Johnny C. Taylor, CEO of SHRM, recently offered practical advice for tackling burnout: spot the warning signs, encourage open dialogue, rebalance workloads, clarify expectations, and connect people with supportive resources like EAPs. These are important. But they’re not enough.
There’s a blind spot in most corporate conversations around burnout and it carries real business consequences.
We’re not talking nearly enough about middle managers.
Middle managers are the connective tissue of every organization. They interpret strategy, drive performance, absorb change, and hold space for their teams, all while trying to meet expectations from above. They’re responsible for culture on the ground. And they’re exhausted.
This layer of leadership is too often invisible in wellbeing strategies. We focus on frontline engagement or executive leadership development. But we forget the people holding both ends together. That’s a mistake.
Middle managers are burning out – quietly, constantly, and in plain sight. Nearly half of U.S. middle managers now fear being laid off. Many are pushing themselves beyond what’s sustainable. They show up, stay late, skip recovery time, and carry the emotional weight of others because that’s what they think good leadership requires.
The cost is staggering. A 2025 study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine estimates burnout costs between $4,000 and $21,000 per employee, per year. For a company of 1,000 that’s a $5 million annual loss. And that doesn’t include the ripple effects: higher turnover, lower morale, slower innovation, and culture decay.
If we’re serious about employee wellbeing, and profitability, we need to get serious about supporting the people in the middle.
Let’s stop asking managers to do more with less. Let’s stop normalizing heroic over-functioning. Let’s build something better – intentionally, and with heart.
Here’s what that could look like:
- Wellbeing as a KPI – Track manager wellbeing alongside business outcomes. Make it a metric that matters, not a poster on the wall.
- Confidential Peer Circles- Create trusted spaces where managers can talk, exhale, and learn from each other without fear of judgment.
- Genuine Recognition and Real Autonomy – Acknowledge not just results, but emotional labor. Give managers more say in how work gets done.
- Training That Feels Human – Move beyond compliance. Offer workshops that equip managers with real skills: empathy, boundaries, psychological safety.
- Reverse Mentoring – Invite two-way conversations between managers and executives. Give middle leaders a voice, and help the C-suite listen.
- Workload Audits – Regularly review what’s on managers’ plates. Make space by removing the non-essential.
- Protected Recovery Time – Normalize rest. Not as a perk, but as a performance strategy. Model this from the top.
- Leadership with Heart – When senior leaders speak openly about their own challenges with burnout, they create permission for others to be honest too.
Here’s the truth: middle managers are holding up the scaffolding of your culture. If they collapse, everything falls.
So, here’s my invitation: What’s one bold move your organization can make today to support its “missing middle”?
Because if we want resilient teams and thriving workplaces, we must start by caring for the people in the middle – thoughtfully, tangibly, and without delay.