Mel Neil has spent more than 20 years teaching emotional intelligence (EI) to leaders, teams and individuals across healthcare, education, construction, community services and beyond. She knows the research. She knows what works. And she knows, better than most, why emotional intelligence matters and where the field has been getting it wrong.
The Institute of EI is Australia’s dedicated emotional intelligence education institution, and her answer to that. We sat down with Mel to find out what she believes the market has been missing, what drove her to build it, and what she hopes changes for the people who come through the Institute.
Burnout lands on managers twice
Managers sit in the most difficult position in the burnout system.
They are expected to monitor team wellbeing, respond to distress, maintain performance and create psychological safety. At the same time, they often have limited authority to change deadlines, staffing, budgets or strategic priorities. They become the organisation’s pressure valve and are then told to protect everyone else from the pressure.
The data reflects that contradiction. Gallup’s 2026 workplace report found leaders had relatively high engagement and thriving, but also reported stress at 46%, anger at 33%, sadness at 34% and loneliness at 31%. Their stress was seven percentage points higher than that of individual contributors (Gallup).
This is why manager training alone is not enough.
Capability without authority becomes another demand
Managers need the capability to notice signs of distress, hold honest conversations, respond without judgement and escalate risks. WHO recommends manager training that equips managers both to support workers experiencing distress and to address stressors arising from working conditions (World Psychiatry).
But skill cannot compensate indefinitely for a system that gives managers no room to act. A manager may recognise that a team is overloaded and still be unable to remove work. They may invite openness while knowing they cannot offer flexibility. They may encourage leave while deadlines make leave functionally impossible.
That mismatch creates a credibility problem. Employees hear a wellbeing message but experience unchanged demands. Managers become the visible face of a problem they did not create and cannot control alone.
Start with prioritisation, not encouragement
Inappropriate workload was the most common burnout driver in a nationally representative Australian survey, reported by 49% of respondents. Lack of management support was next at 32%, followed by inflexible working conditions at 21% (Beyond Blue).
The practical response is not another instruction to “check in with your team”. It is to give managers the authority and information to change the work.
Leaders can begin with four questions:
- What has been added to the team’s workload without anything being removed?
- Which priorities are genuinely non-negotiable, and who has said so?
- Where are employees compensating for poor systems, unclear roles or repeated change?
- What can this manager stop, defer, simplify or escalate?
These questions turn wellbeing from an interpersonal task into a work-design process.
Emotional intelligence is the bridge, not the whole structure
Emotional intelligence matters here because the work is relational. Managers need to recognise their own defensiveness when someone says the workload is unsafe. They need to distinguish a performance conversation from a capacity conversation. They need to hear frustration without labelling it resistance and communicate limits upward without translating every demand into urgency for the team.
Those capabilities make organisational controls usable. They do not replace staffing decisions, role clarity, fair treatment or workload control.
The best evidence supports the combination. One meta-analysis found an effect of (d=-0.25) for organisational-only interventions and (d=-0.54) for combined organisational and individual interventions. Participatory organisational change paired with individual support produced (d=-0.65), although the overall certainty of evidence was rated very low (systematic review and meta-analysis).
A better roadmap for organisations, leaders and workforce
Organisations should stop telling managers to own burnout without giving them control over its drivers. Managers, in turn, should stop treating distress as a private weakness to be managed quietly between one-to-ones.
The better roadmap is:
- The organisation sets realistic priorities and controls systemic risk.
- The manager translates those commitments into daily work.
- The employee contributes honest information about demand, capacity and impact.
- All three review whether the controls are working.
Burnout lands on managers twice. Prevention must support them twice too: as people who may be at risk and as leaders who need the authority and emotional capability to make work safer.
Download The Truth About Burnout and use its 24-hour, 30-day and 12-month prompts with your leadership team. If you want to pair manager capability with practical review of work-design risks, contact The Institute of EI.
