In my thirty-plus years leading, growing, and guiding businesses, I’ve come to realise something that doesn’t make the headlines: it’s often not the CEO or the frontline teams who are silently falling apart… it’s the middle. The managers, department heads, project leads, the people who glue everything together, are exhausted. And not enough is being done by top level leaders to address this silent business killer.
We expect a lot from mid-level leaders. They’re translators of vision and executors of strategy. They’re motivators, mentors, data crunchers, delivery drivers (metaphorically), and crisis deflectors. They’re both accountable and expected to absorb pressure coming from every direction.
And unlike senior leaders, they often don’t have coaches, safe spaces, or even enough autonomy to change what’s hurting them.
I’m talking about your middle leaders. The ones holding the day-to-day weight of delivery, culture, accountability, and communication. The glue in fact that’s holding your company together, and more often than not, they are the ones wearing out silently, invisibly, and expensively.
The invisible pressure sandwich
Middle leaders sit in a unique place; they’re accountable upward to strategy and outcomes, they’re responsible downward for people, pace, and execution, and they’re caught sideways in a constant loop of collaboration, conflict resolution, and cross-functional alignment.
They’re in meetings all day and doing the actual work all night. They’re expected to cascade strategy, deliver performance reviews, coach individuals, spot issues early, and stay relentlessly positive, all without ever really being asked how they’re coping.
Burnout is commonly framed around frontline teams, directors or founders. But in reality, mid-level leadership is where emotional erosion creeps in and goes unseen. I’ve witnessed it dozens of times; great managers slowly shutting down. Not because they’re not capable, but because they’re caught in a squeeze that no one designed, but everyone fuels.
Here’s what that invisible load can look like
- They absorb founder urgency but rarely share in the founder’s clarity of purpose.
- They manage team emotions without the authority to make big decisions that could improve morale.
- They implement change but have little influence over what gets changed or when.
It’s emotionally draining. And it leaves them in a psychological no man’s land; responsible, but not empowered; pivotal, but not protected. And here’s the brutal truth – Most companies don’t notice when middle leadership starts to buckle. Not until it’s too late.
What management and leadership fatigue in the middle looks like
It doesn’t always show up as burnout. Often, it shows up as:
- Flat energy in meetings
- Delay in decisions that used to be sharp
- Overreliance on escalation (“I’ll ask the CFO”)
- Withdrawal from informal spaces
- Cynicism disguised as realism
- Being ‘busy’ but not effective
They’re not underperforming. They’re over-carrying. Many of them were promoted into leadership without the tools, training, or time to reset. And now they’re stuck in a loop of expectation without support.
- They’re not new enough to get developmental attention.
- They’re not senior enough to get strategic investment.
- They’re simply expected to hold it all together.
The middle isn’t weak – it’s overloaded.
We misinterpret their fatigue as poor performance, when it’s actually a symptom of unclear boundaries, shifting expectations, and systemic blind spots.
In one company I supported, a high-performing ops manager went from driving change to resisting it. The founder felt betrayed. But when I spoke to the manager, he said:
“Every time I push something forward, it’s either changed or reprioritised. I feel like I’m running up a hill that keeps getting steeper.”
It wasn’t really resistance, it was exhaustion backed up with chaos.
Cultural erosion from the middle
This middle layer of leadership sets the tone for 80% of the organisation’s lived experience. Culture doesn’t live in the boardroom or the canteen, it lives in how team leaders run their 1:1s, how department heads respond under pressure, and how managers manage uncertainty.
If your middle leaders are exhausted, overloaded, or emotionally checked out, the whole company feels it.
Left unaddressed, leadership fatigue turns into a drop in morale company-wide, bottlenecks in delivery, quiet quitting in management ranks, high-potential leaders exiting early, and a gradual collapse in cultural trust. It’s much more serious than people just leaving. It’s about people staying, but no longer leading.
One client’s turning point
I worked with a growing company where the founder was frustrated. “My managers just aren’t stepping up,” he said.
But what we found was very different: they weren’t lazy, they were overloaded. They were delivering, firefighting, recruiting, mentoring, and still being asked to lead transformation projects.
After some digging, we found that over 70% of their managers were averaging 12 hours of meetings a week. Several hadn’t had a performance conversation themselves in over a year. None had formal leadership coaching or clear delegation structures.
They weren’t failing. They were drowning in uncertainty, never learning best practice because they had never seen it.
We restructured responsibility, gave them permission to delegate without guilt, installed targeted support and a peer-level sounding board. Within four months, project delivery had sped up, absenteeism dropped, and two managers who were on the edge of quitting re-engaged with a new sense of direction.
How to spot and solve mid-level leadership fatigue
Start with one question: Who’s supporting your supporters?
Then look for these signs:
- Are they still learning, or just surviving?
- Are they empowered to say no?
- Do they have time for thinking, not just doing?
- Are they rewarded for leadership, or just output?
- Is anyone actively investing in their growth?
How to strengthen the middle
Mid-level leaders don’t need motivational posters or pizza Fridays. They need:
- Clarity of authority – What can they control? What must they deliver?
- Context behind strategy – Don’t just cascade decisions. Share the ‘why’ behind the ‘what’.
- Peer support and development – Give them a space to think, reflect, and grow.
- Founder empathy – If you’re a business owner or MD, ask yourself: When did I last listen without defending my position?
- Give them space – not just more frameworks.
- Create forums for honest upward feedback.
- Fund coaching or mentoring – not just performance reviews.
- Rethink the meeting culture – and mean it.
- Redefine their role with clarity and boundaries.
What I do
I have a very simple philosophy in my companies – “Everyone (and I do mean everyone) has someone to mentor, and someone to mentor them”. Not always professional mentoring, but always peer support, operational and non-operational career development. By working in this framework, there is peer, management and leadership support across every level, and a clear career development pathway though my Future Job Descriptions framework – ask me about it.
What it feels like when it’s working
When mid-level leaders are energised, aligned, and supported:
- Decisions get made faster
- Teams run with clarity
- Issues surface earlier
- Strategy gets traction
- Culture becomes self-sustaining
They are the engine room of any business of around 30+ people. But you don’t just need them to stay. You need them to lead. And that only happens when we stop pretending they’re fine just because they’re quiet.
If your middle layer feels stuck, weary, or disengaged, it’s not them. It’s the system you’ve allowed to grow around them. This isn’t about lowering expectations. It’s about designing leadership roles that are sustainable. Because when the middle breaks, everything above it eventually falls.
We talk a lot about investing in leadership at the top. But if you want scalable culture and consistent performance, invest in the people who carry the weight of both strategy and operations.
They’re not “middle management.” They’re your structural core.
“No one noticed I was exhausted — because I never said a word. I didn’t think I was allowed to.” – Former head of department during an exit interview
Mark Jarvis
Founder | Interim MD | NED
Author of The Very Best Business Handbook You’ll Ever Own
Work with me:
I help owners, founders and leaders create a scalable business that works without them, build a world-class team, and 10x profitability. Book a call with me here to see if we could work together.
Remember, there are only three types of people – those who make things happen, those who wait for things to happen, and those who talk about why things don’t happen for them. Which one are you?
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