Request Demo Request Demo

The Missing Middle Management – A Conversation with Samantha

Youtube Twitter Linkedin
  • Last Updated on September 16, 2026
  • 10 mins
Check Your Wellness Program ROI
How much can a Wellness Program save you ?
Eligible Employees (slide to adjust)
500 employees
Average Salary (slide to adjust)
$60,000
$ XXX,679
Your Savings Potential with a Wellness Program
Find My ROI Breakdown

Table of Contents

The Missing Middle Management

Companies have cut management layers since 2025, and the average span of control has reached 12.1 direct reports. The shift happened without anything coming off the plate, leaving managers overworked and under-supported.

The point where span of control breaks

There is no single magic number, but once a manager crosses somewhere around eight to ten direct reports, something has to give. What breaks first is almost always the one to one. It is the easiest thing to cancel and the first thing to go, and once it disappears, coaching disappears with it. In one client case, span of control was pushed past ten and manager check ins turned into status updates rather than actual conversations.

Gallup data shows 97 percent of managers still carry individual contributor work, occupying close to 40 percent of their time. Clients have tried to remove it, usually by shifting reports or admin tasks to a coordinating role or automating them. When it worked, the manager got a few real hours back each week, and it showed up in engagement scores within a quarter or two. It only sticks if leadership protects that time. Otherwise the IC work creeps right back in.

The effect of removing a management layer is easiest to measure on the team, and it follows within six months. When that layer goes, people lose their advocate, and a portion of them start looking elsewhere even when nothing else about their job has changed.

Where utilization actually sits

Whether a manager can flag burnout safely depends entirely on company culture, not on the manager. Samantha has seen it go badly, with the manager who spoke up quietly passed over for promotion. She has also seen it go well, where a manager said they were at capacity and got real support because leadership valued retention over optics. Same words, completely different outcomes. That is the whole problem.

Leadership may push a manager to charge through the week even when they are at capacity. If that manager speaks up, they might be passed over for promotion, or left out the next time specific opportunities come around, or they might not. It depends on the space the team has been given.

What stays with you in these conversations is the gap between what managers ask for and what would actually fix it. One manager had stopped doing one to ones because there was no version of the week that fit. Asked what would actually help, the answer was not a break, it was two of me to get the tasks done. Managers will ask for a wellness stipend or a meditation app, but what they are describing is a staffing problem. That gap is basically the whole thesis of this space.

What it comes down to when employees are at capacity is prioritising tasks. If everything is a priority and every task is due tomorrow, nothing is a priority. That call sits with leadership. Managers need to be able to ask what should be prioritised, then move to the next task, and the next. Telling staff that everything is urgent is how they max out and burn out.

The effect of removing a management layer is easiest to measure on the team, and it follows within six months. When that layer goes, people lose their advocate, and a portion of them start looking elsewhere even when nothing else about their job has changed.

Where wellbeing programmes miss the driver

The wellbeing industry oversells the individual fix. Managers are handed resilience training and the problem is called done, when the actual driver is workload design. Peer support cohorts for managers have launched with real enthusiasm and then fizzled because attendance was not protected. They quietly became another meeting nobody had time for.

Resilience training and broad support are valuable, and plenty of providers offer them, including Wellness360. But the outcome still falls back to the internal team, the workload, and how tasks are prioritised. It also depends on higher management recognising employees, showing some sympathy, and having those conversations.

Budget, pipeline, and the next three moves

In the pipeline there is real hesitation. High performing Gen Z employees are turning down promotions into management because they have watched their own managers burn out. Clients are starting to feel this as a backfill problem, unable to find internal candidates who want the role. Somewhere between 52 and 72 percent of Gen Z workers prefer to advance as individual contributors rather than take on people management. They remain ambitious, with 70 percent still wanting executive or high level strategic leadership long term. They are intentionally avoiding the middle management layer.

Samantha's pick for CHRO (Chief Human Resource Officer) budget is manager capacity, not another wellness perk. For the business case, the metric to put in front of a CHRO is manager attrition rate, because that is the number that gets executive attention and the one most directly tied to workload.

Three steps follow from that. This quarter, audit span of control and identify which managers are furthest over capacity. This year, actually take something off their plate and track whether it moves engagement. The harder one requires the executive team to decide whether the company is willing to hire more managers and give up some efficiency to get sustainable ones. That last piece is a structural call, and HR cannot make it alone. The capacity piece is the big one: go back and evaluate the workload sitting on the team, then fill in where more people are needed.

Your Workforce Is Your Greatest Asset

Ensure they remain healthy and happy with
Wellness360.
Request Demo
×