There's a familiar route to becoming a manager: you were the person who got things done.
You were reliable, maybe even a little obsessive about the details. Your managers could trust you, and your peers came to you with questions. It was only a matter of time before someone asked, “Have you considered leadership?”
And now, here you are, a high-performing individual contributor no more. You’re a middle manager, and you’re feeling it.
The latest data from McKinsey and Capterra is a quiet alarm bell, buried in the noise. Roughly half of middle managers and team leads are reporting burnout. A significantly higher rate than their direct reports or the senior leaders above them.
It’s not a surprise, really. Burnout isn’t caused by a lack of grit or hustle. It’s caused by a lack of agency. You’re stuck in the middle, translating commands from on high into meaningful work for a team that has its own questions, needs, and (if we're being honest) a healthy dose of skepticism.
This is a structural problem, not a personal failing. You're the shock absorber in the system, absorbing the pressure from both directions. The “why” of the work is often handed to you, and the “how” is something you have to figure out for a dozen different people, each with their own pace and working style.
You're the one telling people to move faster while also trying to make sure they don’t get run over. It’s a job that requires endless contextual understanding and a profound sense of responsibility for things you don’t fully control.
This is why the core leadership pipeline is at risk. The people we want to promote, the high-performing, reliable, empathetic ones, are often the ones most susceptible to this kind of burnout. They're the ones who care the most, and as such, they're the ones who take the most on.
The reward for being good at your job isn’t more time or less stress. It's a promotion to a new job that requires you to be good at a completely different set of things, all while carrying the weight of the team.
The antidote isn't a new time-management app or a meditation practice. It’s a recalibration of expectations: yours, your team's, and your organization's.
The people who make it out of the middle in one piece are the ones who accept good enough. They learn to let go of the idea that they can fix everything, and they get comfortable with the fact that sometimes, the best they can do is hold the line.