What would you do if 20% of your employees had cancer yearly? What would American society have done by now? Think about that for a moment: one teammate out of five diagnosed with a potentially deadly disease that understandably impacts their ability to perform their role anywhere near their best.

Perhaps not often, yet every once in a while, there are simple and elegant solutions to our most challenging business and societal obstacles. Even less frequently, but more profound and extraordinary, is when one single lever pulled by business leaders radically transforms their organizational performance and the American society for the better.

Look in the mirror: The solution to the mental health crisis in America is right in front of your eyes. It's embedded in your workplace and ready to be exposed to the very nature of the free market. Embedded in every team of over five people is an invisible force creating havoc on productivity, attendance, recruiting, retention, team dynamic, overall performance, and perhaps most importantly, employee satisfaction and happiness. Unfortunately, long-held societal myths and stigmas prevent us from seeing the obvious.

Studies have proven that 20% of Americans every year experience a clinically diagnosable mental illness. It hurts the individual and impacts the performance of every organization, just like a physical illness does. While conventional therapies have an effectiveness rate greater than 90%, less than half of the population seek help. It takes, on average, 11 years from the onset of symptoms to taking the first step in seeking care.  

What would you do if 20% of your employees were diagnosed with cancer yearly, but you didn't know who or how severe their illness would be? Do you think that it would impact your team dynamic, productivity, organizational performance, and employee satisfaction?  

How did we get to a place where every team in America larger than five people is impacted by an illness akin to 20% of their employees being diagnosed with cancer, diabetes, congestive heart failure, or any other significant disease every year? The answer is simple: it's stigma. 80% of patients report that stigma alone prevents them from seeking care. But the stigma doesn't act independently. It's not the root cause. It just plays a part in the larger Isolation Cycle of myths, stigma, shame, and silence. The societal myths of mental illness ("depression isn't a real illness") create the stigmas of mental illness ("people with depression are weak"), which drives an overcoming sense of shame ("I feel depressed, so I must be a weak person"). And so, people stay silent, and the flywheel keeps spinning faster as the myths become more hardwired in our thinking.

Thankfully, embedded in the problem is also the simple solution; address the root cause of the Isolation Cycle, the myths. As a leader, commit to adding mental health literacy into your "leadership toolbox" and use it when appropriate, just as you use all your other leadership and management tools.  

Put another way, a leader's core responsibility is creating an environment where all teammates can consistently perform at their best. And great leaders are constantly honing and learning new skills. Currently, 20% of your teammates are struggling with fear, panic, and sadness, regularly finding themselves in a fight-or-flight mode, performing just barely well enough to get by. And, often, what we do as leaders makes their condition worse. Don't you want to know how to identify who might be struggling, how to approach them healthily, and help them get the proper support? Would you do it if they had cancer or chronic kidney disease?

Creating mental health literacy for yourself and your entire organization is simple and inexpensive. The curriculum is already available as an internationally recognized course called Mental Health First Aid, credentialed by the National Council on Mental Wellbeing in the United States. And its results in breaking the Isolation Cycle have been studied and published in peer review journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine.

On average, organizations in America now spend $1,059 per year on training programs for their employees (e.g. employee health and safety, new employee orientation, job development skills, individual development planning, and first aid.) All we need to do is reallocate about 15% of it to educating our workforce to become mental health literate. A couple of hundred dollars per employee. That's it. That's all you need to radically transform your organizational performance and employee satisfaction, safety, and happiness. All you have to do is transfer about 15% of what you are already spending a year in training your teams, take the class, and use it. It's that simple.

And the very first step is simple too. You'll be able to do it as soon as you finish reading this article. Go to www.mentalhealthfirstaid.org and sign-up for a Mental Health First Aid class in your area. To accelerate the efforts, bring your operations and HR leaders with you. Then, use what you learn in the course in your workplace.  

It's really that simple. Take one class and use what it teaches you.

Remember where we started: What would you do if 20% of your employees had cancer yearly? Would it impact individual and team performance? What would you do as a leader? If you could help them and your business by taking a 1-day class, would you do it? Can you think of how you could spend a day that would have as much meaningful impact on your organizational performance and the lives of your colleagues around you?