What you need to know:

• Former AFP senior Gary Fahey knows how to spot the signs of acute stress, depression and burnout. He almost went to prison for fraud after blowing tens of thousands of dollars on his government-issued credit card to feed a gambling addiction.
• Now a crisis intervention specialist, he says an increasing number of C-suite execs within media and marketing are seeking help, up 300 per cent this year, albeit off a low base. But to Fahey, it’s an early warning sign.
• The media supply chain is increasingly susceptible, says Fahey, after a gruelling post-Covid boom, followed by a protracted economic downturn and now stalked by AI, piling on pressure to sector already running at full speed, 24/7.
• Which is leading to increased risk of “a weird” sort of executive burnout: “Burnout masked as productivity, people working harder but getting less done; and poor impulse control – reverting to maladaptive coping strategies, be that drugs, alcohol, gambling… Fill in the blanks.”
• But there are ways to start to fix it, and Fahey – though he perhaps doesn’t know it – channels marketing effectiveness supremos Binet & Field. via Socrates.

Quarter 22, 2020

“It’s almost as if the world, and particular this sector – media, marketing, tech – has been running flat out since Covid,” says Gary Fahey, an ex-AFP senior officer who was also Kevin Rudd’s bodyguard, before being charged with fraud for using his AFP-issued credit card to blow tens of thousands of dollars to feed a spiralling gambling addiction.

He gambled $1.7m in total before getting busted, then seeking help, and then rebuilding his life as a performance psychologist and crisis intervention consultant.

Now he sees some risky accumulators racking up as senior executives grapple with compound pressure.

‘No release valve’

Fahey likens the sector as akin to the stock trading floor just prior to the 2008 financial crash.

“Everyone is almost clambering over everyone else, nobody stops, resets, refreshes… And if you run on the treadmill without stopping, at some point there’s going to be failure – a critical failure.”

Fahey said the number of media and marketing execs calling him for help has increased 300 per cent in the last 12 months. He admits that is off a low base, but from zero at the start of last year, the sector now makes up 20 per cent of his client-list. Fahey thinks it’s the tip of the iceberg as the marketing supply chain creaks under heightened and sustained pressure.

“By the time I see people, crisis or breakdown is an acute result of a chronic issue,” Fahey told Mi3. He thinks the pressure in media is approaching its upper limit.

“It’s the way the industry runs – media, marketing, digital product – it’s 24/7. Everyone in the world participates [through consumption] and increasingly so. There are no outside business hours.”

After the pandemic came a tailwind boom followed by a protracted economic squeeze. Now much of the marketing supply chain and its business model is being stalked by AI – and Fahey thinks execs are struggling to stay on the treadmill for fear of being overtaken.

“There is no release valve,” he says. Which is why more people are on the brink.

C-suite: ‘Weird burnout’

In the immediate post-Covid aftermath, industry bosses were vocal about recognising the pressure on staff across their businesses – senior and junior employees were urged to ‘bring their whole selves to work’ and not be afraid to open-up about the pressure and challenges they faced.

But there was a labour shortage amid a massive rebound, leading to rampant poaching and over-promotion that some warned could lead to burnout down the track. A year later, those predictions appeared to be on the money, when a 2022 poll suggested more than a third of media agency staff were displaying moderate to severe symptoms of depression and headhunters reported that three quarters of candidate conversations ended up discussing poor mental health.

Fahey is in no way downplaying the affects of stress and depression across all age groups, but says those seeking his help are “predominantly C-suite executive level operators”.

“The younger crowd will no doubt be feeling pressure,” he says, both personally and professionally amid a sustained cost of living squeeze while being asked to do ever more at work.

“But they are a little more fluid, they haven’t taken the hits for as long and they are capable of mobility. They can change jobs, employers, systems, sectors. But when someone has put 15-20 years into an industry, the build up of stress eventually gets to you,” per Fahey.

“It’s very difficult to reach out in your own industry and make it public knowledge – because when you’re the boss, the leader, the problem-solver, you feel you can’t be seen to be struggling in front of your team.”

Hence, whereas business leaders (and everyone else) might be “mindful” of the widespread nature of mental health challenges, “this is one of those issues that is different at the population level than at the individual level”, says Fahey.

“We all accept it is a real issue and want to support people to come forward – except when it is you. I genuinely think that is the problem. People still have that fear that the minute the cat is let out of the bag, everything changes and they won’t get a chance to put it back in. Which means people hold off longer.”

Then they retreat into themselves, and little by little, the problems and pressure compounds. Fahey says a crisis is rarely the result of a single event, but builds until it overwhelms.

“It’s usually chronic stress, some sort of vulnerability in the system, mismanagement of resources, energy, time… and over a period of time that just breaks down and leads to poor decision-making and ultimately burnout,” he says.

“But it’s a weird burnout; burnout masked as productivity, people working harder but getting less done; and poor impulse control – reverting to maladaptive coping strategies, be that drugs, alcohol, gambling… Fill in the blanks.”

Performance v crisis

Fahey says his work is split two ways – ‘performance’ and ‘crisis’.

“‘Performance‘ is someone who’s good trying to be great – so they’re coming in strictly for professional development and I couch a lot of my work as ‘performance enhancement’,” he says.

“It’s a lot safer for people to seek personal development. I believe mental health and wellbeing is a performance enhancer – if you manage them, your performance improves. That is the language high-performing executives understand, rather than delving into what happened when they were children. There is a time and a place for that as well, but my place is to bridge that gap,” says Fahey.

“Whereas ‘crisis’ is when something’s gone wrong and they need help quick to fix it.” Lately, he says, “there has been a big shift in the reason people calling me because something has gone wrong.”

‘Work consumes you’

The problem for many senior execs is that their work has gradually claimed their identity.  

“The nature of ‘crisis’ enquiries I’m receiving primarily come in one of two ways,” per Fahey. “Firstly, ‘I have nothing in my life apart from work’. So they have forgotten how to experience relationships, connection, fun, meaning, purpose.

“The second is when those people have stepped over the line and got themselves into those maladaptive coping strategies: alcohol, drugs, families breaking down, wives and husbands threatening to leave or leaving … They are at a moment where they don’t know what to do – and the second is usually an extension of the first.”

While noting an increase in marketing-media crises, Fahey suggests the rise applies “across white collar professionals – more than any other sector”. (He also works with professional sports people, but that tends to be “when they do something dumb” rather than acute stress management.) 

“The world is tight right now and everyone is feeling it. When the going is good, when life is good, when business is good, there is a lot of tolerance in the system and you can get away with not sleeping great for a couple of nights, a few extra drinks, not eating properly… But at the current time, the tolerance is not very wide – and in times of extreme stress, that is when the cracks appear.”

How to fix it

While there may be few release valves in the mechanics of a 24/7 industry, Fahey says there are ways individuals can manage stress. “The problem is, too many people don’t execute their work life or personal life with any level of conscious thought,” he suggests, and the two are increasingly intertwined.

There are perhaps tenuous parallels with marketing’s pressured lurch to short-term performance investments in order to hit quarterly targets, and the wash through the supply chain: Eventually, performance stops working and long term health suffers, requiring a rebalance.

“People need to extend their time horizon, and most find it very difficult with short-term goals to look out into the future,” says Fahey. “How does today’s life fit into tomorrow’s success?” He talks about building “efficient ecosystems” that enable high performance “so that people can manage the stress of high workload and not fall off the treadmill”.

Ultimately, he says, “the primary function is to move towards making conscious decisions in your life. That relies on you having an understanding of who you are, your identity, your purpose and then your mission, your goals. That is the first step”.

There are tactics to manage stress on a daily basis – “breathwork, journaling, meditation, mindfulness, exercise, cold showers … but they only work until they don’t work,” says Fahey. “These are great tools, but they are usually not deployed on any sort of foundation. You have to put them on that foundation of ID and purpose.”

Which means finding some time to think. Easier said than done, but critical, says Fahey.

“It’s certainly not about people stopping their careers or taking their focus off high performance, it’s about how to include high performance in everything that’s important to you. But most people don’t know what that is – and that is the problem.”

“From there it’s about inculcating what you do into who you are – rather than what you do actually becoming who you are. People end up identifying as the thing that they do. In almost every client I see, that is the problem – they have totally wrapped themselves around their career as their sole identity. You arrive there subconsciously, a couple of extra hours here, deadline pressure there, giving up a weekend for work… Suddenly four years go by, you’ve hardly spoken to your wife or husband, you find yourself drinking every night after work… and you almost don’t know how you got there,” he says.

“It’s hard to see people go through it,” says Fahey. “I’ve been there myself.”

Recognition and prevention, he suggests, is better than cure – and starts by taking the first step.

“Take an hour to make a plan.”