How to Approach Mental Health as a Band or Artist Manager

My career started 13 years ago, working at Fiction and Polydor Records. Back then I was working in A&R. I brought in Ellie Goulding and White Lies and worked with The Music. My taste is across the board and the label allowed me to work across many genres which was very fortunate.

If I’m going to be honest, though: working for a label made me fearful of my job. After six years, it created a destruction of my instinct and self. Once the fear comes in – which is very much your ego – it becomes hard to shut that down. In the last year of working with Fiction my sense of self was so low it certainly led to me leaving the company. It took me six months to get my instinct and sense of self back. There is a great quote, “A quiet mind is able to hear intuition over fear”, which is important to remember. After some time out I set up my own company managing producers and eventually artists. I’m lucky to manage the people I do.

The lack of “people development” in music is a real issue, because you can come into music and be extremely entrepreneurial but have very few management skills or little in the way of self-awareness. In my experience, to be a great manager is 70 percent psychology and 30 percent business. And so in order to get the best out of someone, you need to understand them and know what they need to be the best. It’s important to understand the human condition. But before that you also need to be able to understand yourself. Without that you risk pushing your stresses onto others or lack the understanding required to be empathetic to their needs.

There’s still a massive stigma for managers, or people in the industry, to not talk about their issues – or know how to handle them. People can be ineffective at creating boundaries. They think they need to be on-call at every moment, which is completely fake and false. What they actually need to do is choose to switch off, but most people won’t because they’re scared of losing a client, of showing weakness and of being vulnerable. However I’ve learnt that being honest with clients is a better way to build trust. Explaining to a client: ‘these are the boundaries, this is what’s going to happen’ – that helps them know you’re looking after yourself, so that whenever anything happens to them, you can fix their problems.

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