Training unlocks improved mental health

by | Jan 27, 2025 | Take 5 Articles

Prevention is key for mental health—and eminently doable when centred around training leaders in the workplace.

“People are now understanding that it’s really important to train leaders on how to have a mental health conversation, how to understand their own levels of stress and burnout and how to put in boundaries,” says Dr. Ryan Todd, a psychiatrist in Calgary, Alberta, and founder and President of headversity, a Benefits Alliance preferred provider. “There are some really practical things we can do to give people the skills.”

Todd recently released “The Definitive Guide to Workplace Mental Health,” an e-book that helps organizations develop a tailored mental health strategy. Take 5 for Wellness presents highlights here, focussed on leadership training, and you can learn more in the podcast, “The Connection between Mental Health and Company Culture,” produced by the Benefits Alliance Voice.

First, it’s important to know that the pandemic led to a decline in personal mental-health skills, which range from getting good sleep to how to have difficult conversations and handle conflict. Even more fundamental is the skill “to create emotional recognition within yourself,” says Todd.

Training leaders to have the knowledge and confidence to recognize mental-health issues in themselves and their employees is more important than ever—underscored by the fact that poor mental health is increasingly the cause of short- and long-term disability leaves.

A workforce that is aware and ready to handle mental-health issues “reduces costs, reduces bad outcomes like absenteeism, and improves [workplace] culture,” he summarizes.

Not as much stigma…but

Todd says a lot of progress has been made over the past 20 years in reducing the stigma around seeking help for mental health. However, many managers are still not adept at having mental-health conversations with employees.

It’s important to create time for the conversation, attend to the individual, and have a “respond and refer” plan in place that answers the question, “If this gets worse, where do we turn to next?”

Todd highlights five components of successful manager training:

  1. Take a step back. “All leaders want to fix the problem right away,” says Todd. While that’s a good approach for the day job, it doesn’t apply to the mental-health conversation. Instead, it’s important to ask open-ended questions and be curious, attentive and validating.
  2. Cultivate emotional recognition. “If you don’t have emotional recognition, everyone around you feels it, and that’s just not good management,” says Todd. Not recognizing emotions also puts managers at a significantly higher rate of burnout.
  3. Acknowledge negative emotions. “When you’re able to identify negative emotions, it reduces activity in the fight-flight-or-freeze areas of your brain,” says Todd. The ability to de-escalate the intensity of negative emotion is an essential mental-health skill.
  4. Give your brain a break. Personal behavioural change takes time—including time-outs. Many apps are available to nudge leaders to regularly take brief wellness breaks, such as five minutes to practice mindfulness. “That’s my routine now, and that inoculates me from all of the negativity that I see on all the news channels,” says Todd.
  5. Don’t be afraid to start. The implementation of mental-health practices in the workplace can seem intimidating, says Todd. But many training programs break it down into steps. Managers should not hesitate to start slowly and do more as confidence builds.

Get more of these valuable tips and detailed action steps in Todd’s “The Definitive Guide to Workplace Mental Health.”