The manager squeeze: why middle managers are most at risk of burnout – and least supported 

Nobody talks about how lonely it is to be in the middle.

Too senior to complain. Too junior to change the system.

Squeezed from above by leadership expectations. Squeezed from below by your team’s needs.

And somehow – you’re the one absorbing all of it.

If that sounds familiar, this article is for you.

The position nobody fully prepared you for

When you became a manager, you were probably prepared for the visible parts of the role. The meetings. The targets. The performance reviews. The strategy conversations.

Nobody prepared you for the invisible part.

The part where a decision comes down from leadership that you disagree with — and you still have to defend it to your team as if it were your own. The part where your team is stretched thin and asking for more headcount, and you know the answer is no before you even ask. The part where someone quietly tells you they’re job-hunting, and you have to hold that information while still leading them normally in tomorrow’s meeting.

Researchers call this the manager squeeze – and it’s the most underrated burnout risk in any organisation.

What the research actually shows

The data on middle manager burnout is striking – and most often ignored.

Manager engagement fell from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025, while manager stress remained higher than that of individual contributors. (Gallup State of the Global Workplace)

And yet only 44% of managers globally have received any formal management training (Gallup) – most step into the role without preparation for what it actually demands.

More pressure. Less preparation. That’s the gap – and it’s the people in the middle who are paying for it.

Why the middle is uniquely draining

Most burnout conversations focus on workload. Too many tasks. Too many hours. Too much to deliver.

And yes – workload matters. But for middle managers, the deepest drain is rarely the tasks. It is the emotional labour underneath them.

Every day, without a job description that names it, middle managers are doing a second job:

• Regulating their own emotions while managing everyone else’s
• Absorbing the team’s uncertainty without passing it upward
• Staying calm under pressure so the team doesn’t feel it too
• Staying composed in difficult conversations – then moving straight to the next one
• Performing confidence they don’t always feel, in rooms where showing doubt feels risky

This is not softness. This is sophisticated, skilled, invisible work.

And it has a cost.

The problem is that the cost never shows up on a calendar. There is no meeting called “absorb team anxiety” or “translate bad news with grace.” It just happens – quietly, constantly, without anyone counting it.

Until the manager starts running on empty.

The signs that are specific to the middle

General burnout signs apply here – exhaustion, reduced efficacy, cynicism. But middle managers often experience a few patterns specific to their position:

You’ve stopped having opinions.

You used to push back. Question decisions. Bring a perspective. Now you just implement. Not because you agree – but because it feels like there’s no point. The decisions will be made without you anyway.

You feel responsible for everything but in control of nothing.

Your team’s results depend on you. But the resources, the strategy, the headcount – those are decided elsewhere. The accountability is yours. The authority isn’t.

You’re the last one to ask for help.

Your team comes to you. Leadership expects you to deliver. There is no obvious direction to turn when you’re struggling. So you don’t turn anywhere. You just carry it.

You’ve become the emotional buffer.

Bad news comes from above – you soften it. Frustration comes from below – you manage it. Everyone else gets to feel something. You get to manage everyone else feeling something.

You’ve normalised a level of pressure that isn’t normal.

It has been this way for so long that you’ve stopped noticing. The headaches. The tension. The Sunday evening dread. This is just what the job is, you tell yourself. This is just leadership.

It isn’t.

Try this this week

Here is a simple exercise that most managers find surprisingly revealing.

At the end of this week – before you close your laptop on Friday – write down everything you carried emotionally this week.

Not tasks. Not deliverables. Emotions.

What did your team bring to you? What did leadership hand down? What did you swallow quietly – in a meeting, in a conversation, on a call – without anyone noticing?

Most managers are shocked by the length of the list.

Because here is the thing about emotional labour – it is real work. It takes real energy. And unlike a finished report or a completed project, it never gives you the satisfaction of being done.

You can’t regulate everyone else’s state from a nervous system that has nothing left. But you also can’t see that you’re running on empty if you’ve never stopped to look.

What organisations get wrong

Most organisations respond to manager burnout in one of two ways.

They offer resilience training – which essentially teaches managers to absorb more before breaking. Or they offer wellness benefits – which are genuinely useful, but address the symptom rather than the structure.

But the training that helps build healthy performance is not training that teaches managers to push harder. It is training that helps them understand what is driving the pressure – and build a different relationship with it.

Gallup found that managers who received coaching training saw their own performance improve by 20-28%, and their teams’ engagement rise by up to 18%. And when training came with ongoing development support – not just a one-off session – manager wellbeing nearly doubled, from 28% “thriving” to 50%.

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What you can do right now

Name it.

The manager squeeze is real, it is documented, and it has a name. You are not weak for feeling it. You are carrying something significant without adequate support.

Track it.

Do the exercise above. Write down what you carried emotionally this week. The act of naming it is the beginning of making it visible – first to yourself, and eventually to the people who need to understand it.

Stop absorbing alone.

The leaders who sustain this role over the long term are not the ones who carry the most. They are the ones who have built systems and relationships that share the load.

Know your early warning signals.

Not the dramatic ones – the quiet ones. The morning you wake up already tired. The meeting you go into already depleted. The conversation where your patience ran out before it should have. Those are the signals worth paying attention to – long before they become a crisis.

A personal note

I spent 20 years in large organisations before I understood what the manager squeeze actually cost me.

I was good at absorbing. Good at staying composed. Good at making hard things look manageable.

I didn’t realise that those same skills were making my burnout invisible – to my organisation, to my team, and to myself.

By the time I saw it clearly, I had been standing at the edge for months.

I was lucky. I caught it in time.

My work now is making sure the managers I work with don’t have to rely on luck.