Most companies say they support employees through personal difficulty. Employees learn quickly where that support ends. Chris Coulter on the gap between the values board and what actually happens when someone's performance drops for six months, why low EAP utilisation is not a communications problem, and the three questions worth putting to your own leadership team this week.

Ask a parent how their kid is doing and you get an answer, not a guess. Ask a manager about the person ten feet away, same confidence. Nobody is lying. Everyone is answering from what they were shown, and somebody decided what that would be. Chris Coulter on why the people closest to you tell you least, what we measure instead, and the question worth sitting with.

Almost every company has an EAP and almost nobody uses it. Typical utilization sits somewhere between three and eight per cent, and low uptake keeps getting read as low need. Chris Coulter on the 500-parent experiment that removed every barrier and produced the same number anyway, what utilization is actually measuring, and what reaches the ninety-five per cent an EAP was never designed to find.

An employee breaks down in a manager's office, and the manager's instinct is to reach for HR. It feels responsible. It's often the worst thing you can do in that moment. This is about the difference between routing someone and staying with them, why "that's HR's job" produces the crises it's meant to prevent, and why noticing your people early is a management skill, not a clinical one.

I run a mental health company, and some days I think we talk about mental health too much. Not for the reason you'd expect. The phrase itself has gone abstract. "We all have mental health" is as useful as "we're all animals," true and inert. This is about why awareness stopped working, why vague conversation feels like too much conversation, and what changes when you get specific.