The Most Unmanaged Psychosocial Risk in Your Organisation Is Probably the Person Running It

Leaders as Unmanaged Psychosocial Risk — Mind Logistics

There's a finding from a 2023 study by The Workforce Institute at UKG — Mental Health at Work: Managers and Money — that I keep coming back to.

Across 2,200 employees in ten countries, including Australia, 69% said their manager impacts their mental health as much as their spouse or partner. More than their doctor. More than their therapist.

It landed as a wellness statistic. It was shared widely, nodded at, and largely filed under "interesting." But I think it's evidence of something much more uncomfortable — and something that almost nobody is accounting for on a risk register.

If your manager has that much influence over your psychological experience at work, then the manager's own psychological state isn't a personal matter. It's an organisational one.

The double standard nobody talks about

Here's what I notice — in clinical rooms, in organisations, and if I'm honest, in myself.

If your partner came home quieter than usual. A bit short. Less present than they normally are. You'd probably notice. You might ask if they were okay. You'd wonder what was going on for them beneath the surface. You'd extend curiosity before you extended judgement.

You wouldn't immediately conclude they were a bad partner.

But when a leader shows the same signs at work — slightly withdrawn, less available, an edge in their tone that wasn't there last month — we don't extend the same curiosity. We extend less grace, not more. We call it poor leadership. We flag it with HR. We start performance conversations.

We manage the symptom and never once ask what's happening to the person who is holding everything together.

And here's the part that sits uncomfortably with me: that person is absorbing the pressure of the entire organisation. Of course something is showing.

What the research actually tells us

Gallup has been tracking the relationship between managers and team outcomes for twenty years. Their data consistently shows that managers account for roughly 70% of the variance in team engagement. That's not a management statistic — it's a relational one. It tells us that how a leader is functioning, emotionally and psychologically, flows directly into how the people around them experience their work.

The UK's Chartered Management Institute found in 2023 that 82% of British managers had entered their roles with no formal training of any kind. They were promoted for output, and then asked to do relational work that nobody taught them how to do — and blamed when it went badly.

We are selecting people for one job, asking them to do a different one, giving them no preparation for it, and then treating their struggle as a character flaw.

That's not a leadership pipeline problem. That's a governance failure.

The load-bearing wall problem

There's a structural metaphor I find myself using with organisations: the leader is the load-bearing wall.

Everything leans against it. The team's wellbeing, the culture, the output, the client relationships, the difficult conversations nobody else wants to have. The leader holds all of it — often silently, because showing the strain feels like weakness, and weakness feels like a risk they can't afford.

Load-bearing walls don't announce when they're starting to crack. They just quietly absorb more than they were designed to carry — until something gives.

The problem isn't that leaders struggle. The problem is that the organisation has no mechanism to notice before the crack becomes a structural failure. There's no scheduled inspection. Nobody checks the wall. It just holds, and holds, and holds — until it doesn't.

Under Australian WHS positive duty legislation, organisations have a legal obligation to proactively manage psychosocial hazards. Leaders experiencing unsupported pressure, role overload, and isolation meet the definition of psychosocial hazards under that framework. This isn't a clinical observation. It's a compliance matter.

What high-functioning distress actually looks like in leadership

This is the presentation most organisations miss — because it doesn't look like distress from the outside.

The leader is still showing up. Still performing. Still answering emails at 10pm and making decisions that need to be made. From the outside, everything looks functional. The risk register shows nothing.

But inside, the picture is different. The decisions are costing more than they used to. The recovery time between hard weeks is getting longer. Sleep is lighter. Patience is thinner. There's a flatness that wasn't there eighteen months ago, and the leader can't quite name it — so they file it under "busy period" and keep moving.

"I'm fine. It's just a busy period."

In my clinical work, that line is a signal. Not because people who say it are lying — they're usually not. But because the brain is extraordinarily good at normalising. It adjusts the baseline so gradually that you don't notice how far you've drifted until someone asks how you're actually doing — and you realise you don't quite know how to answer.

The busy period has been going for two years. The baseline has shifted. And the organisation has no idea, because nothing on the surface has changed.

Why this isn't on most risk registers

Three reasons, in my experience.

First, leaders are often outside the psychosocial risk assessment process — either explicitly excluded or implicitly assumed to be managing fine because they're senior. The assessment tools were designed for employees. Nobody thought to point them upward.

Second, the presentation is invisible. High-functioning distress doesn't look like distress. It looks like someone doing their job.

Third, there's a cultural assumption baked into most professional services environments that leadership carries a certain amount of pressure as a matter of course — and that identifying it as a risk is somehow soft, or reads as a complaint. Leaders absorb this cultural message and stop disclosing early. By the time it surfaces, it's usually a crisis.

What organisations can do differently

This isn't an argument for wrapping leaders in cotton wool or adding a mindfulness app to the benefits package. It's an argument for treating leadership sustainability the way you'd treat any other operational risk — with structure, visibility, and proactive review rather than reactive crisis management.

That means building regular check-points that ask different questions. Not "how is the team performing" — but "what are you carrying right now, and is it sustainable?" It means psychosocial risk assessments that include the people running the organisation, not just the people working in it. It means creating conditions where showing the strain early is safer than holding it until something breaks.

It also means acknowledging — formally, at a governance level — that the person at the top of the structure is not exempt from the risks that structure creates. They are, in fact, the most exposed person in it.

A final thought

We extend more empathy to a struggling partner than to a struggling leader. And that gap — between who we notice and who we excuse — is exactly where organisational risk quietly builds.

The leader who is quietly not okay is not a liability. They're a signal. The question is whether your organisation has built anything that can actually hear it.

Tenneile Manenti is a Registered Psychologist specialising in workplace psychology and psychosocial risk. She works with individuals navigating workplace pressure and with professional services firms through The Business Psychologist.

Source: "Mental Health at Work: Managers and Money," The Workforce Institute at UKG, January 2023. Chartered Management Institute, "Taking Responsibility: Why UK plc Needs Better Managers," 2023.

If this resonates — for you or your organisation — here's where to go next.

For leaders and individuals: If you're the person holding everything together and quietly running low — therapy is a confidential space to think clearly about what's actually happening and what you need. Book a session →

For organisations and practice principals: If your leadership team is carrying more than they're disclosing — the Workplace Pressure Scan™ is a structured starting point. A rapid assessment of where pressure is building before it becomes a governance issue. Learn more →