Managers can make or break employee wellbeing, yet many lack the skills to recognise and address workplace stress. Emily Pearson eloquently argues that L&D must rethink leadership development, equipping managers to protect mental health, create healthier working environments and deliver sustainable performance without sacrificing the people who make it possible.
At 7.04am Sarah spotted the empty station. The line was already alive: steel feeding into rollers, forklifts reversing, fluorescent lights humming above a team that should have been ten but was really six. Station 14 should have had Jake on it.
She had noticed the change before today. The slower gait. The shadows under his eyes. The smell of stale alcohol some mornings. The late arrivals were easy to record, because lateness had a policy and a form. What Sarah had not been trained to do was ask the question behind the lateness.
No one had taught her how to recognise work-related stress
Sarah was not a bad manager. She was, in fact, exactly the kind of person many organisations promote. She knew the machines, hit the numbers and could fix faults faster than anyone on shift. But no one had taught her how to recognise work-related stress, have a supportive mental health conversation, consider reasonable adjustments or understand when repeated absence was a sign rather than a problem to be processed.
By 8am she was outside Human Resources, asking for Jake’s emergency contact because his phone was going straight to voicemail. His mother answered from the hospital. Jake had tried to take his own life the night before.
This is a fictionalised composite adapted from Solving the CEO’s Blind Spot: Human Sustainability, but the risk is not fictional. It is what happens when organisations treat people management as common sense, then ask managers to carry responsibility without capability.
A shocking new frame for an old problem
The International Labour Organization (ILO) has now put a global number on the human cost of poorly managed psychosocial risk. Its 2026 global report estimates that work-related psychosocial risk factors, including job strain, effort-reward imbalance, job insecurity, long working hours and workplace bullying, are responsible for more than 840,000 deaths a year. The same report estimates nearly 45 million disability-adjusted life years lost annually and a loss equivalent to 1.37%of global gross domestic product (GDP).
The Great Britain picture is also stark. The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) estimates that, in 2024/25, 964,000 workers were suffering from work-related stress, depression or anxiety, with stress, depression or anxiety accounting for 22.1 million working days lost. This is not a wellbeing side issue for HR to fix but a workforce capacity, productivity and risk issue.
For L&D this creates an uncomfortable question. Are leadership programmes still focused too heavily on performance conversations, managing sickness absence and coaching techniques, while under-developing the capability managers need to prevent work-related stress and support mental health?
The accidental manager is not a small problem
Gallup’s research shows that managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement. That means a person’s experience of work is heavily shaped not by the posters on the wall or the wellbeing app in the benefits portal, but by the person who allocates work, interprets pressure, responds to disclosure, gives feedback, manages conflict and fosters a culture in their teams by default or by design.
Yet the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) has reported that 82% of managers who enter management roles have had no formal management or leadership training. Many are promoted because they are technically excellent, reliable or respected by peers. Those are valuable qualities, but they do not automatically translate into the ability to lead people through grief, burnout, conflict, excessive workload, neurodivergent needs, chronic illness, early intervention or crisis.
This is how a leadership gap becomes a health gap. And it is why “send them to Human Resources” is not a solution. HR, occupational health and wellbeing teams are essential partners, but the manager is the daily operating system of work. They are the person most likely to see the early signs and the person whose decisions can either reduce or intensify the risk.
Manager training is prevention, not counselling
This is not about turning line managers into therapists. The World Health Organization guidelines on mental health at work recommend manager training to improve managers’ knowledge, attitudes and behaviours for mental health, and to improve workers’ help-seeking behaviours. The guidance is clear that manager training is about recognising and responding to workers who need support, building confidence to engage, and adjusting job stressors in working conditions. It is not about managers becoming mental health-care providers and Mental Health First Aid Training isn’t enough.
In practice, manager development should build four core capabilities.
- Managers need to understand psychosocial risk:
Demands, control, support, relationships, role and change. These are not abstract concepts; they are the HSE Management Standards and they sit inside everyday decisions about workload, deadlines, rota design, communication and change and risk assessment. - Managers need the skills to hold supportive, boundaried conversations:
That includes noticing changes early, asking open questions, listening without judgement and jumping to performance management, signposting appropriately, and knowing when to involve HR, occupational health or safeguarding support. - Managers need confidence around legal and organisational responsibilities:
The Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (Acas) summarises employers’ duties to identify risks to health, including work-related stress, and take steps to prevent or reduce them. Managers therefore need to understand stress risk assessment, reasonable adjustments, confidentiality and documentation well enough to act with confidence, not avoid. - Managers need to know how to support sustainable performance:
Clarifying priorities, adjusting workload, building recovery into work, reducing ambiguity, enabling autonomy and supporting return to work. The Keep Britain Working Review argues that prevention, retention, early intervention and rapid rehabilitation in the workplace are likely to be more effective over time than trying to reactivate people once they have fallen out of work.
A practical example from a high-pressure environment
The manager capability challenge is especially visible in operational, male-dominated and safety-critical environments, where mental health training can be dismissed as too soft unless it is grounded in practical tools and real work.
A public Northern Gas Networks (NGN) case study illustrates the point. In a high-pressure utilities environment, 75 managers completed a full-day programme focused on preventing work-related stress and supporting mental health. The challenge was familiar: previous training had not landed, the workforce was majority male and blue-collar, and managers needed usable tools rather than theory-heavy content. The case study reports stronger confidence in recognising early signs of stress, understanding legal responsibilities, holding supportive conversations and managing return-to-work conversations. It also reports that 98.6% of participants rated the instructor excellent or very good, and 82% rated subject knowledge excellent.
The broader lesson is not that every organisation needs the same programme. It is that manager development lands when it respects context, gives managers language and tools they can actually use, and connects mental health with the realities of being human, work design, legal duty, team performance and human dignity.
The future of work depends on manager capability
The future of work conversation is full of artificial intelligence, skills, hybrid operating models and productivity. But none of those will deliver sustainable value if the human system underneath them is exhausted. The International Labour Organization describes the psychosocial working environment as shaped by the job, how work is managed and organised, and the broader policies and procedures that govern work. In other words, this is leadership work.
Human sustainability, in this context, means preserving the energy, health, capability and trust that performance depends on. For L&D, manager capability to prevent work-related stress and support mental health can no longer be optional, informal or left to personality traits. It should be part of every leadership pathway, every promotion into management, every senior leadership expectation and every measure of organisational health.
That requires collaboration. L&D should not own this agenda alone. It should work with wellbeing, HR, occupational health, health and safety, employee engagement and business strategy to define the manager behaviours that protect human energy, health and performance. It should evaluate behaviour change, not attendance. It should ask whether managers are reducing avoidable stressors, acting early, creating psychologically safe teams and supporting people to stay well and in work, and feel good while they are there.
L&D’s focus on workplace development shouldn’t be how to teach managers to get more out of people, but focus on developing managers who can create the conditions where people have enough left to keep contributing, learning and living well.
If human sustainability is now a business imperative, then manager capability is one of its most important levers. A question to ponder is whether L&D is ready to steward it as such.
Emily Pearson is the Founder and CEO of the Wellbeing Lead Academy and the author of Solving the CEO’s Blind Spot: Human Sustainability
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