The Frequency

Managers often feel pressured to become amateur therapists when workplace mental health becomes a corporate focus. Working on the executive side of the behavioral health space, I see how quickly this leads to manager burnout and uncomfortable boundary crossing.

We train our leadership to act as bridges rather than clinicians. Their responsibility is to notice shifts in engagement or performance and offer professional resources, not to uncover the root emotional cause of the distress.

The most effective practice we introduced to enforce this boundary is an asynchronous Capacity Signal during our daily digital check ins. Instead of asking team members how they are feeling, which forces emotional sharing, we ask them to flag their daily working capacity as Green, Yellow, or Red.

If someone marks Yellow or Red, the manager knows to automatically adjust deadlines or redistribute a heavy task for that day. This builds massive psychological safety. An employee can signal they are overwhelmed and get immediate operational relief without having to disclose a personal struggle or justify their stress. Most importantly, the manager stays focused entirely on workload management rather than emotional triage.

Customer facing and sales driven operations are one area where support naturally defaults to managers (and quickly runs into boundary issues). We tackled this by implementing a formal tiered support model. Managers provide support around performance driven wellbeing (workload, targets, environment etc.), but anything else is escalated formally to trained internal/external resources. Managers have explicit language, escalation triggers and non-negotiable items they shouldn’t take on themselves.

The single biggest change we made was implementing “pressure audits” as part of standard team operations reviews. Rather than waiting for someone to come to you with a problem, take time to review pressure points around workflows, targets and peak times across your teams. This approach alleviates the need for someone to feel like they have to raise an issue and take that emotional burden off managers as well. No one needs to worry about reading emotional tells. You end up with a psychologically safer environment that doesn’t increase emotional labour and better outcomes – more consistent performance and fewer fire drill escalations. It’s absolutely critical for high tempo claims type environments.

A strong way to handle this is teaching managers that their role is not to be counselors, it is to be skilled observers, supportive communicators, and clear connectors to the right resources.

Many managers get stuck because they think supporting mental health means solving personal problems. That creates role confusion fast. Better training focuses on three simple lanes:

Notice changes in behavior, workload strain, withdrawal, conflict, missed deadlines

Start respectful check-ins and ask work-impact questions

Route employees to HR, EAP, or professional support when needed

One practice that improved day-to-day psychological safety was introducing a weekly red-amber-green check-in during team meetings.

Each person quickly shares status:

Green = manageable

Amber = stretched

Red = need support or reprioritization

No one has to explain personal details. The focus stays on workload and support needs, not therapy-style conversations.

What changed:

People flagged pressure earlier

Managers could rebalance work before burnout built up

Team members saw it was safe to speak up without oversharing

Managers spent less emotional energy guessing who was struggling

Psychological safety often improves when people can signal strain easily, without needing a big emotional conversation every time.

Managers can sometimes believe they are required to play therapist to their employees, which can create confusion about their role, which ultimately leads to burnout by both manager and employee. We focus much more on operational support for our leaders, and rather than looking at an employee’s personal situation, we focus on the workload and friction points if there is an output shift from the team.

We have implemented a “Single Roadblock” rule for daily check-in meetings. Instead of asking how an employee feels, the manager asks, “What is the one thing slowing you down today that I can remove for you?” This provides psychological safety for the employee, because the employee sees that the manager is focused on serving their operational efficiency, rather than just supervising employee productivity. It also removes any emotional labor for the manager, providing them a clear, actionable instruction to provide the employee, instead of an abstract emotional challenge.

A team that has true psychological safety by being distributed will have reliable, transparent processes, but not have managers who are acting as unpaid therapist. When employees know their managers are committed to remove obstacles for them, they feel supported without needing to provide their manager with more detail about their personal lives than they wish to.

Most companies mess this up right out of the gate. They tell managers to support mental health and leave it at that, with zero guidance on what that actually looks like day to day. So one of two things happens. Managers freeze up because they’re scared of saying something wrong, or they swing the other way and start playing therapist, which wears them out and creates strange vibes with their team. Both outcomes are bad. What managers actually need is a narrow, clearly defined job that helps without pretending they’re clinicians.

The one thing that genuinely worked for us was teaching managers to check in regularly without trying to diagnose anything. We built a small habit into every one-on-one. The manager opens with, “How are you doing this week, and is there anything going on that’s affecting your work?” That’s the whole script. No digging. No pop psychology. Just a real question, asked the same way every week.

The training piece mattered more than the question itself. If someone answers with “honestly, I’m struggling,” the manager has three jobs, and only three. Hear it without reacting like it’s a crisis. Ask whether there’s something work-related that can shift, like a deadline or the current workload. Then point the person to real help, whether that’s the EAP, HR, or something outside the company. End of list. The manager isn’t there to solve it. They’re there to make it okay to say out loud, and then to hand off to someone qualified.

What we noticed pretty quickly was that people started flagging things way earlier. Before this, someone might quietly struggle for a month before it became obvious, and by then a small problem had turned into a real one. There wasn’t a built-in moment to say “hey, something’s off.” Once the weekly check-in became normal, and once people saw that being honest didn’t turn into a weird conversation or hurt them at review time, the culture shifted. Team members felt safer. And oddly, managers felt less stressed, not more, because they were catching things while they were still small.

One last thing. Don’t pile a bunch of mental health training on managers and then make them feel responsible for how people actually do. That’s the road to burnout, and it’s not their job anyway. Keep the role small: notice, ask, listen, hand off. Anything past that belongs to people who actually went to school for it.

This is such a good question and important topic. I think the best thing that managers can do to support mental health is to simply have a professional and personal relationship with their direct reports. This does not mean that they will be friends necessarily, but that they can check in with their team members about how they are doing and know some information about them personally. If every conversation is only about productivity and metrics and work related projects, team members tend to feel disconnected and discouraged. Simply having a more personal touch and awareness of the entirety of the other person and their life will help create psychological safety at work. Managers can then listen, support, and ask questions but make sure not to become overly personal themselves which keeps the relationship professional.

The biggest mistake organizations make is giving managers a list of warning signs and calling it training. That creates exactly the role confusion you’re trying to avoid: a manager who now feels responsible for “diagnosing” their team members instead of simply being a decent human being with clear expectations.

What equips managers is helping them understand the difference between two things: being a support and being a resource. Being a support means addressing what you’re noticing and not making someone feel like a liability for struggling. Being a resource means knowing what to do next when something is beyond a one-on-one meeting. Most managers can do the first without any clinical background. The second just requires knowing what the organization has available and feeling confident enough to say “I think it might help to talk to someone. Here’s what we have.”

When I work with leaders on this, I spend a lot of time helping them figure out what boundaries they need to set to reduce the demand on themselves. Managers don’t need to hold people’s pain. They need to normalize that it exists, that it’s valid, and lower the threshold for getting help. The goal is helping them say the right thing without overthinking it. Being practiced enough that it doesn’t come out cold or awkward, but not scripted.

One specific thing that tends to make a substantial difference is what I call the “noticing check-in.” Instead of a formal meeting about how someone’s doing personally, managers are encouraged to say something simple when they notice a change: lower energy, missed deadlines, more withdrawal than usual. Something like: “I’ve noticed you seem a little off lately. I’m not asking you to explain anything. I just wanted you to know I see it, I’m not concerned about your performance right now, and I want to encourage you to let me know how I can support you.” No follow-up questions required.

That single phrase can do more for psychological safety than most wellness programs, because it separates acknowledgment from judgment or corrective action. It tells the person on the receiving end that being human at work isn’t going to cost them, and it doesn’t require the manager to be a therapist or absorb everyone’s stress. They’re just paying attention and showing they care for the person, not just for what they produce. The leaders having the most success are already doing this, and it shows in their teams’ connection, engagement, and satisfaction.

Managers hold a unique and highly valuable role. They develop working relationships with employees, but also have access to higher stakeholders in the company. When mental health begins to impact the workplace, managers are among the first to respond. Equipping them with the ability to do so effectively and appropriately to their role is essential. Nearly a decade of my career has been providing mental health support to employees through EAP services, as well as providing psychoeducational workshops to management to promote more effective mental health practices in the workplace.

Improving psychological safety within the workplace can be best addressed through the lens of prevention. This involves examining the workplace culture, and increasing daily practises as well as productive and professional dialogue that promotes mental health. Managers who are successful in promoting mental health do the following: they are aware of resources available to their employees. This might be an EAP program, or local resources within the community, particularly ones that are equipped to support with burnout and stress. They also make an effort to ensure that their employees are aware of such resources, through verbal reminders, posting them on bulletin boards or by break areas, and on company websites. Managers not only normalize practises that promote well-being, such as taking breaks and vacation time, they find creative ways to implement psychological well-being into the workday. I have seen numerous organizations find value in “walk and talk meetings”, or starting team meetings by highlighting various stress management tools such as breathing techniques or a quick meditation video. Ensuring that managers have time dedicated weekly to checking in with their team and building trust in their relationships is incredibly valuable. Having some daily “open office door” time provides a level of emotional safety and accessibility for the team, and gives managers the ability to connect and know their employees before a crisis occurs, creating a more effective response time.

Lastly, it is essential to remind managers that they are not responsible for “fixing” the mental health of their team. Instead, providing them with the time and resources to build professional and supportive relationships with their team will benefit them in being able to direct employees to appropriate services when required.