Mental sundhed på arbejdspladsen
Talere der bekæmper stigma, opbygger modstandskraft og omformer hvordan organisationer støtter mental sundhed
Speakers Associates represents 212 speakers on Mental sundhed på arbejdspladsen, including Clare Kenny, Thimon de Jong, Helen Lawal, James Haskell, Ben McBean, Ben Campagna, Sylvia Marusyk, Dan Edwards, Perri Shakes-Drayton og Toby Makoyawo.
Put a defence official, a diplomat, and a humanitarian voice on the same stage and the session usually tilts. Either the chair has a side, or no one tests the speakers at all. Most moderators can keep time. Few can press a partisan room on substance, stay neutral, and still get a decision out of the hour.
Menopause, anxiety and midlife transition are still managed quietly in most organisations, even as they shape the working lives of a large share of the senior female workforce. The cost shows up in attrition, in lost confidence at the point women should be moving into their most senior roles, and in a workplace conversation that policy alone cannot carry. Personal voice, told well, is what shifts the room.
Most leadership development assumes the leader is already steady. They often are not. Senior people are being asked to lead through restructure, AI disruption, and team fatigue at the same time, and the gap between what they expect of themselves and what they can sustain is widening. The organisations that close that gap treat self-leadership as a capability to be built, not a personality trait to be assumed.
Pressure on senior teams has become continuous rather than episodic. Most leadership groups now operate inside repeated change cycles, public scrutiny, and decision loads that exceed their composure. The cost shows up in poor team functioning, attrition, and reactive decisions long before it shows up in the wellbeing survey.
Elite teams are built around the same things organisations claim to want: high standards, hard feedback, recovery from setback. Most never test those standards in conditions where careers are on the line every week. Leaders who have done so, and who later faced personal shock outside work, carry a credibility on resilience that few internal voices can match.
Wellbeing programmes have been bolted onto organisations for a decade, and most senior leaders privately admit they have changed little about how people actually work. The harder problem is upstream: the inner state of the leader sets the operating tone for the team, and few executives have been trained to manage it. When that gap goes unaddressed, fatigue, attrition, and disengagement compound faster than any benefits package can offset.
Organisations are losing experienced women in their 40s and early 50s at exactly the point those women should be moving into senior leadership. Perimenopause and menopause are a significant driver of that exit, and most workplaces still treat the conversation as a wellness add-on rather than a retention and performance issue. The gap between policy statements and what line managers actually do about it is where careers are being quietly written off.
Workforces are exhausted before the working day starts. Stress, anxiety and a constant sense of not being enough sit underneath productivity numbers that the wellbeing programme cannot fix on its own. Leaders need substantive mental health content that respects the clinical seriousness of what employees are dealing with, without medicalising the workplace.
Senior performers are expected to hold their composure when the result is visible, the margin is small, and the recovery window is short. Most leadership development still treats this as a soft skill rather than a trained capability. The cost is felt in poor decisions made under load, not in the absence of resilience workshops.
Sustained performance under public pressure is one of the hardest things an organisation can ask of its people. The leaders and teams who manage it well have usually learned to handle anxiety, scrutiny, and setbacks as part of the work, not as exceptions to it. That is a cultural and personal capability, not a wellness programme.
Workforces are fatigued. Mental health absences keep climbing, engagement is brittle, and the standard wellbeing programme has stopped landing. Leaders need a moment in the room that resets perspective without sliding into corporate platitude.
Setbacks rarely arrive at convenient moments, and senior teams know the cost of a leader who cannot recover their judgment after one. The harder question is what people draw on when the timeline blows up, the plan stops working, and the next twelve months are a rehabilitation rather than a sprint. Composure under sustained adversity is a learned discipline, and most organisations do not teach it.