Listen to the Insight

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I’ll never forget the semester I realized I was burning out.

At the time, I was teaching four courses, advising students, serving on committees, and running my leadership coaching business on the side. From the outside, everything looked fine—strong evaluations, a growing client list, consistent delivery. People often commented on how “impressive” it was that I could juggle it all.

But one Sunday night, I sat at my desk, staring at the grading queue in the online portal and my client prep for the week ahead, and I felt…nothing. No energy. No ideas. No frustration, even. Just empty.

That was the moment I realized something was wrong.

The unsettling part was this: no one knew. Not my department chair. Not my clients. Not even my family. I was showing up, smiling, delivering—and quietly running on fumes.

I wasn’t alone then. And managers aren’t alone now.

A leadership crisis is unfolding in organizations, and it’s largely invisible.

Managers aren’t complaining. They’re not asking for help. They’re leading their teams, meeting expectations, and holding things together—while quietly burning out. Workforce data continues to show managers and directors reporting higher burnout than senior executives. The people in the middle—the ones translating strategy into reality—are carrying the heaviest load.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth: Your most capable managers are burning out first.

Why is this happening now?

Three forces are colliding.

First, organizations are asking leaders to do more with less. Flatter structures mean wider spans of control, fewer buffers, and more responsibility concentrated in the middle—without a corresponding redesign of roles or decision authority.

Second, managers are being asked to lead through complexity they were never trained for. Change fatigue, hybrid team dynamics, emotional labor, conflict resolution, psychological safety—these expectations expanded rapidly, but the support to meet them did not.

Third, recognition has quietly eroded. Many managers report feeling unseen and undervalued, even as expectations increase. When effort is constant but acknowledgment disappears, burnout accelerates.

Why this should concern every organization

Burned-out managers don’t fail culture. Culture fails them first.

Manager burnout is not a resilience problem. It’s a systems problem. It’s what happens when organizations outsource structural dysfunction to the middle and expect individual leaders to absorb it.

That’s why leadership development continues to rise to the top of executive priorities. Organizations know something is wrong. What’s missing is the willingness to address the root causes—not just the symptoms.

What’s next

This work isn’t about teaching managers to push harder or “bounce back” faster. It’s about recalibrating how leadership is designed and supported.

Over the next three weeks, I’ll be exploring:

• How to assess the early warning signs of manager burnout—and why it’s so often misdiagnosed as poor performance

• How leaders can adapt their practices to reduce decision load, emotional labor saturation, and role compression

• How organizations can align support systems so managers aren’t carrying what should never be theirs alone

Your managers are the backbone of your culture. If they break, everything breaks.

Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen.

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Take care.