For Crisis Situations 🛟
For crisis situations specifically (when a team member discloses thoughts of self-harm, a dangerous home situation, or another acute crisis), resources are available via the When a Team Member May Be in Crisis section of The Manager’s Conversation Toolkit. It covers what to say in the moment, what resources to share, and what your role is in that kind of disclosure.
Before you need it: familiarize yourself with your organization’s Employee Assistance Program and any formal protocols for supporting employees in crisis. Know the resources before the conversation happens, so you are not making decisions in the moment without guidance.
There are many types of acute crises that team members may experience. In the US, anyone experiencing a mental health crisis or thoughts of suicide can call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Online chat is also available at 988lifeline.org. Globally, the International Association for Suicide Prevention maintains a directory of crisis centers by country at iasp.info/resources/Crisis_Centres.
Our Role as Leaders
It usually starts as a routine 1-on-1, or someone dropping by to chat. “Do you have a few minutes to talk?” with nothing flagged on the calendar. If you’re a manager your heart rate just spiked thinking about it. More often than not, that was a valid response.
I’d open with something like “How are you doing this week?” (a habit I wrote about here, in Issue #2) and the answer to that question revealed layer on layer of hardship, trauma, pain, grief, or whatever tough emotion life could serve up that day. It wasn’t all thunder and rainclouds, but those unicorns and rainbows felt rarer than they should be.
Some of the richest and most instructive of these conversations were with team members who were navigating chronic conditions or illnesses. Invisible ones, mostly. You wouldn’t know from watching them work. The symptoms varied enormously by diagnosis, the impact shifted day to day, and they were carrying it all largely alone in the workplace until a 1-on-1 gave them the opening to say something. Sometimes they had a medical accommodation already in place. Sometimes, through that conversation, we discovered together that one might help, and we worked with the workplace accommodations team to put it in place.
What I learned from those conversations changed how I show up for every team member.
Grief, burnout, mental health crises, family caregiving, infertility, medical diagnoses, family members navigating substance use or gender transitions, the weight of global conflicts that are anything but abstract for the people living them. All of it shows up at work, invisibly or not, whether anyone acknowledges it openly or not. And it lands on your desk as a manager not because you are a therapist or a crisis worker, but because you are often the person they see most and, if you’ve built the relationship, the person they trust enough to tell.
This issue is a framework for approaching those moments. Not a script. A way of thinking about what your role actually is and isn’t.