Most managers I know want to help when someone on their team is struggling. What holds them back is uncertainty. They’re afraid of saying the wrong thing, and they assume real support takes training they don’t have.
So they wait. Or they fall back on what their own early bosses modeled, which for a lot of us was some version of “get over it.”
I talked about this recently with Tara Rolstad, a speaker and author who came to mental health as a family member. She and her husband fostered her nieces through serious mental health crises, and later she supported one of her own kids through serious mental health struggles. Today, she teaches leaders how to show up for people at work. Her view of managers is generous. Most of them have good intentions. What they’re missing is language and tools, and under pressure, people default to what they already know. What she asks of managers is less than most expect, and that’s why I wanted to write this down.
Why Managers Struggle to Support Employee Mental Health
Tara is Gen X, and she’s blunt with her own generation and the one before it. The “I did it, so you can too” attitude toward younger workers isn’t helping anyone. In one of her blog posts, she answers managers who are tempted to scoff at snowflakes with two words: stop it.
She doesn’t think most managers are cruel, though. She thinks they’re unprepared. Nobody hands a new manager a chapter on what to do when a team member is dealing with depression, or caring for a family member who is. Physical health is different. If someone on your team got a cancer or diabetes diagnosis, you’d have a rough idea of how to adjust their workload and what to say. Mental health doesn’t come with that shared script.
Part of the reason is that we’re strange about our brains. As Tara put it, nobody feels shame in telling coworkers they tested positive for strep throat, but the same person will hide a therapy appointment. Managers absorb that discomfort and read it as a signal to stay out.
Then there’s capacity. A manager with a struggling employee also has a quarterly report due and a team complaining about the coworker who keeps microwaving fish. That’s Tara’s example, and anyone who has managed people recognizes it. Support has to fit inside a real workday, which is a good argument for keeping it simple.
What Employee Mental Health Struggles Look Like at Work
If you’re waiting for absences to tell you someone is having a hard time, you’ll miss most of it. Research from the UK insurer Vitality found younger workers losing the equivalent of about one workday a week to mental health, with workers under 30 losing up to 60 productive days a year. When Tara wrote about that study, she focused on the detail that matters most for managers. Those younger workers weren’t calling in sick very often. They were at work, checked out, and suffering, which is why recognizing burnout and employee mental health concerns early matters.
That’s what this usually looks like from the manager’s side of the desk. Someone who used to speak up in meetings goes quiet, or their work starts to look different. They hold it together on the surface because they don’t trust that being honest is safe.
They have reasons to be careful. In NAMI’s 2025 workplace mental health poll, 42% of employees said they worried that talking about mental health at work would hurt their careers. When people expect a cost for honesty, they mask. Masking takes energy, and that energy comes out of the work.
How to Start a Mental Health Conversation With an Employee
When managers do notice something, the default response tends to center on output. This isn’t getting done, so what’s the problem? Tara frames the alternative as the difference between asking “what’s wrong with you?” and asking “what happened?” The first one judges. The second one invites the person to tell you.
Some leaders will push back here. I don’t need to know about anyone’s trauma. That’s not my job. Tara agrees with more of that than you’d expect. She’s clear that managers aren’t therapists and shouldn’t try to be. Their role is to create the conditions for proactive mental health support, not to diagnose or treat employees. Nobody is asking you to unpack someone’s family situation. What she’s asking for sounds more like this, in her words: “Hey, you haven’t spoken up in meetings lately. What’s going on? We miss that voice.”
Name what you’ve noticed and ask about it. Then listen without rushing to solve anything.
That last part is harder than it sounds, especially for people who became managers because they’re good at solving problems. Tara admits she spent years doing exactly that with a close friend who lives with depression. She’d lay out what her friend should do, when what her friend needed was someone to listen. She puts the lesson simply:
“We don’t have to fix anything, we just have to be present.”
Sometimes being present includes a small practical assist. Tara tells a story about freezing in a tight parking garage, unable to talk herself into backing her minivan out of a spot she had pulled into just fine. Her husband came and moved the car for her. At work, the equivalent might be sitting down with someone who’s spinning and offering to take the next piece so they can get their footing. When someone is in that state, a bit of practical help usually does more than walking them through the logic.
What to Say When an Employee Says They’re Fine
This is where good intentions often stall. You check in, and the answer is a flat “I’m fine.” Most managers take that at face value and move on, partly out of respect and partly out of relief.
Tara’s advice is to stay persistent without making it strange. Keep checking in, and be specific about what you’ve observed and why it worries you. Say plainly that you’re concerned about them as a person, then leave the door open. Her suggested close is one any manager could use as written:
“If you don’t feel like talking about it now, it’s totally okay. I just want you to know I’m here, and I will be here if you ever wanna talk about it.”
Persistence matters because people who are struggling often can’t respond the first time. Tara learned that at home. Someone with depression may not answer the phone or say yes to coffee, and the person who keeps showing up anyway is the one who proves they meant it. She’ll tell you she isn’t naturally patient. She learned it because the relationship required it.
What people need on the other side is less dramatic than managers fear. Tara describes an employee who can walk in, say their anxiety is high today, and ask to work somewhere quieter, and a manager who says yes and asks what else would help. That’s the whole exchange. It works because the employee already knows it’s okay to be real.
How Leaders Make It Safe to Talk About Mental Health at Work
That kind of trust and psychological safety has to exist before the hard conversation. Tara offered a shortcut for leaders who have some experience of their own with mental health and feel comfortable mentioning it. Bring it up the way you’d mention allergies or high blood pressure, in passing.
Her example is a manager telling the team they’re heading out 15 minutes early to pick up anxiety medication before the pharmacy closes. There’s no speech and no big disclosure. Everyone listening still learns that this is something people talk about here.
I think this is one of the most underused tools a leader has. Policies and benefits matter, but people take their cues from what the person in charge says and does. Tara is clear about the limits. Nobody wants a team meeting that opens with a recap of your last therapy session. The goal is to make it ordinary. Not every leader has that experience or wants to share it, and no one should feel pressure to. You can send the same signal by how you respond when the first person on your team speaks up. Building that kind of trust at work happens through small interactions like these.
Benefits awareness belongs in this, too. In the same NAMI poll, only about half of workers knew how to access mental health care through their employer’s health insurance. If your company offers an EAP or mental health coverage, make sure your managers know how to point people to it. Training helps them get there. Three in four managers in that poll said mental health training made them more comfortable talking about it with their teams.
Why Supportive Managers Keep Their Best People
I can speak to this one from experience. I’ve been through a lot over the last few years, and I’ve had a manager who listened. She didn’t fix anything. She isn’t trained to, and I never asked her to. What she did was make it clear that she cared about me as a whole person and trusted me to get my work done. Some days that meant a conversation that took time away from everything else on her plate, and she chose the conversation anyway.
What that built in me is loyalty. I want to do good work for her, and I’m probably more productive because of how she showed up. That connection between the manager experience and employee retention shows up consistently in what employees say they need from work.
Tara hears versions of this all the time from people whose managers were there for them during a hard stretch. Many of them say they aren’t going anywhere. As she put it, “You can’t pay for that in today’s environment.”
She made one more point that I think explains most of this. Managers default to “get over it” when nobody has shown them a simpler option. The simpler option is to notice when someone changes and stay with them while they get help from the people trained to give it. That doesn’t take a budget or a certification, and most managers can start this week.
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Brandon Laws is the host of Transform Your Workplace and the VP of Marketing and Product at Xenium HR, an outsourced HR and payroll partner for small and mid-sized businesses in Portland, Oregon.