The issue we encounter most often when talking with organisations is busyness, reactivity and overwhelm. It’s in every sector and industry we come into contact with, in New Zealand and Australia. It shows up as constant pressure on managers and in some cases an inability to lead through any kind of change

Managers and leaders are the operating system most organisations rely on to transmit strategy, sustain culture, absorb change, maintain performance, and notice when people are struggling.

But the operating system is overloaded.

Gallup reports global manager engagement has fallen from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025, with declining manager engagement driving much of the broader drop in employee engagement.

At the same time, Microsoft’s research on the “infinite workday” points to a workplace that is increasingly fragmented, interrupted, and cognitively exhausting.

The usual organisational response is to talk about wellbeing and resilience.

That is not wrong.

It is just incomplete. The deeper issue is often design.

We have gradually redesigned management into a role that asks ordinary human beings to absorb extraordinary organisational complexity and then act surprised when they begin to crack.

Managers are where organisational pressure converges

Most employees do not experience “the organisation” in the abstract.

They experience workload, priorities, trust, communication, recognition, fairness, and pressure through their immediate leader. That makes managers and frontline leaders the transmission system of culture.

When they become overloaded, the effects spread quickly:

⚠️ slower decisions

⚠️ weaker coaching

⚠️ poorer judgement

⚠️ lower empathy

⚠️ inconsistent communication

⚠️ missed early warning signs in teams

This is not just a wellbeing issue.

It is an organisational performance risk.

Importantly, the problem is not inevitable. Gallup’s comparison between average organisations and best-practice organisations shows dramatically higher manager engagement in environments where the role is better supported and designed.

The role expanded faster than the support around it

The modern manager is now expected to be:

❗ a performance coach

❗ a culture carrier

❗a change leader

❗ a wellbeing first responder

❗ a hybrid-work coordinator

❗ an AI translator

❗ a psychological safety builder

❗ and still deliver operational results

Most organisations added these expectations incrementally. Very few removed anything. The problem is not that any single expectation is unreasonable. It is the cumulative load.

Managers today are carrying performance pressure, emotional labour, constant change, growing administrative complexity, and increasingly fragmented work environments, often without additional authority, recovery time, or meaningful reduction in competing priorities.

Cognitive overload changes how people lead

Managers and leaders are not just busy. They are cognitively fragmented.

Microsoft’s research shows nearly half of employees, and more than half of leaders now describe work as chaotic and fragmented. Managers feel this even more intensely because they absorb other people’s friction as well as their own.

Every unresolved priority conflict, escalation, emotional conversation, performance issue, unclear decision, and ambiguous change lands somewhere.

Very often, it lands with the manager.

The neuroscience matters here.

Cognitive overload affects attention, emotional regulation, empathy, judgement, and working memory. Under sustained overload, leaders do not simply feel worse.

They lead differently.

Decision fatigue makes hard calls easier to avoid. Constant interruption reduces depth of thought. Emotional overload makes empathy harder to sustain.

A depleted manager is not simply a tired employee. They become a weaker node in the leadership, culture, and decision-making system. And this has a material negative impact on the organisations ability to implement strategy and change.

High demand plus low control is a burnout formula

Occupational psychology has understood this dynamic for decades. Stress risk rises when people face high demands but low control. That describes many manager roles today.

Managers are often held accountable for engagement, wellbeing, culture, performance, and change adoption while having limited control over resourcing, workload, organisational priorities, or the pace of change itself.

In other words, they are increasingly responsible for outcomes they cannot fully influence. That is not a resilience problem. That is a structural design problem.

Resilience matters. But design matters more.

None of this means resilience is irrelevant.

Managers absolutely benefit from coaching, recovery, emotional regulation, peer support, and leadership development. But resilience has limits.

Resilience helps people cope with pressure.

Design determines how much pressure the system creates in the first place.

If organisations continue adding layers of responsibility onto managers without redesigning the role itself, wellbeing initiatives may simply help people tolerate unsustainable conditions for longer.

The more important leadership question is this:

What have we designed managers to carry, and is that load still humanly possible?

The fix is structural

The manager crash is not inevitable. But solving it requires organisations to redesign the role deliberately rather than continuing to layer expectations onto it.

That starts with some reflection and an audit:

☑️ What has been added to the manager role in the last three years?

☑️ What has been removed?

☑️ Where are managers accountable without authority?

☑️ What work should be automated, delegated, escalated or stopped?

☑️ How much change is on the agenda and how well resourced is it?

☑️ Are we measuring span of control or span of care?

That last distinction matters.

Span of control tells you how many people report to a manager.

Span of care tells you how much human complexity they are carrying.

The organisations that navigate these changing times successfully will not just invest in better leaders. They will build systems in which good leadership and management are actually sustainable.

Like to know more about how to use practical neuroscience to drive more impact?

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