How to Address Manager Burnout and Improve Performance Outcomes

Managers are central to how employees experience work. They translate business priorities into day-to-day expectations, guide teams through change, and often become the first people employees turn to when stress rises.

But managers are under strain themselves.

Recent workforce data from Modern Health found that 82% of senior managers say being a manager is harder than ever. Eighty-seven percent say burnout is affecting their productivity, and 79% say they've felt pressure to work through burnout or mental health struggles. Managers are being asked to create stability for their teams while navigating rising expectations, uncertainty, and their own limited capacity to recover.

That makes manager burnout more than an individual well-being concern. It's an organizational performance and workforce-risk issue: Gallup estimates that low employee engagement cost the global economy roughly $10 trillion in lost productivity just last year, about 9% of global GDP.

Asking managers to become more resilient won't fix this if the conditions creating strain stay the same. Employers can make a meaningful difference by reducing unnecessary workload, building manager capability, and creating a culture where support is safe to use.

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Why manager burnout matters

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Managers sit between organizational strategy and employee experience. They're expected to interpret change, set priorities, maintain performance, and support their teams through difficult moments. When they're well-supported, they can create clarity, connection, and sustainable ways of working. When they're overextended, pressure can travel downstream.

External research reinforces the scale of the challenge. Drawing on insights from 10,796 leaders across more than 50 countries, DDI found that 71% of leaders have experienced a significant increase in stress since stepping into their current role, up from 63% in 2022.

This is especially important because expectations for managers have grown faster than the systems designed to support them. Today's managers are often asked to lead through evolving business priorities, new technology, team-level conflict, and employees' concerns about events outside of work—all while maintaining their own performance.

Recent workforce data from Modern Health shows that 40% of senior managers received a new mental health diagnosis in the past year, compared with 13% of non-managers. In addition, 24% say the mental health of their direct reports has worsened compared with the prior year. Yet only 37% feel strongly equipped to spot burnout in employees.

Managers don't need to become mental health professionals. But they do need the capacity, confidence, and clear pathways to respond appropriately when people are struggling.

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What's driving manager burnout?

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Burnout rarely comes from a single difficult week. It tends to emerge when sustained demands outpace the resources, autonomy, clarity, and recovery time available to meet them.

For managers, several pressures can converge at once:

• Rising performance expectations. Eighty percent of senior managers say AI has raised expectations for their output, compared with 40% of non-managers.
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• Emotional labor. Managers are often expected to support team members through stress and uncertainty, even when they don't feel prepared for those conversations.
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• Constant change. New tools, business shifts, reorganizations, and policy changes can require managers to provide answers before they've fully processed the implications themselves.
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• Limited room to recover. Sixty-one percent of senior managers say they avoid mental health days because they fear judgment.
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• Unclear boundaries. When responsiveness and availability become the norm, managers can struggle to protect focus time, time off, and personal capacity.

These signals point to conditions in the work environment that may need to change.

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Reduce the work conditions that create burnout

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Self-care can support recovery, but it can't compensate for chronic overload, unclear priorities, or a culture that rewards constant availability. Sustainable burnout prevention begins with examining how work is designed and what managers are being asked to carry.

The World Health Organization identifies several workplace conditions that can put mental health at risk, including excessive workloads or work pace, low control over job design or workload, unclear job roles, job insecurity, inflexible work arrangements, and limited support from colleagues or supervisors. Employers should address these conditions through organizational changes, rather than asking individuals alone to cope better.

Here are practical places to start:

• Audit manager workload. Review spans of control, meeting volume, administrative burden, and after-hours expectations. If managers are responsible for too many people or too much coordination work, no amount of training will fully solve the problem.
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• Clarify tradeoffs. When new priorities come in, spell out what can pause, shift, or stop. Managers need the authority to deprioritize, along with clear guidance on what matters most.
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• Make decision rights visible. Help managers understand what they can decide independently, what requires escalation, and where they can turn for support.
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• Treat change as a human experience. AI adoption, reorganizations, return-to-office policies, and leadership transitions all affect how people feel at work. Clear communication, realistic timelines, and space for questions can reduce unnecessary strain.
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• Protect recovery. Set norms that support time off, focus time, and reasonable response expectations. Employees take cues from what leaders reward in practice.

This approach also aligns with the broader conversation around psychosocial risk: organizations can reduce risk by looking upstream at the workplace conditions that create stress, well before symptoms surface later.

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Equip managers without making them clinicians

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Managers aren't therapists, and they shouldn't be expected to diagnose or treat mental health conditions. Their role is to create a supportive team environment, recognize when something may be wrong, respond with empathy, and connect employees to the right resources.

That requires more than a one-time awareness session. Effective manager enablement should include:

• Practical conversation skills. Give managers language for checking in, listening without judgment, acknowledging difficult moments, and asking what support might help.
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• Clear boundaries. Help managers understand the difference between showing empathy, adjusting work where appropriate, and referring someone to HR, an employee assistance program, or mental health support.
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• Realistic scenarios. Use role-play and examples that reflect situations managers regularly face, including workload concerns, burnout signals, team conflict, performance changes, and conversations about difficult current events.
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• Escalation paths. Make it easy for managers to know where to go when they need help navigating a sensitive situation.
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• Support for managers themselves. Managers need care options, including coaching and community sessions, where they can address their own stress without feeling that doing so will hurt their careers.

Managers are multipliers of organizational resilience. When they have the tools and support to lead with consistency and care, they can help teams navigate pressure before it becomes a larger performance or retention problem.

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Make support safe to use

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Offering mental health benefits is important, but access alone doesn't determine whether people use them. Employees also weigh whether using support will be seen as a sign of weakness, affect how others perceive their commitment, or create career risk.

Modern Health's workforce data showed that half of employees don't use mental health days because they fear judgment. Among senior managers, 54% say they've received direct judgment for using employer-provided mental health days.

To make support truly usable, employers can:

• Treat mental health days like any other paid time off, without unnecessary disclosure requirements.
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• Encourage leaders to model boundaries, time off, and appropriate use of support.
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• Review meeting, promotion, and responsiveness norms for messages that contradict stated well-being values.
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• Offer accessible paths to mental health care, including coaching, therapy, digital tools, and higher-acuity options.
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• Measure trust alongside utilization. Utilization tells employers who used a benefit; trust helps reveal whether employees felt safe enough to consider it.

Embedding support into the moments that shape employee experience can make a meaningful difference.

Learn more about how to embed mental health support across the employee lifecycle.

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Build a more sustainable manager experience

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Managers can't be the sole buffer between organizational pressure and employee well-being. Creating a healthier manager experience requires organizations to share that responsibility through thoughtful work design, clear operating norms, leadership development, and accessible care.

The goal is sustainable performance, achieved without lowering expectations.

Organizations that invest in managers as both leaders and people can improve how teams experience change, support earlier intervention when strain emerges, and strengthen the conditions that allow employees to do their best work over time.

The upside is real: Gallup found that within best-practice organizations, 79% of managers are engaged at work—close to four times the global average. That's evidence the conditions driving manager burnout are changeable, not fixed.

For a broader look at how proactive mental health strategy can strengthen organizational stability, explore organizational resilience as a smarter approach to workforce risk.

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Support managers—and the teams who rely on them

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Manager burnout is a signal: the layer responsible for holding teams together may need more support itself. By reducing structural sources of strain, equipping managers for the human side of leadership, and making care safe to use, employers can build a more resilient workforce.

Modern Health delivers adaptive mental health care that helps employees and managers access the right support at the right time, including coaching, therapy, psychiatry, digital tools, and manager-focused resources.

Learn how Modern Health can support your workforce.