Leading Wellbeing: A leader's guide to mental health conversations at work

How leaders can have confident mental health conversations that support both the wellbeing and performance of their people at work. Leaders have the responsibility to provide a psychologically safe and well work environment for their teams. With levels of stress and burnout rising, and one in five people experiencing mental illness, mental health conversation skills are no longer a nice-to-have. Mental health conversation competence is a necessary part of our leadership toolkit. Our leaders also juggle the daily pressure of competing priorities, urgent deadlines and overwhelming workloads while worrying about their team's wellbeing, and are at risk of developing chronic stress and burnout themselves. Many leaders feel ill-equipped, lacking the skills and training to have the difficult and supportive mental health conversations that are needed to support the wellbeing of their people. Leading Wellbeing addresses the key concerns for leaders and presents a clear framework to follow for recognising the signs someone is struggling, providing psychological safety, what to say, what support is appropriate and how to balance both care and performance needs. Designed by leadership expert and award-winning author Fleur Heazlewood, the Mental Health Mastery approach to better conversations improves leader confidence, capability and capacity in having the necessary, difficult conversations at work. Leading Wellbeing should be compulsory reading for all leaders wanting to achieve both healthy and high performance for themselves and their teams.