Dr. Adam Mark Harrison is a leader in the fields of well-being, workplace bullying, and leadership. After experiencing burnout and being a target of workplace bullying as a junior doctor, the second stage of his career has nurtured a strong interest in coaching individuals affected by these challenges, for which he received an international award in 2024. To broaden his reach and deepen his impact, he has expanded his approach by creating and facilitating training events on topics such as personal and workplace well-being, workplace bullying, the benefits of kindness in the workplace, and 'How to be a Great Leader', in multiple countries around the globe. He is also enjoying more recent roles as a company director and trustee of a charity which aims to end adult bullying in New Zealand’s organisations.
Dr. Adam Mark Harrison, Leadership and Wellbeing Coach and Trainer
Introduce yourself! Please tell us about you and your life, so we can get to know you better.
I am a walking, talking, example of the people I help professionally.
I am a British former General Practitioner (Family Physician), married to a female surgeon with whom I have two incredible young daughters. As a family, we relocated from the UK to New Zealand in January 2024 for a better way of life, and, just over a year later, it is proving to have been a great move.
I was born in the UK to working-class parents, and I have two amazing younger sisters and an inspirational mum. I graduated from medical school in 2000 and worked as a trainee surgeon for several years, during which I was on the receiving end of quite a lot of bullying from my bosses.
After a few years, I transferred to General Practice (Family Medicine) training and qualified as a GP in 2008. I was always fascinated by the crossover between medicine and law, and in 2009, I began working for a medicolegal company. I soon got frustrated handing cases over to the legal department, so went to law school in 2011 and retrained as a barrister (a courtroom legal advocate in the UK), passing the bar exams in 2014.
This led me to a career in medical leadership (that’s another story!) and in 2016 I was elected to the board of a local medical organisation and appointed to the role of Assistant Medical Director in my region of the NHS (the British state health service). Two years later, I was elected Vice-Chair of that local medical organisation and Medical Director of the Urgent Treatment Centre in Nottingham.
In July 2019 my family and I moved to Darwin in Australia, where we lived for eighteen months. While there, I undertook my life, leadership and executive coach training and worked as a tutor to female Indigenous mature medical students and GP Undergraduate Course Leader. I was upset to hear from some of my tutees that they had also been the targets of bullying by their senior clinical supervisors while on ward-based attachments. It was then that I knew I had to do something to help individual victims of workplace bullying and do my best to detoxify organisations and their toxic leadership cultures.
I now coach individual professionals, mainly leaders and executives, and put on workshops for organisations on the subjects of workplace wellbeing, kindness in the workplace, and effective leadership. In addition to that, I am a company director, a charity trustee, a business consultant (mainly to healthcare start-ups), a keynote speaker and a podcaster (I created and host the show ‘Inspiring Women Leaders’: https://healthpodcastnetwork.com/show/inspiring-women-leaders/).
Other than passionately wanting the world (and workplaces) to be a kinder place, I love spending time with my family, listening to audiobooks with a range of genres, watching movies (again, of all kinds) and practising karate.
What inspired you to transition from a successful career in medicine and law to becoming a certified coach, and how has your background in these fields influenced your coaching practice?
When I worked as an Assistant Medical Director for the UK National Health Service, I was fortunate enough to receive a course of leadership coaching, and to say it was transformative would be an understatement. I was 42 years of age at the time and it was honestly the first time in my life that I had ever sat down, completed a values survey, and reflected on the results (my five core values were and still are honesty, justice, gratitude, love and humour).
Since then, not only have I tried to live each day and every moment of those days in alignment with my core values, but I also ask each new client and leadership workshop participant of mine, to complete that same survey ( you can register here for the free Values in Action survey to discover your values, if this is something you’re interested in: https://www.viacharacter.org/account/register).
And because I loved my experience of being coached so much, I decided my life could be so much more impactful in the world if I worked as a coach myself rather than carrying on working as a physician.
As a doctor, especially a Family Physician, with well-honed communication skills, and as an appraiser of my medical colleagues, accustomed to celebrating their wins and setting them several SMART goals for the coming year, going into coaching was a natural move for me, like a homecoming. Additionally, training and working as a coach has conferred reciprocal benefits on me, improving both my personal and professional achievements and enhancing my communication skills more than I thought possible.
Given your personal experiences with burnout, what are the key strategies you recommend for preventing burnout among healthcare professionals and other high-stress occupations?
Burnout is a growing concern among professionals in high-stress occupations, including healthcare workers, corporate executives, educators, and first responders. Chronic stress, excessive workloads, and emotional exhaustion can lead to reduced productivity, mental fatigue, and even severe health issues. Hence implementing effective burnout prevention strategies is essential for maintaining well-being and long-term career success.
The starting point for most problems of this nature is to recognise and understand the symptoms of burnout, which include:
Feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion;
Increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one's job; and
Reduced professional efficacy.
Then, once you have felt these symptoms within yourself, admit that you have a problem (this does, of course, rely on a good amount of personal insight (aka ‘self-awareness’, an essential component of Emotional Intelligence, EQ) and a willingness to allow yourself to be vulnerable, but this is the only way that the healing can begin). After this stage, how can we begin to combat burnout?
Firstly, manage the acute symptoms of exhaustion, stress, low mood, inability to do your job properly etc. n.b. these may not be immediately apparent in certain professionals, especially doctors, many of whom may have ‘high-functioning burnout’, which may involve hiding it from others and even yourself and managing to function at a high-level despite it, but this cannot last and the eventual crash is inevitable.
Secondly, take some time off work and see your GP (Family Doctor) for a diagnosis and subsequent advice; after all, the symptoms of burnout can mimic other conditions like anxiety and depression.
Of course, as the saying goes, “Prevention is better than cure”, so here are some ways of preventing burnout:
Seek peer support
We know that positive workplace cultures play a significant role in reducing stress, but it’s thought that relationships are key to preventing burnout in the workplace. A team that actively supports each other both practically (for example, helping each other with tasks on busy days) and emotionally (for example, asking ‘how are you?’ and actively listening to the answer) is less likely to struggle with burnout.
To combat physical and emotional exhaustion, rest when needed, integrate self-care into your daily schedule, and protect your work-life balance, which includes doing things like:
Taking regular breaks and all your annual leave. These breaks are essential for your mental health and therefore essential for productivity and best outcomes.
Trying to ensure you fully switch off from work when away from it.
Working on maintaining your boundaries and becoming more assertive, saying “No” more.
To help you reconnect with colleagues and clients on a more personal level:
Practice self-compassion (when you have compassion for yourself and can be with your feelings, it makes it easier to cultivate greater compassion towards others n.b. Dr Kristin Neff); and,
Connect with our common humanity (try to connect with people beyond just the colleague-colleague or server-client roles).
To help you remember that what you do matters:
Acknowledge your successes e.g. by celebrating wins; and,
Identify what you can and can’t control along the lines of Stephen Covey’s circles of control, influence and remoteness.
By implementing these strategies, professionals can enhance their mental resilience, job satisfaction, and overall well-being, ensuring sustained success in high-pressure careers. If these steps don’t help, you must seek professional help.
What motivated you to start the "Inspiring Women Leaders" podcast, and what impact do you hope it has on your audience, particularly in terms of supporting female leadership?
I first had the idea for the show around August-September 2019 when my family and I were living in Darwin, Australia, having moved there in July 2019 for my wife’s year-long Surgical Fellowship.
I was chatting to a friend of mine, British Family Physician and wellbeing expert Dr Helen Garr, telling her about all the amazing female leaders, in addition to her, that it had been my great fortune and privilege to have worked with or got to know in other ways e.g. through coaching courses I had done, over recent years. At that time, I was thinking about creating and hosting a conference for these incredible women to come together and speak about their wonderful leadership styles, but the pandemic arrived six months later and we had to stay in Darwin for an extra six months, so the planning for that idea took a back seat.
I never lost that desire to share those women’s stories and wisdom though, and being away from the rat race back home and living in one of the most relaxed places on Earth, enabled me to spend time on reflection that I wouldn’t normally have had.
It occurred to me, putting the fantastic female leaders I know to one side for a moment, that we don’t need to look any further afield than our own families for some examples of exceptional female leadership. I had been surrounded by strong, resilient, resourceful, compassionate women my whole life.
For example, my wife is a woman of colour and fearsome mama lioness, yet kind caring surgeon, who has been respected by all her colleagues, clinical and non-clinical alike, for her inclusivity and team-centredness, in every unit she has worked in over the years. My mum is an extremely mentally-resilient woman who, while holding down three jobs simultaneously at one point, brought my sisters and me up with tenderness and enough love to fill each of us up and have some to spare, which more than made up for the lack of money and material items we had. My sisters, who lived through my mum and stepfather’s turbulent marriage with me, have both gone on to become successful professionals and happy family-orientated women. And then there are my young daughters, the next generation, who never cease to inspire, amuse, educate and challenge me, in equal measure, every day - they are who I am creating this podcast for.
I’d love to be able to look back at the end of my life and say that I genuinely feel I made some small impact, in my corner of the world, to help women achieve the gender equality they deserve and make the workplace a kinder less toxic place to be for people like my daughters and nieces and all the other daughters and sisters out there.
As a male ally, I have learned so much about strong kind human-centred leadership and overcoming adversity, from my female mentors, as well as gaining insights into my leadership failures and successes. With my male privilege, I will never be able to fully empathise with my female colleagues and with my white male privilege, despite being married to a British Pakistani woman, I will never fully understand the challenges women of colour face in their day-to-day work. This is why I feel it is so essential to get their voices heard and why I want to highlight the amazing lessons we can learn from them, which I hope will serve to support and expand the number of great female leaders in the world moving forward.
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