Remember: You Are Not a Therapist

As a diligent, caring manager who is excellent at listening, you may experience your one-to-one sessions turning into therapy sessions for your staff. Although this may be helpful, this isn’t something that you’re trained in, nor are issues that belong in therapy sessions best placed to be part of your one-to-one meetings. As much as you may want to help, this isn’t your area of expertise and you owe it to your staff to find them better support.

If you feel that your staff primarily use your sessions to vent with no solutions proposed, or to talk about in-depth personal issues that aren’t related to work, or if you begin to notice signs that you think that your staff are going through difficult times or may be mentally unwell, then there’s a limit to which your support can extend.

If you are beginning to worry about your staff, then the best thing that you can do is to raise your concern and ask whether they would be interested in talking to a qualified independent third party. If you’re in a company of reasonable size, you may have an HR department that can help. Seek help from your own manager, too, about what to do.

This is, of course, a sensitive area. Despite your intuition, you are (probably) not a medical professional who can make diagnoses. I’ve been through periods of anxiety and depression and so have my staff, and I have often been able to sense that they may be suffering. However, it’s not my place to suggest that. Instead, I have said to them that I sense they may not be feeling their best self and they should make sure that they get some external support if they need it. Once they’ve opened up about a problem, then it’s OK for you both to talk about it, but until that moment, be supportive but refer them elsewhere. Never diagnose.