When Someone Is Struggling

Managers are frequently the first to notice and are not qualified to treat. The role is to notice, ask, adjust and refer.

General guidance on the manager's role. Not clinical advice. Follow your organisation's escalation route, and involve occupational health or your employee assistance provider where one exists.

Before the conversation

Know your escalation route, before you need it. Who to call, what your organisation provides, what you are obliged to do.

Choose a private setting with time available and no hard stop.

Do not prepare evidence. You are opening a conversation, not presenting a case.

Opening it

Say what you have noticed, gently and without interpretation. "You have seemed like you are carrying a lot recently."

Then ask, and stop talking. "How are you doing?"

Allow silence. People need time.

If the answer is that everything is fine, accept it. Say the door is open, and come back in a few weeks. Many people decline the first time and accept the second.

During

Listen more than you speak.

Do not diagnose, not even sympathetically. Do not name a condition, and do not offer an interpretation of what they are experiencing.

Do not compare to your own experience or anyone else's.

Do not minimise, and do not catastrophise.

Ask what would help, rather than assuming.

Be honest about confidentiality. Say what you may need to share and with whom, before they tell you something on a false assumption.

What you can offer

Adjustments to the work, which is the thing most within your gift and frequently the most useful: workload, deadlines, hours, duties, location.

Time, including leave.

A clear route to support. Not a vague mention of resources — the actual name, number, and what to expect when they contact it.

Follow-up, at a date you agree.

What you must not do

Attempt to counsel. Support as a colleague is not therapy, and confusing the two harms the person.

Delay a referral because you want to handle it yourself.

Share clinical details beyond what a work adjustment requires.

Make decisions about their capability in the same conversation. Performance discussions belong elsewhere and combining them makes disclosure unsafe for everyone watching.

Assume you know what is happening or what they need.

Where it goes beyond you

If the person's safety or anyone else's may be a concern, this is not a management conversation.

Follow your organisation's escalation route immediately — occupational health, your employee assistance provider, or emergency services as your procedure specifies. Do not attempt to assess the situation yourself, and do not leave someone you are worried about without ensuring they have professional support.

Every manager should know this route before it is needed, and every organisation should make sure they do.

After

Do what you said, promptly.

Follow up at the agreed time, and afterwards.

Handle the team's workload so the adjustment does not silently become someone else's problem.

Look after yourself. Supporting someone is demanding, and managers doing it need their own support rather than being expected to absorb it.

Looking after yourself afterwards

Supporting someone through difficulty is demanding work, and managers are routinely expected to absorb it invisibly.

It is normal to find it hard. Concern that persists after the conversation is a reasonable response, not a weakness.

Talk to someone, without breaching confidence — your own manager, occupational health, or the assistance programme, which usually covers managers dealing with these situations.

Do not carry the clinical weight. Your role was to notice, ask, adjust and refer. Professional support carries the rest, and the boundary exists for your protection as much as the employee's.

Watch your own load, since supporting a struggling team member is additional work that rarely gets counted.

Ask for cover if you need it.

Organisations that expect managers to do this without support find the practice quietly stops, and then conclude their managers are not committed.

What to say to the rest of the team

Colleagues notice adjustments and will speculate unless given something.

Say nothing about the reason. Not a hint, not a generality.

Say plainly that it is private, which closes speculation better than silence.

Say what is changing in practical terms, so nobody reads it as favouritism.

Say how the capacity is being covered, so the person does not become a burden in their colleagues' eyes.

Ask people to be normal, which colleagues frequently want guidance on and rarely receive.