Organisations & Speaking
Better organisations begin with the people inside them.
Mental health has become a fixture of the corporate conversation, which is undoubtedly progress. However, somewhere between the wellbeing apps, resilience seminars, employee-assistance programmes and the enormous volume of language now surrounding workplace mental health, there is a danger that we lose sight of the fact that this is not and cannot be a simple tick-box exercise.
Human beings are complicated. We bring our histories, personalities, ambitions, fears, relationships, coping mechanisms and ways of responding to pressure into work with us. None of these things disappear simply because we walk into an office or open a laptop.
A wellbeing initiative cannot compensate indefinitely for poor leadership. A resilience workshop cannot repair a culture that continually exhausts its people. Telling employees to look after their mental health has limited value if the environment around them doesn’t allow them to do so.
My organisational work sits at the intersection of mental health, leadership, behaviour and performance, looking at how we create workplaces in which people can function intelligently and sustainably — not simply survive them.
Workplace Mental Health — Moving Beyond Awareness
Awareness matters, but awareness is only the beginning. The more interesting questions come afterwards.
What do we actually do when somebody is struggling? How do managers have conversations about mental health without feeling that they are being asked to become therapists? How does an organisation respond to stress before it becomes burnout? What happens when the behaviour of a high-performing leader is having a damaging effect on everybody around them?
How do we create cultures in which people are able to perform well without quietly sacrificing themselves in the process? I work with organisations to develop a more sophisticated and practical understanding of these questions. Programmes can be designed for leadership groups, managers, individual teams or whole organisations, depending on what is needed.
Leadership
We lead with considerably more than our job title.
Leadership is partly strategic, but it is also deeply psychological. How a leader responds to pressure, uncertainty, criticism, conflict and vulnerability inevitably affects the people around them. A leader who cannot regulate themselves doesn’t leave that difficulty at the door; it travels through conversations, decisions, relationships and eventually culture.
My leadership work explores the relationship between self-awareness and leadership: helping people recognise their own patterns, understand the effect they have on others, communicate more intelligently and remain thoughtful when circumstances become difficult.
The aim isn’t to create perfectly regulated leaders. There is no such thing. It is to create leaders who know themselves well enough to notice what is happening before their unconscious patterns begin making decisions on their behalf.
Training Managers to Support Mental Health
Managers are increasingly expected to respond to the mental health of their teams, but many have never been given a useful framework for doing so. This can leave managers either frightened of saying the wrong thing or carrying responsibility that properly belongs elsewhere.
The aim is not to turn managers into therapists. It is to help them become better managers.
Training can include recognising when somebody may be struggling; approaching difficult conversations; listening without attempting to diagnose; understanding appropriate boundaries; knowing when and how to signpost professional support; creating psychologically healthier teams; and understanding the manager’s own wellbeing within that responsibility. A good manager doesn’t need to have all the answers. They need to know how to begin the right conversation.
Resilience & Sustainable Performance
I am slightly wary of the word resilience. Too often it is used to describe becoming increasingly good at tolerating circumstances that probably shouldn’t be tolerated in the first place. Properly understood, resilience is something more interesting. It is the ability to remain flexible under pressure; to recover after difficulty; to regulate ourselves when circumstances become demanding and to continue making thoughtful choices rather than simply reacting. It is not endless endurance, nor is it the absence of vulnerability. I work with teams and leaders to understand resilience as a practical psychological capacity — one that belongs alongside good systems, good leadership and realistic expectations of what human beings can sustainably do.
Mental health and the human condition. Leadership and self-awareness. Psychology and high performance. Resilience without burnout. The regulated leader.
Talks, Workshops & Programmes
I speak and facilitate sessions on the areas where psychology, mental health, leadership and human behaviour meet. These can be developed around the needs of a particular organisation or audience rather than delivered as an off-the-shelf wellbeing package.
Themes can include mental health and the human condition; leadership and self-awareness; psychology and high performance; resilience without burnout; the regulated leader; mental health for managers; why wellbeing programmes fail; the psychology of teams; and rethinking workplace mental health.
Sessions can range from keynote-style talks and smaller workshops to leadership programmes and longer pieces of organisational work. I work with organisations in the UK and internationally.