For most of my career, I met people after something had already gone wrong.
I've worked as a clinical psychologist in hospitals, community mental health, the VA and private practice. The settings changed. One thing didn't. Workplace Wellbeing.
Work was almost always in the room. In fact, more veterans at the VA experienced psychological distress from day to day work stressors and bad leaders than they did from deployments and even combat.
Work can bring psychological distress in many ways. A manager who never said anything directly. A team where conflict had gone underground. A promotion that brought more responsibility and no more support. People who were excellent at their jobs and quietly struggling to hold everything else together.
We did good work together, and people got better. Then many of them went back into the same environment that had helped wear them down.
At some point I started asking a different question. Not only "How do I help this person recover?" but "What would it take for the place they work to stop producing this?"
That question is why I'm moving my work upstream: into business psychology, workplace wellbeing, and working directly with leaders.
Why now
The timing isn't accidental. The data on work in Germany is hard to ignore.
People are unhappy at work.
Most people have stopped giving more than the minimum. Gallup's Engagement Index Deutschland 2025 found that only 10% of employees feel strongly connected to their employer, while 77% do what's required and nothing more. Gallup puts the productivity cost of employees who have inwardly quit at €119 to 142 billion in 2025 alone.
Mental health is now the leading reason people are off work. In the first half of 2026, mental illness overtook respiratory infections as the top driver of sick days among DAK-insured employees: 184 days per 100 insured, up 9% on the year before.
The people holding teams together are running low. Only 12% of managers in Germany are engaged, barely above the 10% of the people they lead. Just 27% say they feel supported and developed in their role. Yet managers account for around 70% of the variance in how engaged a team is.
At the very top, the weight is heavier still. Gallup's 2026 global data shows leaders are more likely than individual contributors to report a lot of stress, anger, sadness and loneliness on any given day.
When I read numbers like these, I don't see a motivation problem. I see a strain problem. And strain is something psychologists are trained to understand.
Why the quick fixes don't stick
Organizations haven't ignored any of this. Most have tried something: a wellbeing app, a resilience workshop, an engagement survey every autumn, fruit in the kitchen.
Germany even made it law. Since 2013, the Arbeitsschutzgesetz has required employers to include psychological strain in their workplace risk assessment. Yet the most recent surveys I've seen suggest only around half of companies actually carry it out. An occupational health manager quoted in Personalmagazin described managing directors asking how to complete it as painlessly as possible, ideally without finding anything.
Clinical work teaches you something useful here. When a problem keeps coming back, something is keeping it in place. In therapy we call these maintaining factors. You can teach someone excellent tools for managing stress, but if they return every day to a team where mistakes are punished, the stress returns with them.
Organizations work the same way. If the climate, the incentives or the leader's own stress keep producing strain, no app will out-breathe it. Lasting change happens where the pattern is being maintained. And very often, that runs through leadership.
What a clinical psychologist brings to leadership
People sometimes ask what a clinical psychologist has to offer a leadership team. More than you might expect.
Alongside my clinical work, I've trained extensively in relationship science through the Gottman Institute. John Gottman's research found something deceptively simple. Partners constantly make small "bids" for connection: a comment, a question, a sigh. Couples who were still happily together six years later had turned toward those bids 86% of the time. Couples who had split up or were unhappy did so 33% of the time.
I'd argue teams run on bids too. A comment in a meeting that nobody picks up. A concern answered with "let's take that offline" and never revisited. A message that sits unanswered for three days. Each one is small. Together, they teach people whether it's worth speaking up at all.
That's the level I work at. The skills I've built in clinical practice translate directly:
- Reading the emotional undercurrent of a room, not just what's being said.
- Helping people stay regulated under pressure, so they can think clearly and decide well.
- Working with conflict so it gets repaired instead of buried.
- Spotting the patterns someone keeps repeating, and the beliefs holding them in place.
Leaders under pressure don't need another framework. They need someone who understands how people actually work, and who will tell them the truth with care.
What I'm building
Through McGraw Advisory, I now work in two directions.
With founders and leaders, on what it takes to reach the next level of success, inside and out: mindset and decision-making, leadership and relationships, balance and boundaries, purpose and values.
With organizations, on understanding what is really driving morale, engagement and strain, then building the right support around it. That includes assessment and tailored training, workplace wellbeing workshops, support through transformation, and helping founders set up their company on solid psychological ground before it scales.
The goal is the same in both: get there earlier. Help leaders and teams build the conditions where people do their best work without paying for it at home.
Three questions for your next leadership meeting
- When someone on your team raises a concern, what happens next? Is it picked up, parked, or quietly dropped?
- When did someone last ask your managers how they are holding up, and actually wait for the answer?
- If your wellbeing initiatives disappeared tomorrow, would anyone notice a difference in how work feels?
I trained to help people after work had worn them down. Now I want to help build workplaces, and leaders, that don't wear people down in the first place.
What are you seeing in your organization right now? And what has genuinely helped?
If this resonates, I work with founders, leaders and organizations across the DACH region on exactly this. Feel free to connect or send me a message.