How devastating loss shaped company's approach to mental health

When Sydney de la Torre talks about workplace mental health starting with her organization’s leadership, she isn’t speaking in abstractions.

As HR lead at Sklar Wilton & Associates, de la Torre's views were shaped by a painful chapter in the firm’s history: the long struggle with depression of a founding partner and his death by suicide in 2018. That loss forced the Toronto-based consulting firm to confront the gap between talking about well-being and treating it as a business imperative, she says.

De la Torre says the co-founding partner’s experience made mental health “very real” for colleagues who had watched a respected leader suffer over time. In the wake of his death, the firm chose to double down on mental health, both to honour his legacy and to help other employers learn the lesson in a different way.  

“It’s unfortunate that sometimes it takes that personal experience [to raise awareness], but it gave a lot of people at the firm that experience of, people's well-being is really important,” says De la Torre. “that was a big shift for the organization of, mental health isn't this buzzword, it really is something from which people suffer.’ 

For HR leaders, that story is a reminder that the tone for mental health is often set long before a crisis hits, and leadership — which isn’t immune to mental health issues — is where it can start. The question is how executive teams turn intent into daily behaviour, governance, and decisions that employees can see and trust. 

Leadership trust as the foundation 

For Sonia Boisvert, partner and Chief People officer at PwC Canada, the starting point is trust. Leaders can invest in benefits and awareness campaigns, but if employees don’t believe they can safely speak up about stress, burnout, or illness, those programs will underperform. 

“They need to cultivate the trust, because if they have a trust-based relationship with our people, people will be open to speak up,” says Boisvert. “And with that, we’ll know who needs help and we can give them support and make sure we reference them to the right place.” 

Boisvert argues that trust is earned through observable behaviour by leadership. Executives must be transparent about key decisions and trade-offs, set realistic expectations for workloads, and model healthy boundaries in their own calendars. When a senior leader leaves on time, takes vacation, or declines unsustainable demands, it signals that self-care isn’t a career risk but an expectation, she says. 

Boisvert also believes that leaders shouldn’t be afraid to show vulnerability when they’re facing pressure. “It opens the door for people to look at them and say, ‘I'm not alone in this,” she says. “I think it really matters what leaders do, not just what they say.”  

Role modelling and everyday conversations 

At online food delivery platform Skip, Head of HR Cailey Brown also puts role modelling at the centre of mental health leadership. If executives announce new supports but never use them themselves, employees will question how safe and effective they are. 

“I think they need to role model it all, they need to take the time that they need to get better when they’re unwell, be humble and vulnerable, and really talk about mental health and supporting our people,” says Brown. 

Brown sees engagement surveys not as a compliance exercise but as a diagnostic tool that demands action. Leaders must be prepared to “get into the detail” of feedback, identify where people are struggling, and commit openly to changes, even when those changes require investment. “The best thing is to say, ‘Hey, we have a problem here and we're going to take action, and we're going to support our team members, and it might cost this much up front,’” she says. “But the return that we're going to get is going to be tenfold, because our people will feel taken care of when it matters most.” 

Brown also emphasizes the value of smaller, more intimate forums for honest discussion. Not every executive is ready to give a keynote on their mental health journey, but most can participate in panel discussions, fireside chats, or closed-door leadership meetings where they admit when they’re overwhelmed or stuck, she says.  

Within Skip’s own leadership team, those admissions are common, according to Brown. “We have vulnerable moments with each other all the time, like ‘I'm really struggling with this project’ or ‘I'm feeling overwhelmed today,’” she says. “I think normalizing that and being honest with how we're all feeling creates that culture and continues to work its way down through the organization, and when leaders see us talking to each other that way, it a makes a safe space where they can also be vulnerable — and making sure that that trickles down through every layer of the business is really important.” 

Governance that keeps mental health on the agenda 

At PwC Canada, mental health is now embedded directly into leadership governance rather than treated as a standalone campaign, according to Boisvert. She says she regularly reviews people metrics with the extended Canadian leadership team, such as engagement indicators, well-being data, usage of support programs, and employee sentiment. Monthly surveys give leaders a near-real-time view of trends and allow them to distinguish between internal stressors and external shocks.  

“We also use data that don’t just sit in reports,” says Boisvert. “We make informed decisions, we prioritize, and we invest.” 

As an example of feedback helping the organization inform its mental health program, Boisvert says PwC recently increased its mental health benefit by more than 25 per cent because of feedback from staff and partners that it wasn’t in line with other organizations.  

Brown points to the role of employee resource groups (ERGs) as another form of governance — a steady “drumbeat” that keeps mental health on the radar between campaigns. At Skip, ERGs help sustain conversation and connect employees with resources, particularly during periods of organizational change, she says.  

The experience at Sklar Wilton is a stark reminder of what’s at stake when mental health is left to chance, from the top on down — it’s not just people’s well-being at stake, but their contributions to the business goals. For organizations and their leadership, the choice isn’t whether to engage with mental health, but how, so mental health support is a lived reality at every level of the organization. De le Torre says that since the loss of the co-founding partner, the firm has been on a journey to inspire other organizations to make mental health the same priority that it does. “Not everyone needs to learn this lesson the exact way that we have, but now we can share that with other people and say this is real,” she says. “It's important that you want your people to be happy and healthy, and there are ways to get ahead of it and really make sure that you're prioritizing it.”

This article is part of our Monthly Spotlight series, which in March focuses on mental health. Full coverage can be found here.