds trust and the honesty that transfers your discomfort onto someone else. There is the honesty that is brave and the honesty that is, perhaps, a little careless.
When you tell a client that you cancelled a call because you were tired and not feeling it, you are being honest. You are also, whether you intend to or not, making them the custodian of information they did not ask for and cannot really do anything useful with. It subtly shifts the dynamic. It puts them in the position of having to decide how to feel about it, whether to say something, whether to be concerned or irritated or sympathetic. That is a lot to hand someone in a professional relationship.
The question I keep returning to is this: who does that honesty serve?
The Mental Health Day debate
Several countries have moved to enshrine the concept of the “Mental Health Day” formally. In the Netherlands, the approach to sick leave has long included mental and emotional wellbeing as valid grounds for absence, without the requirement to produce a medical certificate. Australia’s personal and carer’s leave provisions similarly cover mental health. New Zealand has led the way on wellbeing-related leave more broadly. The direction of travel globally is unambiguous. We are moving towards a world that takes mental health as seriously as physical health … and that is the right direction.
The existence of a right, however, does not automatically come with a roadmap for how to exercise it thoughtfully (particularly when clients are involved).
If you work in a service environment, your clients have made commitments based on your availability. They may have prepared, cleared time in their diary or arranged their own team around your meeting. When that falls away at short notice, there is a knock-on effect. Taking a mental health day is entirely reasonable. Doing so in a way that is planned around your commitments, communicated with appropriate notice and without a level of personal detail that puts the client in an awkward position, that is where the responsibility lies.
The right to the day and the responsibility for how you take it are two separate conversations and we often conflate them.
Is this a generational mismatch or simply a professional one?
I have gone back and forth on this more times than I can count. Part of me wonders whether I am simply old and whether this is exactly the kind of situation where I need to update my thinking rather than reach for the comfort of: “that is not how things are done“. Younger generations have grown up in a world where mental health is discussed openly, where vulnerability is not weakness and where bringing your whole self to work is actively encouraged. These are genuinely positive shifts.
There is, however, a distinction that sometimes gets lost in that conversation, which is the difference between internal culture and external relationships.
Within a team, within an organisation, the norms around honesty about wellbeing, around naming when you are struggling and around creating psychological safety, these can and should be progressive. Managers and leaders have a real responsibility to build environments where people feel they can say: “I am not doing well today” without fear of judgement or consequence.
The client relationship is a different animal. Not because clients are less important than colleagues, but because the nature of the contract is different. A client is not there to support your development. They are there because they need something from you and they have made themselves vulnerable by trusting you to deliver it. That dynamic calls for a different kind of care.
What does this mean for Leaders and Teams?
If you manage people, particularly across generations, this scenario is almost certainly going to land on your desk at some point, if it has not already.
Here are the questions I think are worth considering:
- Have you had the explicit conversation? Many teams assume their people know where the professional line sits with clients. Often, they do not. Not because they are careless, but because the line has genuinely shifted and nobody has drawn it clearly. Do not assume. Have the conversation.
- Are you managing up as well as managing down? If your team takes a mental health day, what is the plan for client commitments that day? Who is managing the communication and the rescheduling? A wellbeing-positive culture does not mean the client becomes collateral damage. Building that responsibility into the conversation is part of what it means to lead well.
- Are you distinguishing between the right and the execution? You can fully support someone’s right to take time for their mental health and still give them feedback on how they communicated it to a client. Those are not contradictory positions. In fact, holding both at once is exactly what good leadership looks like.
- Are you examining your own reaction? As I sat with my twitching face and my warring inner voices, what I realised is that my discomfort was telling me something useful, not just about the other person, but about my own assumptions, my own conditioning and the ways in which I still have some updating to do. That is not comfortable, but it is valuable.
Where does the line sit now?
What I do think is that the line has moved and that is not inherently a problem. What creates problems is when the line moves without anyone in the room agreeing on where it now sits. When one person is operating from the old map and another from the new one and nobody has noticed the discrepancy, you get exactly the kind of jarring situation I experienced on that call.
The solution is not to go back to a world where nobody was allowed to be human at work. Nor is it to abandon all professional discretion in the name of authenticity. It is to have the explicit, sometimes uncomfortable, conversations about what we expect of each other across generations, across roles and in the different contexts in which we operate.
That, in my view, is where the real work lies.
What do you think? Have you experienced a situation like this, either as the person reacting or the person who said something that landed differently than you expected? I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
Frieda Levycky is the Founder of Braving Boundaries, a coaching and training practice based in Cape Town. She works with individuals and teams to navigate change, build self-awareness and create healthier, more effective ways of working together.