Individuals cannot fix their wellbeing in organisations that are structurally broken. Here is what needs to change.
In part one of this series, I argued that mid-to-senior professionals need to stop blaming work for their unbalanced lifestyle and mid-life dispair and start doing their own personal work first: redefining success, naming their non-negotiables, and reclaiming their agency. I stand by every word of it. And yet I also know that personal work has a ceiling. You cannot fix your wellbeing in an organisation that is structurally incapable of supporting it. Which means this conversation has two parts, and this is the harder one.
Most wellbeing initiatives are lipstick on the over-stuffed pig that organisational life has quietly become. Benefits signal good intent. They do not change the underlying conditions driving poor wellbeing: too many meetings, unclear expectations, cultures of performative busyness, and line managers who have somehow become responsible for everything short of catering.
Consider what happens when you get the personal work right but the organisation is not ready for it. The individual who has examined their habits, named their non-negotiables, and turned up on Monday morning with a clearer sense of what they need, only to walk straight back into a structure that overrides all of it. That is not a personal failure. It is an organisational one.
The individuals doing their personal work need somewhere for that work to land. Most organisations, if they are honest, are not ready to receive it.
The train on fixed rails
Here is the problem nobody in a conference keynote wants to say out loud: culture change is far too reliant on turning a massive ship that is, in practice, a train on fixed rails. You can talk about psychological safety until you are hoarse, build beautiful manager training programmes, launch ERGs, and commission wellbeing surveys. But if the person at the top is the problem, none of it will fix anything.
Toxic leaders do not fundamentally change. Most experienced HR professionals know this privately even when they cannot say it publicly.
Organisations can manage around difficult leaders, promote past them, or move them on. What they cannot do is medicate their way to a healthy culture whilst leaving the root cause in place. Pretending otherwise is not just optimistic. It is actively harmful, because it consumes enormous resource, raises expectations, and then fails the people who most needed it to work.
The organisations with the courage to act on this, rather than simply train around it, are the ones whose wellbeing investments actually compound over time.
Stop training managers to look after others before looking after themselves
The other problem nobody wants to say out loud: we have built an entire management development industry on telling people how to look after their teams, whilst saying almost nothing about how those people look after themselves. A burnt-out manager cannot model psychological safety.
A manager who has never examined their own relationship with work cannot credibly encourage their team to set boundaries. We are asking people to give something they do not have.
The organisations doing this well have realised that the wellbeing of team leaders is not a nice addition to the agenda. It is the agenda. They have also realised that simplifying what we ask of managers matters as much as training them.
The role of a line manager has expanded so relentlessly over the past decade that asking them to also become the front line of mental health support, without reducing anything else, is somewhere between optimistic and unkind.
The longer game
The organisations genuinely getting this right operate on two tracks simultaneously. They address the immediate, providing accessible support for people who are struggling right now: employee assistance programmes, mental health allies, and screening. Not a poster in the kitchen asking if you are okay, but proper across-the-board screening for depression, anxiety, burnout, and neurodivergence, delivered anonymously, with automatic routing into relevant support for that individual rather than a generic list of resources nobody reads.
This kind of infrastructure, the sort that meets people where they are rather than where it is convenient for the organisation, is increasingly achievable and the return on investment is well evidenced. (Wysa has built exactly this kind of model with the NHS, among others. I work there, so make of that what you will, but the outcomes data is real.)
And then they play the longer game: simplifying work, protecting managers from scope creep, and creating the structural conditions in which the personal work their people are doing can actually take hold.
For those of us advancing this agenda in boardrooms, the business case is not a concession to cynicism. It is the most effective language for reaching the people who control the decisions.
The data is robust: companies scoring highly on employee wellbeing consistently outperform the market, and the return on mental health investment climbs the more upstream you intervene. Meet your audience where they are. The CFO needs financial data. The operations director needs efficiency metrics. Turning up and saying it is simply the right thing to do is noble, but it rarely shifts the dial on its own.
The leaders who built successful organisations under very different cultural norms are not villains. They are people being asked to change a model they know works, for a longer-term one they have to take on faith. Bringing the evidence, framing it in their language, and acknowledging the journey they have already taken is not compromising your values. It is having the combination of compassion and pragmatism this agenda genuinely requires.
Where the two parts meet
The reason this is a two-part series is that neither half works without the other. An individual who has done the personal work (who knows their warning signs, has named their non-negotiables, and is modelling healthy boundaries) is also, quietly, the most powerful agent of organisational change available to you. They are demonstrating, in small undramatic ways, that it is possible to perform at a high level and live a sustainable life. That behaviour is contagious. It creates the permission structure that formal culture programmes spend years trying to manufacture.
And an organisation that genuinely simplifies work, acts on toxic leadership, and focuses on the wellbeing of its managers is creating the conditions in which that individual behaviour can take root and spread. Neither fixes the other on its own. But when both happen at once, something shifts. The pig, if you will, starts to lose a little weight. The lipstick becomes optional.
This is part two of a two-part series. Part one, ‘The Midlife Reset: Your employer cannot save you from burnout”, addresses what individuals can do to reclaim their wellbeing at midlife and mid-career.
About the author:
Sarah Baldry is CMO at Wysa, a global mental health AI platform. She writes and speaks on the intersection of marketing, mental health, and workplace culture.
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