Managers are told to have the conversation. Nobody tells them what to say next.

Two figures that agree with each other

The CIPD’s Health and Wellbeing at Work 2025 survey found that only 29% of organisations train their line managers in mental health. Fewer than a third of the people formally responsible for this have ever been shown how to do it.

Now the other end of the same problem. Mental Health UK’s Burnout Report 2026 found that 35% of workers would not feel comfortable discussing high or extreme levels of stress with a manager. Put those two figures side by side and something uncomfortable becomes clear. This is not a perception gap that better internal communication would close. Employees have looked at their manager and arrived at roughly the right answer.

That matters more than it sounds, because the manager is nearly always the first person anyone tells. If a third of a workforce has quietly concluded that the conversation would not help, most of them will never start it, and the organisation will keep believing it does not have a problem.

The manager is a bigger factor than most managers believe

Part of what keeps this unaddressed is a quiet assumption that the line manager is a minor variable in someone’s mental health, well behind their home life and their clinician. The evidence does not support it.

The Workforce Institute at UKG surveyed 3,400 people across 10 countries in 2023 and found that 69% said their manager affects their mental health. That is the same proportion who said their partner does, and it is higher than the proportion who said their doctor (51%) or their therapist (41%) does.

Whatever the precise figure in any one workplace, the direction is not really in dispute. The person who decides your workload, your deadlines, whether your one-to-one happens and whether your concerns are taken seriously has a substantial influence on how you feel. Treating that role as a scheduling function with some people admin attached is a choice, and it has costs.

Managers are not avoiding this because they do not care

In our experience the reason is remarkably consistent, and it is not indifference. It is that managers do not know what they are supposed to do with the answer.

Asking “how are you doing?” is easy. What stops people is the next 30 seconds. If they tell me something serious, am I qualified to hear it? What if I say the wrong thing and make it worse? Am I now responsible for this person’s mental health? Do I have to tell HR? What if they ask me not to?

Faced with that many unanswered questions, a reasonable person does not open the conversation. They tell themselves they will keep an eye on it. And the organisation records a manager who is not engaging with wellbeing, when what it actually has is a manager who has never been told where the edges of the job are.

What managers actually need

Not clinical knowledge. Four much more ordinary things, none of which most managers have been given.

• An opener that does not invite “fine”. “Are you OK?” gets one answer. Naming something specific you have noticed, without interpreting it, gets a different one. “I’ve noticed you’ve been quieter in stand-ups over the last few weeks. How are you doing?”
• Permission to say very little. Most managers reach for a solution within about 20 seconds, which reads as wanting the conversation finished. The pause is the tool. What comes after it is usually the real thing.
• A clearly drawn line. A manager is not a counsellor and should not attempt to be. The role is to notice, listen, change what is within their gift at work and signpost to people who are qualified. Saying that boundary out loud is what makes the conversation safe to start.
• Something to actually change. This is the half of the job that genuinely belongs to the manager and it is the half most often skipped. Deadlines, workload, meeting load, hours, who someone works alongside. A supportive conversation that changes nothing about the work is sympathy, and sympathy has a short shelf life.

The encouraging part is that this responds to training in a way many management problems do not. In the same CIPD survey, employers who train their line managers in mental health report that 73% of those managers are confident holding sensitive conversations and signposting to support. Among employers who do not train them, it is 57%. It is a skill rather than a temperament, and the alternative to practising it is learning it live, on a colleague, at the worst possible moment. Our line manager’s mental health toolkit sets out the openers, the shape of the conversation and where the boundary sits.