Latest / The Burnout Podcast with Fexingo: Workplace Exhaustion, Recovery, and Sustainable Careers / The Burnout Gap Between Managers and Their Teams
Transcript
- Lucas: There's a number that's been stuck in my head since I saw it last month. Fifty-eight percent of managers report being burned out, compared to thirty-eight percent of individual contributors. That's from Microsoft's 2025 Work Trends Index, and it flips the conventional wisdom on its head. Luna: Wait — we usually think of burnout as a bottom-up problem. The frontline worker, the overloaded IC. But managers are actually worse off? Lucas: Significantly. And it's not a small sample — this is a global survey of over thirty thousand people across thirty-one countries. The gap has been widening for three years straight. The pandemic-era assumption that managers had it easier because they could delegate? That's just not holding up. Luna: So what's driving it? I've managed teams before, and yeah, there's a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from being the person who has to absorb everyone else's stress. Lucas: That's exactly the term researchers use — absorption. The manager is the team's 'resilience sponge.' They catch the anxiety from above — quarterly targets, reorgs, budget cuts — and they have to translate that into something motivating for their reports, all while processing their own uncertainty. And unlike the people they manage, they often can't just shut off at five p.m. because they're the escalation point. Luna: Right — the 'always on' problem from episode two, but amplified by responsibility. There's also the autonomy paradox. A manager has authority over their team's work, but they often have very little control over the actual resources or strategic direction. Lucas: That's the real killer. Job demands–resources theory says burnout happens when demands are high and resources are low. For a manager, demands are sky-high, but the resources — decision-making power, budget, headcount, even time — are often lower than you'd think. A 2024 study from the University of Sheffield found that middle managers have thirty percent less control over their schedules than senior leaders, but three times the emotional labor. Luna: Three times the emotional labor. That's a huge disparity, and it's invisible on an org chart. Lucas: Exactly. The org chart shows you who reports to whom, but not who absorbs what. And there's a second layer to this: managers are expected to model resilience. They're supposed to be the calm, steady presence. So they suppress their own exhaustion, which makes it worse. Luna: That's the 'performative wellness' trap — you have to act like you're fine so your team feels safe. But acting fine while you're not is itself a cognitive drain. Lucas: It's a double shift. You do your actual work, and then you do the emotional work of appearing okay. And the data suggests that female and minority managers experience this even more acutely — they're often expected to be more nurturing and absorb even more emotional load. Luna: So if the standard advice — take time off, set boundaries, meditate — is mostly targeted at individual contributors, what actually works for managers? Lucas: Let me give you a concrete case. There's a Dutch manufacturing company, I'll call them Helmond Tech — they make precision components for semiconductor equipment. About eighteen months ago, they realized their middle-manager turnover rate was hitting thirty percent annually. Exit interviews kept citing burnout. Luna: Thirty percent turnover among managers is brutal. That's losing almost a third of your leadership layer every year. Lucas: Right. So they tried something unusual. They flattened the hierarchy. Instead of four layers of management between the factory floor and the CEO, they went to two. They eliminated the 'team lead' and 'department head' tiers entirely. Luna: And what happened to the people who were those middle managers? Lucas: Some left, but most were reassigned to senior individual contributor roles — project leads, process engineers, quality specialists — with higher pay but no direct reports. Their job was now to solve problems, not to manage people. Within a year, burnout among that cohort dropped forty-seven percent. Luna: Nearly half. That's not a marginal improvement. But not every company can flatten their hierarchy — especially if you're a large enterprise with thousands of employees. Lucas: That's the counterargument, and it's fair. But Helmond Tech has about twelve hundred employees, so it's not a small shop. The principle is: they redesigned the role to reduce the 'responsibility without control' trap. The managers who stayed were given real decision rights over budgets and schedules. The ones who left were the ones who were essentially just message carriers. Luna: So the key isn't necessarily eliminating managers — it's eliminating the role that has responsibility but no authority. That's the burnout sweet spot. Lucas: Exactly. And there's a simpler version of this that doesn't require a reorg. In a 2025 study from the Society for Human Resource Management, companies that implemented 'manager recovery zones' — protected time blocks where a manager cannot be contacted by their team or leadership — saw a twelve percent reduction in burnout scores within six months. Luna: Twelve percent from just blocking out time. That seems almost too easy. Lucas: It's easy to implement, but hard to enforce culturally. The study noted that in companies where senior leaders also observed those zones, compliance was high. Where it was just for middle managers, people felt guilty and kept checking email anyway. Luna: So it has to be modeled from the top. Which loops back to the 'performative wellness' issue — if the CEO is sending emails at 11 p.m., the recovery zone is dead on arrival. Lucas: Exactly. And I think there's a deeper structural point here. A lot of burnout recovery advice assumes the individual can fix themselves — better sleep, better boundaries, better time management. But for managers, the problem is often baked into the role design. You can't boundary-set your way out of a job that requires you to be on-call for two dozen people. Luna: That reminds me of something the psychologist Christina Maslach said: burnout is a problem of the workplace, not the worker. And managers are the workers who are most exposed to the systemic failures. Lucas: Maslach's framework — exhaustion, cynicism, inefficacy — applies perfectly here. The manager feels exhausted from the absorption, becomes cynical about whether their work matters, and then feels ineffective because they can't actually change the conditions causing the stress. Luna: And that ineffectiveness is the most dangerous part for the organization, because a cynical manager can demoralize an entire team. The burnout gets transmitted downward. Lucas: There's a great term for that: 'cascading burnout.' A 2023 paper in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that a manager's emotional exhaustion predicted their team's exhaustion six months later, even controlling for workload. The manager's burnout becomes a climate variable. Luna: So we have a self-reinforcing cycle: managers burn out, that makes teams worse, which makes managers burn out more. How do you break it? Lucas: I think the most promising interventions aren't about teaching managers to cope better. They're about changing what the job asks of them. The Dutch factory example shows one path: redesign the role. Another is the 'distributed leadership' model used at some tech companies — rotating the management responsibility among a team so no single person carries the load for more than a quarter. Luna: Rotating management — that's interesting. It normalizes the idea that managing is a temporary function, not a permanent identity. And it gives everyone a taste of the absorption so they understand it. Lucas: And it prevents the accumulation of that emotional debt. The Microsoft data also showed that managers who had 'recovery routines' — things like a non-negotiable lunch break, or a walk after their last meeting — reported forty percent lower burnout than those who didn't. But the catch is: the routine only worked if their own manager explicitly supported it. Luna: So it always comes back to leadership. The people at the top have to create the conditions for recovery, not just encourage it. Lucas: Right. And I think that's the piece that often gets missed. We spend a lot of time telling individual contributors to set boundaries, but we don't ask what boundaries look like for the person whose job is to be the boundary-breaker for others. Luna: So if you're a manager listening right now, what's one actionable thing? Lucas: I'd say: audit your 'absorption ratio.' For one week, track every piece of stress that comes to you from above and every piece that comes from below. Then ask: how much of this do I actually have the authority to change? If the number is low, that's a conversation to have with your own manager about role redesign. Because if you're just a relay for stress, the job is broken — not you. Luna: That's a concrete starting point. And I think it reframes the conversation from 'how do I cope better' to 'how do we build a job that doesn't require coping.' Lucas: Exactly. Because the goal isn't to make managers more resilient to a broken system. It's to fix the system.