Kansas Clinic Helps Stressed Executives to Decompress

Corporations downsize. That means friends are fired. Long hours mean you don’t see your family. You were unhappy when you didn’t get promoted. When the promotion came, you were still unhappy.

Arguments at home. Office relations are strained. The kid’s sick. Another board meeting. And the bottom line is you can’t remember the last time you ate a hot dog at a baseball game.

That’s the condition some senior executives or their subordinates are in when they attend a Menninger Clinic seminar for managers. The clinic, a sprawling psychiatric hospital on the edge of Topeka, is considered one of the best in the nation. Since 1956, it has provided businesses and industry with services designed to improve relations on the job and to promote efficiency.

Some seminar participants are high performance managers battling burnout. Some just need to take a little time out to learn something about themselves and other people.

“Corporate America is burning both ends of the candle at the same time,” said Dr. Donald Rosen, a psychiatrist who is director of the Menninger Leadership Center. “What I see is people living their lives at full bore.”

“Most people we have worked with are in a real bind,” Rosen said.

“They’re going through fairly intense experiences at work in secrecy and parallel to the people they work with. Parallel because they are all part of the same culture, and in secrecy because they report to each other.

“They have ongoing relationships that really prevent them from being too supportive of each other,” Rosen said.

During the five-day seminar, things are a little different.

This is what Rosen will tell these top-flight executives: “Put the cards on the table and talk about whatever you want to talk about regarding your professional development and your personal development.”

And that is what they do, said Charles Griffin of Washington.

“We talked about ourselves and it became very personal,” said Griffin, who is regulatory director in the government liaison office of AT&T.; “We bonded very quickly.”

The business climate has changed a lot in the past two decades, said Griffin, 51, who holds master’s degrees in both physics and management.

“Corporations have had to adapt or die,” he added. “I thought I needed to understand a little bit more about what it meant not only to manage but to survive in this climate.”

Rosen understands that climate. He reads the Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, Business Week and other publications that chronicle the course of American commerce. “It helps inculcate me into that environment,” he said.

Uncertainty has become a fact of life in a downsized business world, and it takes its toll, Rosen said.

“I think most individuals are looking for a sense of productivity and stability, and they’re experiencing corporate America as increasingly insecure,” he said.

The seminars, with about 20 people each, are held either at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka or on a white water raft trip on the Salmon River in Idaho. The raft trip is intended as a teaching tool.

“Most people are not experienced at white water rafting, and part of the point of the seminar is that people learn new things,” Rosen said. “They do it physically as well as intellectually.”

Topics include morale, balancing professional and personal lives, the ever-changing relationship between employer and employee and how to help employees navigate through stormy weather.

Management, to a considerable degree, is problem-solving, Rosen said, and most of those problems are interpersonal ones.

“That’s the part that most management programs really don’t address, and that’s the part we really focus on,” Rosen said. “It’s the human component that is our strength.”