Hidden cost of manager burnout in business

This article is authored by Shipra Kamra, head, People Operations, Responsive.

I've sat across the table from a lot of managers over the years. High performers, deeply committed people, the kind who answer emails at midnight not because anyone told them to, but because they genuinely care. And increasingly, what I'm seeing is not ambition or drive. It's exhaustion dressed up as dedication.

Manager Burnout (Representative image). (Unsplash)

Managers have quietly become the most overloaded layer in modern organisations. They're being asked to lead AI transformation, absorb their team's stress, maintain culture across hybrid setups, drive performance metrics, and navigate relentless change, often with fewer resources and almost no support directed at them personally. We talk endlessly about employee well-being. But we've largely ignored the people we've made responsible for it.

This is no longer just an HR issue. Manager burnout is becoming a direct risk to business performance. The data is finally catching up to what many of us in people functions have been quietly worried about for years. The numbers don't tell the full story, and they don't capture the full picture either.

Across industries, line and middle managers are being asked to do more with less. Recent research shows that only one in three managers feel they can maintain a healthy work–life balance. Nearly a third report being unable to do their jobs to the best of their ability simply because of workload. These aren't people who are failing. These are people the system is failing.

The traditional idea of management, that idea of it being a step up, a mark of success, is getting harder to sustain. What many managers actually experience is something closer to being caught between two fires: senior leadership demanding results from above, and a team looking to them for stability, reassurance, and advocacy from below.

There's a phrase I've come across recently that captures it well: The Great Squeeze, the widening gap between expectations and the actual resources, authority, and capacity managers have to meet them. Calendars overloaded. Focus constantly fragmented. Decision-making hamstrung by approval chains. The result is what neuroscientists describe as a “competing threat cascade”, a state where the brain is processing so many simultaneous stressors that it essentially goes into survival mode.

When that happens, the prefrontal cortex, responsible for empathy, problem-solving, and clear thinking, effectively goes offline. Less creativity. Slower decisions. Diminished patience. This isn’t a character flaw. It’s biology. And it has direct consequences for the teams these managers lead.

Here’s the thing about manager well-being that doesn’t get said enough: it’s not a ‘people’ issue sitting separate from business performance. It is business performance. When employees feel genuinely supported by their manager, engagement levels jump from around 45% to over 85%. That gap represents enormous amounts of discretionary effort, retention, and output.

Conversely, when managers are burnt out, stretched, or disengaged, the ripple effects are immediate and costly. In the UK, nearly one million workers experienced work-related stress, anxiety, or depression in 2024/25, resulting in over 22 million working days lost. Middle managers sit at the epicentre of this, absorbing stress from above and managing it in others simultaneously.

What I hear most often, in honest conversations, is that managers feel trapped between empathy and expectation. They want to look after their people. They’re also being measured on targets that don’t flex for the human moments. That tension, sustained over months, wears people down in ways that performance reviews rarely surface until it’s too late.

Organisations that are serious about this need to act on three fronts:

• Mindset: Be honest about what you’re asking managers to do. Define clear boundaries around their role: what they’re accountable for and, just as importantly, what they’re not. Many managers are drowning in scope creep that was never explicitly sanctioned but never pushed back on either.
• Skillset: Invest in emotional intelligence and energy management, not just technical leadership skills. Managing people through uncertainty is a craft that needs to be taught and supported, not assumed.
• Toolset: Give managers practical, real-time support: communication frameworks, frameworks, decision-making structures, and access to well-being resources that actually fit into a working day. Not another workshop. Actual tools they can use on a Tuesday afternoon.

One of the battles I still find myself fighting, even in forward-thinking organisations, is the idea that leadership well-being is a ‘nice to have’. It isn’t. Replacing a burnt-out manager carries direct costs in recruitment and onboarding. The indirect costs are often far higher: months of team instability, the quiet disengagement that spreads before anyone notices, and the institutional knowledge that walks out the door.

When managers are well-supported, the difference is tangible. They hold teams together through uncertainty. They create the psychological safety that makes people willing to stay, speak up, and do their best work. They are, in the truest sense, the connective tissue of an organisation.

As we move further into an era defined by AI, leaner teams, and hybrid work, we are asking managers to hold together the human side of organisations while everything else accelerates. That’s not a small ask. The leaders who will sustain it, and stay healthy while doing so, will be those whose organisations have chosen to genuinely invest in them, not just rely on them.

(The views expressed are personal)

This article is authored by Shipra Kamra, head, People Operations, Responsive.