Raise your hand if you are a manager or leader and the organization expects you to do all of the following as well: recognize mental health concerns without acting as therapists, address underperformance without damaging psychological safety, demonstrate empathy while maintaining accountability, and explain decisions you may not have made and may not fully understand.  And this would be in addition to coaching employees, managing conflicts, managing hybrid teams and sustaining engagement.

If you raised your hand or are nodding your head right now, you are not alone.    These days, it seems that whenever a new organizational priority emerges, it seems to find its way into the manager’s job description.

Managers ae just as tired as the employees they are managing so that, dear readers will be the topic of this week’s Corner Office.  We’ll talk about why providing managers with another toolkit, another workshop or another checklist won’t fix systemic organizational problems and how HR can help.

The problem in essence is not one we can throw training behind.  The problem may lie with the managerial role itself.  What is happening over time, in fact, is that the managerial role itself has become impossible to perform well.

Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace revealed that global employee engagement has fallen to 20%, its lowest level since 2020, and that manager engagement has declined by nine percentage points since 2022, with the largest recent drop taking it from 27% to 22%.  Surprising no?  Especially since managers tended to be more connected to the organization and more engaged than the employees they supervised.  But the evidence shows that that advantage is disappearing.

This matters because managers are expected to generate engagement in others. Yet many are now barely more engaged than the people they are supposed to motivate.

We should therefore be careful about treating declining engagement exclusively as a managerial performance problem and a problem which can be solved with more managerial training. In some organizations, disengaged teams may be the visible symptom of an unsustainable management system.

For example, a manager may understand perfectly how to conduct a meaningful one-to-one conversation. But that knowledge is of limited use if the manager supervises 20 employees, carries a substantial technical workload and spends most of the week responding to administrative requests.  Similarly, a manager may know how to support employee wellbeing. But if the underlying problem is insufficient staff, unrealistic deadlines or continuous uncertainty, a supportive conversation will provide only temporary relief.

Another managerial burden which seldom gets talked about is a kind of invisible emotional labor and this is usually linked to restructuring and other organizational changes which directly affect employees.  You see, during restructuring, managers may know that jobs are at risk but be unable to speak openly.  They must continue assigning work, maintaining performance and encouraging employees while managing their own uncertainty.  After difficult announcements, managers conduct the conversations and respond to anger, fear and disappointment.  They may also be worried about their own future but feel they cannot show it.  When managers perform this work repeatedly without support or time to recover, what is really exhaustion is often treated as personal failure.

So, you may be asking, does HR have a role here?  The answer is a resounding YES!

HR can begin by auditing the managerial role.  As yourself questions like: How many people does each manager supervise?  How much technical work does the manager still carry?  How many administrative processes require managerial involvement?  What decisions can managers make independently?  

HR should also help leaders distinguish between manager development and manager enablement.

Some managers absolutely need leadership development.  That type of training is crucial and indispensable.  But at the same time HR can work with managers to determine what the organization can provide, change or remove so that they can succeed.

For example, can support a manager to reduce their spans of control, to simplify approval flows or to remove low-value reporting requirements.  Not all busy work is essential work and HR can help managers to eliminate tasks which occupy valuable time so that managers can dedicate time to more valuable tasks like coaching and team leadership rather than assuming that this work can be squeezed between meetings.

Most importantly, HR can bring managerial capacity into strategic conversations. Whenever a new initiative is proposed, someone should ask: What will this require managers to do? What will we stop asking them to do? Do they have the authority, time and resources to deliver it?  If there is no credible answer, the organization should rethink the initiative or shelve it until there are answers to these crucial questions.

When a few managers struggle, the issue may be individual capability. When most managers across an organization are overwhelmed, disengaged and unable to meet expectations however, the more likely explanation is organizational design and it would be a mistake to place every organizational failure at the feet of the managers.

Everyone in an organization has a role and must own that role.  Senior leadership must own strategic clarity.  HR must own coherent people systems.   Organizations must own the consequences of their policies and decisions.  Managers should translate, reinforce and implement but they should not be expected to compensate indefinitely for dysfunction elsewhere.

In conclusion, this is a general call to all organizations.  If you want your managers to lead well, stop treating them like their resilience is an endless well from which you can draw.  Stop adding more and more tasks and responsibilities and when they fail, stop sending them to yet another leadership training workshop.  The answer is to design roles, systems and expectations that make good management possible.  Managers can and should be accountable for how they lead, but organizations must be equally accountable for the conditions under which they are asked to lead.

[1] Gallup tracks employee engagement worldwide using the Q^12®, the most rigorously validated measure of workplace engagement. Engaged employees are psychologically invested in their work and workplace — they drive performance, innovation and growth. Organizations with high engagement outperform their peers on profitability, productivity, customer satisfaction and retention.