Investing in mental health training for managers is one of the most impactful decisions an organisation can make. But like any significant investment, the return you get depends largely on the groundwork you do before the training ever takes place.
Here are five things worth considering before you go ahead.
Why is Mental Health Training for Managers Important?
Before diving into the five considerations, it is worth addressing this question directly because it shapes everything that follows.
When managers are equipped to recognise and respond to mental health issues early, the ripple effect across an organisation is significant. Absence reduces. Engagement improves. Teams feel psychologically safe. HR spend less time picking up the pieces of conversations that were never had. And managers themselves feel more confident, less overwhelmed, and better equipped to lead.
The cost of getting this wrong is high. The cost of getting it right is transformational.
1. Mental Health Training | What Are You Trying to Achieve?
This might sound like an obvious question, but from our experience of delivering mental health training for managers, many organisations are not completely clear about this.
They know they want managers having conversations with team members about mental health and wellbeing. HR teams want to see managers being far more proactive at addressing mental health issues before they escalate. Organisations want managers to feel confident and equipped with the right tools to have these kinds of conversations. All of that makes sense.
But in order for your mental health training to be as strategic as possible, one of the questions we always ask HR leaders and learning and development professionals is this:
If we were having a conversation six months from now, after the mental health training had been delivered, what would you be telling me had changed?
Picture that conversation. What are managers doing specifically? What are you seeing as a result of the training? Is there a reduction in absence? Are employee engagement survey results indicating a happier, more psychologically safe workforce? Do employees feel genuinely supported by their manager and by the organisation? Are there fewer ER cases or less escalating to HR?
The return on manager mental health training, when it is done well, can have a significant ripple effect throughout an organisation. But a lot of that depends on being clear about what you are wanting to achieve in the first place.
2. What Problem Are You Trying to Resolve?
This links closely with the first point, but it is worth exploring in its own right because the presenting problem is not always the real problem.
For many organisations, stress and burnout are at an all time high.
🇬🇧 UK workforce (Mental Health UK)
- 91% of UK adults experienced high or extreme stress in the past year
- Around 1 in 3 (34%) experienced high or extreme stress “often or always”
- This has stayed consistently high year-on-year rather than improving
But stress and burnout are not really the problem you are trying to resolve.
The problem is that you want people at work performing consistently well, delivering results, meeting deadlines, meeting client and project expectations, communicating well, working well together, and making good decisions.
Stress and burnout are the byproduct. And when they are high, standards slip, mistakes get made, and those mistakes can be costly.
If you are working with an organisation where the cost of a single product or project sits anywhere between £200,000 and several million, mistakes have enormous financial consequences.
But the same is true at the other end of the scale. If you are running a contact centre or operating in retail where absence tends to be higher, a few people down on the phones or on the shop floor creates a direct impact on customer service. People wait longer. They do not get the assistance they need. That leads to missed sales or complaints.
So what is it that you are seeing across the landscape in terms of problems that, if your managers were equipped with the knowledge of how to support mental health, would go some way towards alleviating?
3. How to Identify Mental Health Issues in Your Team
This is where point three becomes critical, because before you can design effective training, you need to understand what your managers are actually struggling with.
Many organisations come to invest in mental health training for managers without having done the background work to understand what is genuinely getting in the way of managers tackling these conversations in the first place.
As we highlight in our guide to planning mental health training for managers, we always recommend speaking with at least a handful of managers before the training is designed, because what comes up in those conversations helps to shape everything that follows.
Some managers are worried about making things worse. If somebody on their team is really struggling and they do not know how to approach it, the fear of saying the wrong thing and making the situation worse can stop them from having the conversation at all.
For others it is a fear around employment legislation. Some managers are not sure what they are and are not allowed to ask. Some struggle with the boundary between what is personal and what is professional, particularly when a team member does not want to share what is going on.
Others simply don’t have a clear understanding of their role and responsibility when it comes to mental health. And for some, if they are honest, it is just a lack of time.
Doing that groundwork before the training takes place means the training itself can be shaped around what managers genuinely need, rather than a generic programme that tries to cover everything and lands nothing.
4. What Should Mental Health Training for Managers Cover?
What do you want managers to walk away with?
Mental health is a vast topic. It covers an enormous spectrum of conditions, experiences, and challenges. So before investing in mental health training for managers, it is worth getting specific about what you actually want managers to know and be able to do by the end of it.
If your data is showing you that stress and burnout are the primary issues your workforce is facing, it might make more sense to focus the training there rather than trying to cover every condition under the sun.
There is real value in managers understanding conditions like anxiety, depression, and trauma. Knowledge reduces the stigma of mental health and that matters. But one of the most consistent pieces of feedback we receive is how valuable managers find the practical application of the training, particularly around listening skills and solution focused coaching.
Managers who have been through our training tell us that those skills have transformed not just their mental health conversations, but their sales conversations, their customer service conversations, and their day to day management. That is the kind of transferable impact that makes training genuinely worthwhile.
What we would not recommend is overwhelming managers with an exhaustive overview of every mental health condition that exists. More is not always more. In the case of mental health training for managers, knowing what you want people to walk away with makes the difference between training that creates real change and training that ticks a box.
Online Mental Health Training for Managers: Does it Work as Well as Face to Face?
This is one of the questions we get asked most often, particularly from organisations with dispersed or global teams. The short answer is yes, when it is designed and delivered well.
The format matters as much as the content, and this leads naturally into the fifth consideration.
5. How Much Time Can You Give to Mental Health Training?
This is perhaps the most practical consideration of all, and it is one where we see organisations undersell themselves more than anywhere else.
We have had requests to deliver mental health training for managers in an hour. With a topic this significant and managers arriving with this many questions, an hour is not going to give you the impact you are looking for.
One approach that has worked incredibly well for a number of our clients is breaking the training into two or three two hour online modules delivered across consecutive weeks.
Managers attend the first session focused on understanding and destigmatising mental health. They are given something to take away and put into practice before the following session, which focuses on the skills.
By the third session, managers are sharing their own experiences of having put things into practice, the conversations they have had, and the results they have seen.
That is where the real learning happens. Not in the room, but in the reflection on what they did when they got back to their teams.
Breaking the training up in this way also makes it more time efficient for the organisation overall. If you have 100 managers to put through the training, working in groups of around 20 creates a much greater sense of psychological safety in the room, and gives everyone enough time and space for their questions to be genuinely addressed.
The more people you have in a session, the less time there is for the conversations that actually make the training stick.
Mental health training for managers is too important to rush. Done well, it changes how your managers show up for their people. And that changes everything.
Ready to Equip Your Managers With These Skills?
If you’re an HR leader or Learning & Development Manager who wants to create a culture of trust, safety, and emotionally intelligent leadership, our mental health training for managers is for you.
It’s designed to remove fear, build confidence, and equip your managers to show up with calm, clarity, and care, even when conversations feel hard.
No awkward role plays. No tick-box content. Just practical tools, human-first language, and deep shifts in perspective
Download our guide to planning your mental health training for managers.
