Spotting stress in others starts with managing your own.
Caught early, stress is manageable. Left alone it surfaces late, as the resignation or the long absence, and by then the cost is already paid. I train managers, team leads and partners to read it in themselves first, because that is the only reliable way to read it in anyone else, and I measure whether it moved.
Coping is not the same as being okay.
workers in Britain with work-related stress, depression or anxiety last year. It accounted for 52% of all work-related ill health and 22.1 million lost working days.
HSE, work-related ill health statistics, 2024/25
Everyone learns to cope. Almost no one learns to look. The people carrying the most are usually the best at hiding it, right up until the week they cannot do it any more, and by then you are managing a crisis instead of a person.
Look at what those workers said was causing it. Workload and deadlines first, then lack of managerial support, then bullying, then how change was handled. Three of those four are not the work. They are the management of the work.
And most of the cost never shows up as an empty desk. It shows up as a full one, occupied by someone doing worse work than they are capable of, which is why you have probably not noticed it yet.
A therapist in the room, not a trainer with a slide on stress.
Your managers were promoted for being good at the work. Nobody taught them to read a person, their own state included. That is not a character flaw, it is a gap in training.
of people entering a management role in the UK have had no formal management or leadership training at all. A quarter of senior leaders have had none either.
Chartered Management Institute with YouGov
I spend five days a week sitting with people that pressure has quietly worn down. That is the difference. I am not working from a manual written by someone who has never had to hold the hard part of a conversation, and a sceptical room can tell inside ten minutes.
Luke Brownlee-Williams
BACP Accredited counsellor, psychotherapist and clinical supervisor.
MBACP (Accred) membership number 00668921.
I work across Gloucestershire and Bristol, on site or online: Cheltenham, Gloucester, Cirencester, Stroud, Bristol, and anywhere a screen reaches.
Two two-hour sessions. Start with one.
Each one opens with a question rather than a slide, turns inward privately, then turns the same lens outward onto a named person on your team. Everybody leaves with one thing to do and a date on it.
Stress, anxiety and burnout
Your team reads your tone, your pace and your face before they read your email. Two hours on what your people are carrying, on the early signs that go missing before anything obvious arrives, and on catching it sooner next time.
Neurodiversity in the workplace
Around one in seven people are neurodivergent, and most never tell their employer. Two hours on why you do not need to know who, and on reading the person in front of you instead of the label you reached for.
Confident managers, and staff who still feel unsafe.
The 2026 Neurodiversity Index found employer confidence at its highest yet, while neurodivergent employees reported the opposite: lower psychological safety, uneven support, longer waits for adjustments, more microaggressions. The report's own conclusion is that awareness is not the missing piece. Manager capability is.
City & Guilds Foundation with Do-IT Solutions, Neurodiversity Index 2026
That gap is the whole argument for what I do. An awareness session tells a room that different minds exist. It does not change what happens on Thursday when someone is blunt in a meeting and their manager reads it as rudeness, or goes quiet and has it recorded as agreement, or misses the unwritten half of an instruction and gets it written up as carelessness.
Almost none of that is malice. All of it is damage, and increasingly it is a claim: disability discrimination now accounts for around 15% of employment tribunal claims, up sharply on the year, with neurodivergence driving much of the rise. The traits managers were treating as poor performance are the ones the law protects.
So I do not teach anyone how autistic people are, or how ADHD works. That is usually wrong and it is its own kind of disrespect. I teach the smaller, harder skill: stop assuming your normal is everyone's, and ask.
Tribunal figures: Littler analysis, year to 31 March 2026
Two hours shows you the problem. The six weeks is what shifts it.
Six fortnightly sessions of two hours, in a cohort of ten to fifteen of your leaders, with something to practise in the weeks between. Insight does not rewire anything. Repetition does.
Foundations
What stress actually is, what it costs, and how your state sets the weather for everyone downstream.
What shaped you
Reading the body as data, and the one lever that moves the risk: not less work, more control.
Different minds
Belonging, boundaries, and reading the actual person rather than the version you assembled in your head.
Clear communication
Cutting the ambiguity and mixed messages that quietly wear people down.
Purpose and habits
The small daily things that hold under pressure, and leading change without breaking people.
Keeping it alive
A written plan, a measured shift, and a rhythm that does not depend on me being there.
You get a number, not a feeling.
Three questions at minute two. The same three in the last five minutes.
Every session is measured start and end, and within forty-eight hours whoever booked it gets one page: the shift in the room, the themes that came up, anonymised with nobody identifiable, and what I would do next if it were mine.
That is the honest version of proof. It is a measured shift over two hours, not a cure and not a certificate, and I would rather say so than sell you a number that does not mean anything.
Having the policy is not the same as doing the thing.
In December 2025 the HSE served a Notice of Contravention on the University of Birmingham over its management of work-related stress. The university had a stress management policy. It had risk assessments. The HSE found the measures ineffective at identifying, preventing and controlling the causes, with no effective system for monitoring or review.
HSE Notice of Contravention, 11 December 2025
The enforcement itself was the lowest level available, a notification of contravention, and I am not going to pretend it was more than that. The interesting part is the finding, not the penalty. An organisation with the full paperwork could not show that anything was being done with it.
Reducing work-related ill health is an HSE priority, and stress is at the centre of it. My work sits on the substance of ISO 45003 and the HSE Management Standards, delivered rather than filed. I do not sell certification, because ISO 45003 is guidance and nobody can certify you against it. I sell the part the standards quietly assume somebody already has.
Start with a conversation.
Tell me what is happening in your teams and I will tell you honestly whether two hours will help, or whether it will not.