The Managers Are Burning Out Too

Wellbeing programmes are aimed at employees and delivered by managers, who are usually excluded from the population being helped.

Why the middle is worst hit

Demands from two directions. Accountable upward for outcomes, responsible downward for people, with authority over neither entirely.

Absorbing conflict from above so their teams do not experience it. Valuable, invisible, and depleting.

Management added to a full workload. In many organisations, people manage on top of a substantially unchanged individual role.

They deliver bad news they did not decide and cannot explain, because they were not told why.

Emotional labour. Supporting people through difficulty is real work with a real cost.

Their own manager frequently does not do for them what they are asked to do for their reports.

Least likely to be asked. Surveys are aimed at staff; manager experience is assumed adequate.

The specific traps

Cannot express strain downward without alarming the team.

Cannot express it upward without appearing not to cope.

Cannot take leave because nothing is covered.

Held responsible for retention while having no influence over pay, headcount or structure.

Told to model balance while carrying a load that makes it impossible.

What actually helps

Reduce the individual workload when someone takes on management. Management is a job, and pretending it is free is the root of most of this.

Realistic spans of control. Beyond a threshold, none of the good practices are arithmetically possible.

Cover for their absence, designed rather than hoped for.

A peer group. Other managers at the same level, meeting without their own managers present, is one of the most valued and cheapest supports available.

Their own good manager, which is the intervention with the largest effect and the least attention.

Authority matched to accountability.

Being included in the measurement, and having their results looked at separately rather than averaged into the whole.

What does not help

Leadership training offered as the response to a workload problem.

More responsibility framed as development.

Resilience content aimed at people whose difficulty is structural.

Being told they are the most important factor in employee experience, which is true and, delivered without support, is simply additional pressure.

The measurement

Segment every wellbeing measure by level. Where middle management scores worst — which is common — that is a finding about the structure rather than about the individuals.

Track manager turnover separately. It is expensive and it destabilises whole teams.

Ask managers what they need, which is rarely asked and usually answered specifically.

Track how many have their own regular one-to-one with their manager, actually held. The number is frequently low, and it is the clearest indicator of whether the organisation applies its own advice to the people delivering it.

The reciprocal principle

An organisation that expects managers to notice strain, hold difficult conversations, protect their teams and model good behaviour has to supply the same to them.

Where it does not, the practices decay quietly, because a depleted manager cannot do any of it — and the organisation concludes that its managers are not committed.

The manager peer group

One of the highest-value and lowest-cost supports available, and frequently absent.

Managers at a similar level, meeting regularly, without their own managers present.

No agenda beyond bringing real situations.

Confidential, with that stated and observed.

Facilitated lightly or not at all, depending on the group.

Six to eight people, which is small enough for candour.

What it provides: normalisation, practical advice from people who face the same constraints, and a place to say things that cannot be said upward or downward.

It costs an hour a month and it is consistently among the things managers name as most valuable when they are asked, which they seldom are.

Including managers in the measurement

The group delivering the wellbeing programme is routinely excluded from it.

Segment every measure by level, and look at middle management separately.

Ask managers the six questions about their own experience, not about their team's.

Track manager turnover separately, since it destabilises whole teams.

Track how many have a regular one-to-one with their own manager, actually held.

Where middle management scores worst — which is common — that is a structural finding, and treating it as an individual coping issue repeats the error the whole programme exists to correct.