
In this lecture you work through five responses managers reach for when someone's work gets heavy and the move that replaces each one, including where your own role ends and the professional help your company provides begins.
This course is built from six disciplines: emotional intelligence, one-to-one meetings, surveys, employee experience, employee engagement and wellbeing systems.
The map of the course
A dictionary for reading lectures written for other roles as your own work with your team
Three questions to ask after every lecture
A short self-diagnostic that shows which sections to watch first
Download the Manager Response Check worksheet and fill it in for the work of one person on your team.
How emotional intelligence actually develops
Influencing through logic against influencing through emotion
Emotional intelligence and the relationships it produces
The ability to resonate, and what a resonant person does differently
What emotional charging means in a team
How one person energises or drains everyone else
The role of stress in all of this
Recovery, and why it is not optional
How an emotionally engaged person behaves
What low emotional intelligence looks like from outside
Assessing it, and the components it breaks into
Self-awareness, positive attitude, social intelligence
Awareness as the starting point
How people actually change
Positive attitude, and what it is not
Moving someone from a negative to a workable frame
Whether warnings and worst-case stories motivate anyone
The power of single-mindedness
Coaching with empathy rather than sympathy
The inspirational conversation, rapport, and the elements of coaching
Building an honest picture of yourself
Feedback, and what to do with it
The cycles of a working life
The pyramid, and where you currently sit on it
Reading the environment around a team
What outstanding leaders do with it
Building a shared view of where things are going
Group identity, and the social groups people actually belong to
The process of change, step by step
Choosing which capabilities to work on
The three development zones
Bringing it together
Why Google concluded a business does not work without it
The format itself
The measurable effect on results
Whether the manager or the support function should run it, how often, and where
Performance, relationship building, coaching and feedback as separate meetings
The burnout diagnosis conversation
Handling a conflict situation
The development conversation
How this meeting changes what a person will tell you
Building rapport deliberately
Working with engagement inside the conversation
Making it thirty minutes someone looks forward to
What coaching is and how it works in a short meeting
The technique Google uses
The GROW model
When coaching is the wrong thing to do
Giving feedback effectively inside a one-to-one
The formula that makes it land
Criticising someone without demotivating them
What positive feedback actually is, and why most of it fails
Building the case for the practice
Calculating the return on it
Presenting it to senior management, and training managers to run it
Monitoring, reporting, and the tools that automate the admin
The role of surveys in understanding a workforce
The most common ones and what each answers
Automation tools
Market benchmarks to compare against
Satisfaction, loyalty and engagement surveys
The employee experience and value proposition surveys
The burnout survey, and pulse surveys
Cross-department interaction, management performance, and the exit interview
Question types, response options and scales
How long a questionnaire can be before people stop answering honestly
Open-ended questions, and when to use them
The platforms, with a full build in a free tool
Setting the task the survey is meant to answer
Designing the questionnaire around that task
Promoting it so participation is real
Reminders that work without irritating everyone
The report formats available and which to use
Chart types, and the sections that must be there
Preparing recommendations rather than observations
Analysing the open-ended answers, which is where the real content is
What conclusions the data supports and which it does not
Planning actions people will see
Interim surveys to check whether anything changed
The three environments that shape how work feels
The employee journey map
Auditing that experience through questionnaires
What the website says about the company
The application process
The interview experience, and negotiating terms
How the decision to join is actually made
Communication between offer and first day
Preparing before they arrive
The first day
The onboarding process, and where it usually fails
The relationship with the manager, which dominates everything else
Performance management and evaluation
Communication and collaboration
Pay and benefits, and development
Communication at the point of departure
The handover
References
Keeping in contact
Alumni groups and events
Referrals from former colleagues
People who come back, and why they do
This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
Most managers find out that someone was struggling when they read the resignation letter. Everything before that was available to see.
What managers actually get wrong
Not indifference. The problem is that the signals are quiet and the usual response is a phrase. Someone's camera stays off. Their replies get shorter. They stop arguing in meetings, which reads as agreement. So you say "let me know if you need anything", which puts the entire burden on the person with the least capacity to carry it, and then you both move on. Six weeks later they are gone and the exit interview says workload, and you think back and realise you had noticed, you just did not have a next move.
What this course covers
Forty lessons in five parts. Noticing first: how emotion transfers between people, the role of stress and recovery, what high and low emotional intelligence look like in behaviour, self-awareness and social intelligence, empathy in a conversation, rapport, and whether warning someone ever motivates them. Then the venue: the one-to-one, its types including the burnout diagnosis conversation and the conflict conversation, building enough relationship that someone tells you the truth, the coaching mode and when it is wrong, feedback that does not add pressure, and rolling the practice out across a company. Then scale: the survey types including burnout and pulse surveys, questionnaire and scale design, getting honest participation, the report, and analysing the open-ended answers where the real content sits. Then conditions: the three environments, the journey map, and where in that journey strain reliably shows up. Then engagement as a trackable signal — Gallup Q12, the twelve elements, three generations of approach — and finally building the support system, auditing the culture that would otherwise cancel it, and evaluating it at five levels.
What this course is not
This is not clinical training and it does not make you anyone's therapist. It contains no diagnosis of conditions, no crisis intervention protocol, and no guidance for someone in acute distress. Those require a qualified professional, and part of doing this job well is knowing precisely where your role ends. What this course gives you is the earlier ground: the environment, the conversation, and the measurement — the work that reduces how often anyone reaches a crisis in the first place, and the awareness to see that someone needs more help than you can give.
Who is teaching this
I am Mike. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn, and I have worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank. More than 1.6 million students have enrolled in my courses across 185 countries, and over 150,000 specialists have gone through my programmes. I hold PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and represent HRCI in more than ten countries.
What is included
Lifetime access to all 40 lessons
Active instructor support in the Q&A section
A Udemy Certificate of Completion
Working material: the one-to-one formats including burnout diagnosis, survey and scale design, Gallup Q12 and the twelve elements, the journey map, the cultural audit, five-level evaluation
Methods drawn from published research rather than opinion
Where to start
Think of one person on your team whose behaviour has changed in the last two months. You already know who. The rest of this course is about what to do next. Enrol now and start today.