Training for managers and leaders
Your managers will face these moments. Most have never been trained for them.
Disclosures like these happen in workplaces every day, and managers are usually left to respond with no training at all. How they respond in that moment can make or break trust in your entire organisation.
The core idea
You cannot train a manager in every crisis. You can train them for the moment that matters.
Impossible
Training every manager to be an expert in miscarriage, addiction, domestic abuse, bereavement, suicide risk, and financial crisis, all at once.
Achievable
Training every manager in the one response that holds, whatever the disclosure.
No manager can be an expert in miscarriage, domestic abuse, addiction, bereavement, suicide, and financial distress all at once. That is not the goal, and trying would be futile. What determines whether these moments build trust or destroy it is not specialist knowledge of the subject. It is how the manager responds in the first few minutes: whether they listen or flinch, hold the space or rush to fix, support or unintentionally re-traumatise. That response is a single, learnable skill. This course teaches it, once, for every kind of disclosure your people will ever bring.
The risk of getting it wrong
When these moments are handled badly, the damage is real.
Someone is re-traumatised
At their most vulnerable moment, in a conversation that was supposed to help.
It signals silence is safer
That person, and everyone watching, learns that speaking up is not worth the risk.
The fallout compounds
Grievances, absence, disengagement, and resignations that trace back to one badly handled conversation.
The manager carries it too
Left holding emotional weight they were never equipped to process, at real risk of stress and vicarious trauma.
Who it’s for
Anyone who manages people.
If someone might one day disclose something difficult to you, this course is for you.
What learners take away
A skill for every disclosure, not a manual for each one.
- What 'sensitive disclosures' means at work: miscarriage, domestic abuse, sexual violence, addiction, bereavement, serious illness, financial distress, and more.
- Why these conversations are fundamentally different from performance or conflict conversations, and why standard difficult-conversations training falls short.
- The trauma-informed principles that shape how people disclose, and how a response can support or harm.
- Common well-intentioned responses that accidentally minimise, dismiss, overwhelm, or re-traumatise.
- A practical framework for responding in the moment: what to say, what not to say, and how to hold the space.
- How to respond with empathy while keeping professional boundaries, without becoming a counsellor or trying to fix it.
- Recognising and managing vicarious trauma and the emotional load of these conversations.
Delivery and format
Three focused hours, delivered live, always.
Three hours, well spent
Including breaks. Focused enough to respect people's time, thorough enough to change how they respond.
Facilitator-led, always
Discussion-based, scenario-led, with contextual case studies and group debate. Never a slide deck read aloud to a passive room.
Rooted in the neuroscience of learning
Built around how adults actually retain and apply new understanding, not just how they sit through a session.
Delivered your way
Live face-to-face at your premises, or live virtual via MS Teams or Zoom. Also available as public, open-enrolment courses.
Due to the sensitive, emotionally complex nature of this topic, we do not offer this course as e-learning. Live facilitation ensures psychological safety, skilled handling of real scenarios, and lasting behavioural change, none of which a pre-recorded module can deliver.
Why organisations choose us
Delivered by a genuine specialist, not a generalist trainer.
- A trauma-informed practitioner, trained by Victim Focus, a leading CPD-accredited UK provider.
- Supervision-trained by the British Psychological Society.
- CIPD qualified at Level 7 in Human Resource Management.
- Mental Health First Aid and IOSH Managing Safely trained.
- Elements of this learning have been delivered to over 30,000 professionals, including police and social workers, as part of Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) strategies.
- Experience delivering training in Ofsted-regulated environments.
The reality right now
This is not a future risk. It is happening today.
Somewhere in your organisation, right now, an employee is deciding whether it feels safe to tell their manager what they are going through. The manager receiving that disclosure has had no training for the moment they are about to face. That is the gap this course closes.
Expert, trauma-informed training doesn’t have to cost the earth.
This course works out from as little as £125 per person, and equips your people with a skill they will use for the rest of their careers. Every engagement is tailored to your organisation, so the right way to find your number is a quick conversation.
Get in touch
Enquire about this course
Tell us about your organisation and we will come back to you within one working day.
These conversations are happening whether your managers are ready or not.
Let’s make sure they are. Book a call, send us an email, or pick up the phone. There is no obligation, and no sales script.