You already have enough to act on
The tempting reading of "I'm fine" is that you have no mandate yet and should keep an eye on it. That reading is comfortable and wrong, because you are not diagnosing anybody's mental state; you are responding to three things you can see. Someone is working hours the job does not require, their conduct towards colleagues has changed, and the extra hours are not producing extra output. Each of those is a legitimate management concern on its own, and the third one is the tell: sustained overwork that is not moving the date means the person is past the point where more hours help, which is the most reliable signal available to you.
Waiting for a request is also a misunderstanding of what is happening. The engineers most likely to work themselves into the ground are the ones with the strongest sense of obligation, and asking for relief feels to them like admitting they cannot do the job. If your intervention is conditional on them asking, you have made the condition impossible for exactly the people it applies to. This is the probe that separates a manager who has done this from one who has read about it.
Open with the observation, not the question
"How are you doing?" invites "fine" and you have spent your opening. Lead with what you have seen, in specifics, without a diagnosis attached, and then stop talking. The point of specificity is that it is not arguable and does not require them to confess anything.
| Weak opening | What to say instead |
|---|
| "Are you feeling burnt out?" | "Your last four merges were after ten at night. That has been going on about a month." |
| "You seem stressed lately." | "The comment you left on Rae's pull request on Tuesday was sharper than you usually are. That is not like you." |
| "Let me know if you need anything." | "I am taking the on-call rotation and the audit tickets off you for the next three weeks. That is decided, not an offer." |
| "Try to get some rest." | "I do not want any commits from you after seven, and I will say the same to the team so it is not about you." |
Note what the last two rows do. They convert a conversation into a decision you have made, which removes the need for the engineer to admit anything or accept a favour. Offering to reduce someone's load asks them to declare themselves unable to cope; removing it yourself does not. That asymmetry is the whole technique.
Then leave silence. If they do talk, resist the urge to solve it in the meeting, and ask the one question worth asking: what would have to stop for this week to be manageable. That question produces an actionable list, where "what is wrong" produces a mood.
Relief has to be specific and it has to be yours
Vague permission does not work. "Take it easier" and "protect your weekends" are heard as things a manager says, and the engineer will keep going because the work has not changed. Name items, take them away, and tell the people who were expecting them that you moved the date and why — without making the engineer's health the stated reason.
Expect the removal to be resisted, sometimes by the engineer and sometimes by circumstance, and plan for the resistance. The most common failure is that you remove three things and they quietly pick two back up within a fortnight, because those things were part of how they see themselves. That is not disobedience and treating it as a compliance problem will not help. It usually means the item you removed was the one that carried their standing on the team, in which case the honest fix is to give the standing back another way rather than to police their calendar.
There is also a hard case worth naming out loud, because interviewers push on it: sometimes the overload is genuinely structural for a fixed period, a regulatory date or a migration with no slack. Then the honest answer is not to pretend you have removed load you have not. Say what the end date is, say precisely what you will do at that date, and hold to it, because a stated finish line is survivable and an indefinite one is not.
Look at your own part in it
Before concluding this is a resilience problem, check the requests. Managers routinely give the hardest, most urgent and most poorly specified work to whoever handles it best, and each individual decision is rational while the cumulative pattern is that one person absorbs everything the system cannot. Go through the last quarter and count how many of the urgent interruptions went to this person. If the answer is most of them, the cause is your allocation and not their coping.
The adjacent pattern is the person who is load-bearing for the team's knowledge — the only one who can deploy the legacy service, the only one who understands the reporting path. They are working evenings because nobody else can do it, and their overwork is subsidising a single point of failure you have chosen not to fix. Removing tasks will not touch that. Spreading the knowledge will, and it takes a quarter rather than a week, which is why it needs to start now rather than after the crisis.
Also check whether you rewarded this. If the last performance conversation praised heroics, weekend recoveries and always being available, then the behaviour is a rational response to the signal you sent, and changing it means changing what you praise in front of everyone else.
Know where your competence stops
You are their manager, not their clinician or their friend, and the most damaging version of this conversation is the one where a manager becomes an amateur therapist. Hold two boundaries. You address work — load, expectations, hours, conduct, the environment. You do not diagnose, and you do not press for personal detail.
If what you hear moves beyond work, or if they disclose a health issue, a bereavement or anything you are not equipped for, your job is to say that you take it seriously, to point them at whatever support your organisation provides, and to involve HR early as a partner rather than late as an escalation. Follow your organisation's process for adjustments rather than inventing an arrangement privately, because a private arrangement leaves the person with no protection if you move on.
Be careful with confidence, too. If someone tells you something and asks you to keep it entirely to yourself, do not promise what you may not be able to keep; say what you would need to share, with whom, and why, before they tell you more.
The last check is whether this is one person or a pattern. If two or three others show the same signs, you no longer have an individual to support, you have a team running above what it can sustain, and the intervention moves from one-to-ones to the commitments you have made on the team's behalf. Treating a systemic overload as a series of individual wellbeing conversations is the most common way a manager works very hard on this problem and changes nothing.
© 2026 Preptima. Originally published at preptima.com (opens in a new tab).