I’ve seen it and I’ve experienced it. There’s a quiet, exhausting truth in corporate life. It rarely makes it into senior leadership conversations. People are held accountable for results without having the authority to create them. It causes burnout.
Middle managers live here:
- Responsible for ambitious (impossible?) KPIs.
- Expected to keep teams engaged and productive.
- Caught between executive vision and frontline practicalities.
Yet, their ability to make meaningful decisions is often stripped away.
I call this the Power Gap.
It’s not just frustrating; it’s one of the most corrosive, and ironically, most preventable, causes of burnout.
I spent over two decades in multinational corporations leading global Talent Development functions, training countless middle managers. I saw their commitment… their care for their people… their willingness to go the extra mile.
And I also saw the toll.
We invested heavily in management training, but the burnout persisted. Why? Because you can’t train away a structural problem.
The real causes were clear:
- Workloads that exceeded human capacity.
- Teams stretched so thin managers became doers instead of leaders.
- KPIs set without resources to match.
- Relentless waves of change with no time to recover.
These are not gaps in skill. They are gaps in design.
The solutions require courage at the top:
- Clarify decision rights so managers know where their “yes” and “no” actually count.
- Balance staffing and workload to match the expectations being set.
- Protect focus by pacing change instead of piling it on.
In my experience, many senior leaders will not implement these decisions. They often see the cost of balancing staffing and workload as a hard cost. They view burnout as a soft cost. But, the long-term impact of burnout has significant financial implications.
- Burnout leads to higher turnover rates, increased absenteeism, and lower productivity. These are real and measurable costs.
- Investing in balancing staffing and workload is an investment in the organization’s future. It leads to higher employee retention, reduced absenteeism, and improved performance. The ROI from a healthier, more engaged workforce can far outweigh the initial costs.
- A culture of burnout erodes trust and morale. By addressing the Power Gap, we foster a positive work environment, attracting top talent and ensuring long-term sustainability. Balancing staffing and workload is essential for creating a resilient organization that can adapt to changes and challenges effectively.
When middle managers have both accountability and authority, with the resources to back it up, they transform. They stop being bottlenecks. They become bridges, connecting strategy to reality, vision to execution, and people to purpose.
If we want workplaces where people thrive, we have to close the Power Gap. Not by asking managers to “be more resilient,” but by redesigning the very role they’re asked to carry.
For more information on burnout and its impact, contact me or follow me on LinkedIn.