The Rise of the Super-Stressed Manager
We have spent years removing layers of management. The promise was simple: fewer managers, lower costs, faster decisions and less bureaucracy. But there was an assumption hidden in the calculation. If you removed a management layer, the management work would disappear too.
It didn't.
Some of it disappeared. Much of it did not. It was redistributed to the managers who remained. That may be one reason why being a manager increasingly looks like a less attractive career choice.
Picture a typical middle manager. They have a large team, several vacancies and their own targets to deliver. They are implementing a new corporate initiative, dealing with an employee relations problem and trying to support a member of staff who is struggling. At the same time, a senior manager wants faster progress on another priority.
They are expected to deliver the plan, manage the people, absorb the problems and somehow remain positive. This is not necessarily bad management. It is what happens when organisations become flatter, spans of control become wider and more work is concentrated in fewer management posts.
I have seen this at first hand. There was a time when we wondered whether an organisation could function if deputy directors and assistant directors were removed. We discovered that it could. In some respects it became more streamlined and efficient. But it was a very different organisation.
The financial saving was obvious. The less visible consequence was the management work that had to be absorbed elsewhere. The lesson is not that delayering was a mistake. It is that we did not always ask what work those layers were actually doing.
There may be fewer managers, but there is not necessarily less management work.
The modern middle manager is less a job title than a position between organisational ambition and operational reality. They translate strategy into action. They manage performance, people and change. They deal with the consequences when plans meet reality. Increasingly, they are expected to do all this with wider spans of control.
Gallup's latest global research shows manager engagement falling from 31% in 2022 to just 22% in 2025. Its 2026 research also reports that average team size in the US increased from 10.9 employees per manager in 2024 to 12.1 in 2025. Larger spans of control are not automatically a problem, but they become one when organisations fail to redesign the manager's job around them.
The problem is not simply that managers have more work. They have more management work. A manager can be responsible for a target without controlling the resources needed to achieve it. They can be given a deadline they had no role in setting. They can be told to implement a new priority without being told which existing priority should stop.
Then, when the plan starts to fail, the manager is expected to find a solution.
This is accountability without control. It is often described as empowerment, but it can feel very different to the person being held responsible.
The contradiction becomes particularly obvious when organisations talk about stress and wellbeing. Most organisations now accept that workplace stress is a problem. They have wellbeing strategies, employee assistance programmes and mental health initiatives. Managers are trained to recognise the signs of stress in their teams.
But how often does the organisation ask whether its own management practices are producing the stress?
The latest CIPD research found that average sickness absence has risen to 9.4 days per employee, the highest level recorded in more than 15 years. Mental ill health is the leading cause of long-term absence, while stress remains a significant contributor to both short- and long-term absence. Yet although 64% of organisations are taking steps to identify or reduce workplace stress, only half believe those efforts are effective.
That should make us pause. We tell managers to monitor stress in their teams. We train them to recognise burnout. We expect them to support employee wellbeing. Then we give them another priority, another deadline and another vacancy to manage.
It is easier to offer resilience training than to reduce an unrealistic workload. It is easier to tell a manager to have a better conversation about wellbeing than to ask whether the target is achievable. It is easier to provide a wellbeing app than to ask what the organisation could stop doing.
Resilience is useful. But it should not become the organisation's answer to organisational overload.
This is not an argument for blaming senior managers. They are under pressure too. They are dealing with financial constraints, political demands, customer expectations, regulation and pressure from their own boards. Nor is it an argument for rebuilding every management layer that has been removed.
It is an argument for understanding the consequences of the choices that have been made.
When a management layer is removed, senior leaders should ask what work has actually disappeared and what work has simply moved downwards. When spans of control increase, they should look beyond the number of direct reports. Complexity matters. So does geography, the level of employee support required and the amount of change being implemented.
When a new priority is introduced, someone should ask what is being stopped. Otherwise every new priority is simply added to the same management workload.
Managers should also be able to challenge feasibility without being labelled resistant to change. If nobody can say that a target, timescale or workload is unrealistic, the organisation has created the appearance of accountability without giving managers meaningful control.
HR has a role here, but not simply as the provider of wellbeing initiatives. It should be an early-warning system for the health of the management system. Rising sickness absence, declining manager engagement, management vacancies, increased turnover and reluctance to seek promotion can all be signals that something is wrong.
The last one may be the most revealing. If talented people look at the next management job and think, “Why would I want that?”, organisations have a management pipeline problem.
The answer is not to tell managers to become more resilient. It is to make the job more manageable.
We thought we were removing management. In some cases, we were simply removing managers. The work remained. It went somewhere. Increasingly, it went to the people in the middle.
Before removing another management layer, perhaps the question should not simply be, “What will this save?” It should be, “What management work will this leave behind, and who will do it?”
blairmcpherson.co.uk
