Ask a room full of people whether wellbeing is an individual responsibility or a collective one, and something interesting happens. Almost everyone reaches for the same answer. Both.
On one side, we treat wellbeing as a private project. Get enough sleep. Set your boundaries. Take your leave. Manage your stress. It's on you.
On the other, we sense it clearly depends on the world around us. The workload. The team. The tone set from the top. The thousand small things that make a place easy or hard to work in.
Both of these are partly true. And it's that word “partly” that I want to sit with for a moment. If you’ll bear with me, I will put on my nerdy little philosopher hat and explain why it is not as clearly defined as it seems.
The trap of "a little of each"
When we say wellbeing is "a bit of both," we tend to picture a split. You do your part, the workplace does its part, and we each cover our share. It sounds fair. It sounds balanced. It also, I think, overlooks something important.
This is because "a little of each" assumes there's a clean line somewhere. A point where my responsibility ends and yours begins. This is what philosophers call a dichotomy. A clearly defined separation. But what if that line doesn't actually exist the way we think it does? Here is a piece of philosophy that shows us why.
The individual is always already social
The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre put it like this.
"The individual possible is only ever the internalisation and enrichment of a social possible."
In plain terms, every idea you hold about your own wellbeing has already been handed to you by the world you share with others. What counts as a fair workload, what counts as a good day, what counts as "coping" or "thriving", even the permission you give yourself to rest. None of that is invented privately. You absorb it from the culture around you, and then you live it out as if it were simply yours.
So, when we tell our friends and colleagues that they need to set boundaries, those boundaries have already been defined by the culture we inherit.
That's what Sartre means. The individual isn't a private starting point that the social world later bumps into. The individual is the place where the social gets taken in, lived,
and, this is the important part, handed back. That last part matters. You don't just receive the culture. You also shape it for everyone around you in return.
This means the neat split falls apart. There is no exact boundary where the personal ends and the collective begins, because the very standards you use to look after "your own" wellbeing were handed to you by the shared world, and the way you live them out becomes part of the world that shapes the next person.
Everyone is the culture, and so are you
If we follow this idea through, then we see that a workplace culture isn't a thing that exists outside people. The culture is the people. It is the sum of what everyone internalises and hands back to each other, every day.
Every tone we set, every time we value rest and recuperation, or model running on empty, every quiet signal becomes part of the social possible other people take in.
What a culture of wellbeing actually is
In early childhood education, this lands with some force.
If the unspoken message is that good educators cope quietly, then "good educator" and "stays silent" become the same thing in someone's head. They internalise it. Not because they are weak, but because that is the social possible they were given. Change what the culture makes thinkable, and you change what each person can do for their own wellbeing.
I want to be careful here, because “you shape the culture” is easily heard in misleading ways.
It's not blame. No single person is carrying the whole thing, and no one should read this and feel personally responsible for every hard day around them.
But it's also not a free pass. The flip side of “the culture shapes me” is not “so it's someone else's job to fix it.” If everyone is the culture, then doing our part is the actual mechanism. Each person still has to take up what is on offer and make it their own, and no one can do that for them. What the culture decides is not whether they act, but what there is to act on.
So wellbeing is never only individual and never only collective. It's both at once. That's not a cop-out. It's the opposite. It's what makes it genuinely everyone's responsibility.
Put simply, a culture of wellbeing is an environment where the conditions make it easier for everyone to meet their needs, and it's built by all of us, together.
Leadership
For those in leadership, this lands with particular weight, and it is easily heard as pressure. It isn't meant as blame. It's meant as possibility. If the individual possible is only ever a social possible, then you, as a leader, are a large part of the social possible your team internalises. That's not one more thing on your plate. It's the single point of leverage that touches everyone at once. Build the conditions, and you build the ground under every individual standing on it.
A Few Tools
Here are two quick tools you may find useful in creating a culture of wellbeing.
The first is around meeting needs. You've heard the saying that you can't pour from an empty cup. This is where the Phoenix Cups framework comes in. If you’re new to it, think of the Cups as a simple yet powerful way to understand human needs and motivations. The thing is, we don’t just have one cup, we have five. We have a Safety Cup, a Connection Cup, a Freedom Cup, a Mastery Cup, and a Fun Cup. These Cups represent our basic human needs. When our Cups are full, we feel good and have a strong sense of wellbeing. When our Cups are emptying, it affects our wellbeing, and it's visible across a whole team. That visibility is the useful part. It lets us swap the question from what's wrong with that person to which Cup is empty, and what's making it hard to fill?
The second is thinking. So much of what we do, feel, and believe about our wellbeing runs on the stories we tell ourselves, and those stories often play out on autopilot. Those stories don't stay private either. hey spread. So it's worth stopping and asking, are the stories running through our team cup-filling, or cup-emptying? And what stories does our culture quietly invite people to tell about themselves here?
Finally, a few questions to sit with
Here are a few questions to leave you with. They are not to answer quickly, and definitely not to score yourself against. Just to hold open for a while.
1. Which cups does our culture make easy to fill, and which does it quietly make hard?
2. What are we modelling that others take in about wellbeing, including the things we don't say out loud?
3. Where are we still treating wellbeing as an individual fix, when it's really a culture question?
4. What's one thing we could change so that meeting these needs becomes easier for everyone, not just possible for some?
Let me leave you with this. While you cannot pour from an empty cup, you can help build the kind of place where cups get filled.
If any of this resonated with you, Chris Phoenix works with teams and services to turn these ideas into shared language and lived practice. If you'd like to bring it to your team, get in touch at www.phoenix-support.com.au.
AUTHOR: Christopher Phoenix