The Cracking Core: Why Manager Burnout Should Worry All of Us

What happens when the people holding it all together start to come apart?

That’s the quiet crisis unfolding in organizations across the globe. According to Gallup’s 2025 State of the Global Workplace report, manager engagement has dropped more than any other role—particularly among women and young leaders. For those of us supporting leaders, this lands less as data and more as confirmation of what we already feel in the field: something is fraying at the center.

It’s not just disengagement—it’s depletion.

The leaders and managers I coach aren’t short on capability. They’re short on breath. In an era of unrelenting uncertainty, rapid AI transformation, political polarization, and organizational whiplash, they’re being asked to bridge impossible gaps. And like a strained tendon that finally snaps, the injury tends to happen not during a moment of crisis, but in the slow, grinding accumulation of weight.

What Happens in the Brain Happens in the Team

Chronic stress doesn’t just fray patience—it rewires the brain.

When managers operate routinely within the stress response, the amygdala (our threat detection center) becomes overactive, while the prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain responsible for executive functions like emotional regulation, decision-making, and perspective-taking—begins to go offline. We literally lose access to the neural circuitry that makes thoughtful leadership possible. As this process continues, research shows that sustained stress leads to prefrontal cortex atrophy and amygdala hypertrophy, making us more impulsive and less empathetic over time. The brain begins to optimize not for connection or clarity, but for survival.

And survival-mode leaders can’t do their real job: regulating the nervous systems of others.

Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett reminds us that the human brain is wired for co-regulation—leaders set the emotional tone through what's called affective contagion. When a manager is grounded, their calm transmits. When they're frayed, so is the team’s collective attention span, creativity, and psychological safety.

You’ve probably felt this firsthand. A leader walks into the room—before they speak, everyone knows whether it’s safe to exhale. That’s not just culture. That’s biology.

Gallup’s data shows that 70% of team engagement is attributable to the manager. But here’s the real kicker: you can’t pour clarity from a foggy teapot. If your managers are emotionally flooded, mentally fatigued, or physiologically in fight-or-flight, no amount of key performance indicators will create alignment. The nervous system leaks through every well-written memo.

Leadership, it turns out, is less about controlling others and more about regulating oneself.

If we want antifragile organizations, we must start with antifragile leaders—those who can stay present under pressure, metabolize ambiguity, and model coherence when the storm rolls in.

The Antidote Is Counterintuitive

We’ve been taught to respond to productivity drops with urgency: act faster, do more, launch another initiative. But true resilience, like a forest regenerating after fire, requires space. Slowing down isn’t weak—it’s wise. It builds the soil conditions for creativity and adaptation to take root.

When leaders pause, when they remember to breathe before they react, they interrupt old neural grooves. They choose presence over panic. And presence, I’ve learned, is not soft. It can be palpable and even kinetic. It is a core leadership competency.

Leading Like Humans Again

We don’t need more performance hacks. We need to reclaim our capacity to feel, to notice, to choose. To lead like humans, not just operators of systems. And to create the kind of organizations where people can thrive even when the world doesn’t slow down.

What if the pain—like a strained thumb or a strained manager—isn’t the problem, but the invitation?

• To lead with curiosity instead of control.

• To rewire instead of retreat.

• To slow down, so that we can speed up—for real this time.

Curious what this might look like for you, in action? Let’s talk.