Manager Resilience and Performance Starts with Solving Burnout
I was recently on a coaching call with a Director who has always been the steady hand for her team. She spent the first few minutes describing how she’s been helping her direct reports navigate shifting deadlines and personal stress. When I asked who was doing that for her, she just laughed.
It wasn’t a happy laugh. It sounded like someone who is giving all the "grace" the company culture asked of her, but receiving little of it from the layer above.
This is the quiet reality for the middle layer of most organizations. These leaders are the bridge between high-level strategy and actual execution. But in practice, some feel the support is only flowing one way.
The Empathy Gap
We often ask managers to lead with empathy, build psychological safety, and support their teams through uncertainty. We rarely talk about the pressure coming from the top down. Managers are being asked to do more with less. They’re facing smaller budgets and teams. In many cases, they’re doing this with limited incentives or rewards. They’re managing down… and up.
Whether or not it’s their intention, what I’m seeing is that many of these managers end up pushing the pressure downward. At the end of the day, they need to produce, and the outlets for stress feel limited. This empathy gap can strain an entire organization.
What Are We Missing? The Culture of "Tolerated" Behaviors
I often hear senior leadership express genuine support for their people, and I do think many mean well. But employees are observant. They notice when deliverables and resources stay the same despite the "supportive" language. They see which behaviors are actually rewarded and which are tolerated. And if nothing actually shifts when people express concern, the expression of empathy can feel hollow. We unintentionally create an environment where burnout is the culture.
Moving Beyond "Resilience" to Structural Change
To fix this, we can explore cultural practices and concrete resources. Resilience tips can be helpful, but telling a person who is drowning to just tread water ‘better’ isn't a strategy. Interventions that actually shift the load and modernize how we support the middle layer are much more likely to shift the culture and grow team performance.
1. Audit the Environment
Before you can change the culture, you have to understand it. We recommend using deep-dive interviews and culture surveys to see what is actually happening on the ground. This helps identify specific opportunities to better manage projects and stress rather than guessing where the pain points are. A gap analysis can identify strengths, opportunities, and risks. These leadership strategies also establish benchmarks for measurement and progress over time.
2. Operationalize Real Support
Support should be reflected in policies, and not just expected to happen. This includes looking at roles with clarity and shifting how or when work gets done. If your team has fewer people, you may need to do fewer things. Senior leadership can be explicit about which tasks to de-prioritize or drop, and which tools (like AI) may provide more capacity. This creates actual spaciousness for their teams. Training is excellent, but it can’t fix a fundamentally broken workflow.
3. Disrupt the "Push Through" Myth
Reposition silent struggle as a strategic risk rather than a badge of honor. We have to look at the math. Surveys indicate the average manager takes on a 71% increase in stress, while the pay bump for moving into management can be 10-20% at best. When we look at these numbers, it’s not hard to imagine why more than 60% of individual contributors would prefer to opt out of management altogether. To top it off, a manager crash is a liability that can cost trillions in lost global productivity (Gallup).
If we want a leadership pipeline for the future, we have to make management a role people actually want to hold and feel supported in taking on.
When we partner with teams on talent and workplace strategies, we focus on building inclusive systems. We want managers to feel safe raising their hands before they hit a breaking point, helping co-design solutions that encourage high performance.
4. Allow for Processing and Connection
Managers need a space where they aren't the ones in charge of everyone else’s emotions. Consider re-sharing access to Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs); these are often underused outlets for building the emotional intelligence and resilience skills needed to navigate a complex workplace.
Another important lever to remember: forums facilitated by an experienced coach or peer group can be transformative and one of many leadership workshop ideas. It allows leaders to process their needs, ask the questions they've been afraid to ask, build supportive relationships, and engage in collaborative solutioning.
I recently facilitated a workshop where we asked a group of cross-functional managers a simple question: "What is one thing about your workload that your peers don't see?" The room wasn’t quite ready for one leader’s reality. Because of the company’s complex structure, the leader shared that they answered to four different "bosses." This leader spent hours each week just navigating conflicting priorities and "dotted line" expectations even before getting to their actual work.
As others began to share, you could see the revelations happening in real time. They realized they weren't "failing" at time management. They were navigating an invisible level of complexity no one had acknowledged. That shared "aha" moment changed the energy from one of individual shame to collective support. As one person told me afterward, "The pressure of the job is still there, but I finally feel like I’m not the only one feeling it."
Assessing the Health of Your Middle Layer
The middle layer of your organization is the heartbeat of your culture and the primary driver of organizational health. If your managers are cracking under the pressure, your broader strategy can easily stall.
It may be time to take a hard look at the reality on the ground. Are you rewarding the right behaviors, or are you inadvertently incentivizing manager burnout?
If you are ready to move toward measurable results and structural changes that protect and truly support managers, we’re here to help. We help teams take the pressure off by identifying where the "invisible work" is hiding and building the modern leadership strategies and skills that make high performance sustainable. Whether that’s through an audit of your environment or a dedicated workshop for your leaders, our goal is to help you build a culture where your managers—and your business—can actually breathe.
How are you checking in on the health of your middle managers right now? I'd love to hear what you are observing and prioritizing.
