Thriving leadership programme

That moment is the reason we’ve spent the last few months building something new. We wanted to share what it is, who’s helping us, and why we think it matters.

What we’re building

With funding from NEBOSH, a global authority in workplace health and safety, as part of their Social Purpose Programme, we are developing Thriving Together. It’s a six-week online programme that helps managers become trauma-informed: understanding how stress, trauma and adversity change the way people think, focus and respond at work – and learning how to lead and communicate in a way that works with that, rather than against it.

It is grounded in trauma science, and importantly, it is not about expecting managers to develop specialist counselling skills, or asking them to identify what someone might be struggling with. It’s about something far more practical: understanding how people actually function under pressure, stress and adversity, and learning to respond in a way that feels clear, safe and consistent.

Nobody leaves their nervous system at the door when they come to work. Whether someone is living with PTSD and C-PTSD, navigating grief, burnout, or simply a hard season of life, those experiences come into the office with them. The McKinsey Health Institute found that a third of employees say they’ve experienced a traumatic event that has affected their lives. So it’s not a niche group of people, that’s likely someone on every team.

And managers matter more than almost anyone realises – their influence on a person’s wellbeing at work is enormous. Yet most have never been given a single practical tool to handle these moments well. That gap is what we’re trying to close.

Who’s helping us

This isn’t something we wanted to build alone, or off the shelf.

We’re developing this programme alongside Hala Khouri, a somatic psychologist and one of the most respected international voices in trauma-informed practice, and Alexandra Ostrow, a strategist who specialises in bringing trauma-informed approaches into organisations. Between us, that’s clinical depth, somatic expertise, real-world organisational know-how and the community insight that has always been at PTSD UK’s heart.

We’ve also tested our early ideas and initial concepts with HR teams and senior leaders from leading organisations in several sectors, because good intentions aren’t enough. We needed to understand where wellbeing initiatives usually fall down, what causes managers to resist, and what actually makes training stick once the screen goes dark.

Shaped by the people who’ve lived it 

The thing we’re proudest of is also the quietest: the listening.

For more than a decade, PTSD UK has been in service of our community – hearing, again and again, what people affected by PTSD and C-PTSD actually experience at work, and what employers ask us when they’re genuinely trying to do better. For this programme, we went further. We ran focus groups and surveys with people who have lived through trauma in the workplace, and we asked them the questions that matter most: what helped? What didn’t? What do you wish your manager had understood?

Their answers shaped the content. Not our assumptions about what people need – their words, about what they actually needed.

That’s the difference we hope you’ll feel in this. We’re not a top-down medical voice telling people how their experience should look. We’re the charity built by, with and for the community we support and that’s the lens we’ve brought to every single decision.

What happens next

Before we share this with the world, we want to be sure it genuinely works – in real workplaces, with real teams, under real pressure.

So the next step is a pilot. We’re bringing on ten organisations to run the programme internally with their own managers, and to be honest with us about what they find. We want to see what’s landing and what isn’t, what changes once managers start putting these tools into practice, and what the experience is actually like from the inside – not in theory, but on a normal Monday morning. At present, we’ve got some amazing organisations signed up to support us with this pilot phase, but we are looking for more. 

Their feedback will shape the final version. We’ll refine, adjust and strengthen the programme based on what we learn, so that by the time it’s ready to go out more widely in Summer 2027, it’s been tested, challenged and improved by the very people it’s designed to support.

If that sounds like something your organisation would like to get involved with (or if you think your employer might), we’d love to hear from you. Being a pilot partner means helping to build something that could change how employers across the country support their teams – and getting early access to the training as we do. Find out more about how to become a pilot partner here. 

We wanted you to know what’s been happening behind the scenes, because you’re part of the reason it exists. Every conversation, every piece of feedback, every person who has trusted us with their story has fed into this.

Tomorrow can be a new day – and we think it can be a better one at work, too.