Author Talks: Wellbeing Intelligence: Building Better Mental Health at Work (Thomas Roulet)

In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing’s Eliza Cooper chats with Thomas Roulet, professor of organizational sociology and leadership at the University of Cambridge Judge Business School and cochair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Leadership, about Wellbeing Intelligence: Building Better Mental Health at Work (Profile Books/Economist Books, July 2025), coauthored with Kiran Bhatti. Roulet and Bhatti argue that by cultivating well-being intelligence, individuals can heighten self-awareness, better support teammates, and help build healthier, more resilient organizations. An edited version of the conversation follows. You can also watch the full video at the end of this page.

Why did you write this book?

Mental health at work is mostly about explaining the antecedents of stress and anxiety—what they are and what we can do about them. Yet there is a body of knowledge in counseling psychology that we can actively draw from to better understand our stress, anxiety, and mental health issues. There are lots of techniques that we can learn from counseling psychologists. And that was the idea with this book: to share practical advice, tips, and methods to better understand our own mental health so that we can then help others improve their own.

How is well-being intelligence different from, or similar to, emotional intelligence?

In emotional intelligence, one of the most important focal points is the self. We learn about understanding our own emotions and delineating them. This is helpful in understanding the emotions of others, of our coworkers. The idea at the core of well-being intelligence is very similar. When it comes to mental health, the idea is to start with the self to better help others. We first need to understand ourselves: to understand what is triggering [our own] stress and anxiety.

When we know the triggers, we can also help others who face the same challenges. Then we can take this to the organizational level. In our model, we start with the self. Then we can use that understanding of our own mental health in our teams when we work with other colleagues.

How can leaders help mitigate the stigma around mental health?

We have made a lot of progress in the last decade or so. People are more open to talking about mental health, to normalizing their experiences with mental health issues. The reality is that we all face some degree of anxiety and stress. Understanding that we are not alone with that stress, with that anxiety, is crucial. That is the first step toward normalizing mental health and removing the stigma around mental health issues.

Normalizing mental health issues is, in part, about talking to one another about mental health, but role modeling also plays a part. That involves people at the top—CEOs, leaders, top executives in organizations—talking about their experiences and how they deal with mental health in order to change the perception of mental health and to help people discuss it more openly.

Understanding that we are not alone with that stress, with that anxiety, is crucial. That is the first step toward normalizing mental health and removing the stigma around mental health issues.

When we talk about mental health, we get a better idea of how to deal with it and its causes. We also get ideas about how we can challenge mental health issues.

How can leaders and managers create a psychologically safe environment within teams?

Trust and listening skills are two essential pillars of psychological safety. If you have both, you already have a good degree of well-being intelligence. If I tell my boss and my team that I’m unwell, that I’m feeling really anxious and really stressed, I trust them to help me or at least to try and understand me, then I’m trying to force the psychological safety. My team members and my boss could refuse to listen, not understand, or negate my feelings. They could say, “Oh, Thomas, you’re actually fine. Just go for it. Your stress is in your head. Your anxiety is in your head,” and I would feel like my feelings, my emotions, my mental health have been negated. Consequently, the next time I think about sharing with my team and my boss that I’m anxious, I won’t do it. I will withdraw, and I won’t report my feelings.

Trust and listening skills are two essential pillars of psychological safety. If you have both, you already have a good degree of well-being intelligence.

There’s psychological danger when people don’t talk openly about the challenges they face. If they don’t talk, it’s hard to collectively solve those issues. Team members need to trust and listen to one another. If they don’t, it might have longer-term implications. The second step beyond trust and listening skills is having the willingness to address the issues that others are confiding. If we don’t have psychological safety, it’s much harder to leverage well-being intelligence to help other people with their mental health.

What does a team with good well-being intelligence look like?

A team that has good well-being intelligence is one in which people are watching out for each other and can talk about their well-being. They can talk about their mental health. And when they do, it builds better psychological safety because people will be able to better regulate themselves. They will understand when they are burning themselves out, when everybody’s on edge, and how this might impact the relationships that people have with one another. So in a time of crisis, well-being intelligence is helpful so that people can really engage with the crisis in a forward-looking way.

We may think, “OK, this crisis is going to affect us. It’s going to stress us out. We might be short with each other.” But if we are aware of that, maybe we can regulate our own behavior. With a better understanding, we can then improve our mental health and the ways we sometimes pass on our stress by being short with each other, being difficult with each other.

A team that is trying to leverage well-being intelligence can have a culture of mutual support, mutual care in which people can watch out for signs of mental health issues, step in, and help each other map out and understand what is creating those negative cycles of stress and anxiety.

What elements make up an effective strategy for organizational well-being?

Organizations have to think deeply about how they set up their provision for well-being—how they support their employees with mental health challenges. A lot of organizations lack a strategy for well-being. That’s what we define in the book. It’s not enough to offer a subscription to a service that can help employees meditate or to outsource counseling sessions for them. You need to think about mental health in a strategic, holistic, and coherent way.

In the book, we define what I have defined in some of my previous work: a sieve model of organizational strategy for well-being. Focusing on addressing mental health issues when they arise—helping people when they are burning out or when they have reached a very high level of stress and anxiety—is already too late. You have missed out on many other things you could have done before.

With a good organizational culture, one with good psychological safety, you can preempt mental health issues. That’s the first step. Some of the issues might still pop up, and then you need to detect them. Sometimes, organizations are really bad at detecting issues until they have become unmanageable, meaning people have to take a leave of absence because they are burned out. Organizations need to tackle mental health issues upstream, thinking about preempting them with a good culture, trying to detect them when they come up at an early stage.

With a good organizational culture, one with good psychological safety, you can preempt mental health issues.

How can organizations ensure that employees utilize well-being resources and benefits?

People in organizations are often not great at using and joining employee wellness programs. There are many different reasons for this. The number one reason is that people may not necessarily see that they have mental health issues. They might think stress and anxiety are fleeting. But if you have a culture where people talk openly about mental health, normalize it, then see the benefits of really engaging with their own well-being and taking charge of it, you can see an uptick in all the well-being benefits that firms can offer.

The second reason that employees do not use wellness programs is that sometimes firms are not great at talking about them, displaying them, and promoting them so people know that they’re good. The reality with all those programs is that people start engaging with them when they have heard from someone else that they were beneficial.

A typical example is counseling services. People who usually use these counseling services use them because they have a colleague who has told them that they have used them. Then they think, “Maybe I can use that as well. This might help me as well.” But if someone doesn’t tell you about this, you might not know about it. You might not think it’s for you. And so you might reject it. But by talking about it, having an open discussion, normalizing mental health issues, it’s more likely that people will see the benefits they can get from their organizations, and they will engage with those programs. It really takes an effort to normalize mental health and to have it be a part of the culture of teams and the culture of the organization.

How could generative AI affect well-being intelligence?

People have gen AI tools that they use in their daily work to achieve their objectives, to carry out their work. While it’s good that these tools can increase productivity, research shows that they can also create social isolation. If you are talking only to a gen AI LLM [large language model], then you might not be asking your colleagues about how to solve a problem. There is research that shows using tools can create social isolation and overwhelm. People feel like they have too much information, which creates stress, and that isolates people.

Yet we need the tools because they trigger and enforce productivity. Wellbeing intelligence is really about self-awareness. So we are hoping that this concept will help people balance the productivity benefits of these new tools and ensure that they don’t isolate themselves, that they continue to connect with others in a meaningful way. Sometimes, asking your colleagues things that might sound like dumb questions actually builds trust, which is a factor in relationship building.

It’s all about guardrails. It’s thinking about, “What do I use gen AI for? When does it make sense?” It’s tricky, and we are on a learning curve. To balance the need for social connections, we are hardwired to connect with others, to build friendships. In fact, building friendships is one of the main sources of job satisfaction in the workplace. If we want to be motivated by work, we must ensure that we still have strong relationships at work.