how many i think it was one in yeah so it says hybrid managers are experiencing the highest level of burnout but all managers were experiencing like 20 like one in four managers what is that on-site remote capable managers at 21 percent burnout not remote capable 25 percent hybrid managers 32 percent burnout so the best the best scenario is 20 percent of managers have burnt out yeah i i found that funny as well because the as always the headline is like oh hybrid managers are doing really well but actually the difference is not that big it's like there is a bit of like a five or six percent difference which to me is not huge so yeah but all of them well shall we stick to the burnout angle yes it's topical just because it's just being it feels like it for managers in particular i mean for everybody but for managers it's just being hit after hit after hit and you know there was the pandemic you know and then switching to a different way of working trying to adjust all of that trying to keep people going and then now there's a situation where for a lot of the market like employment's really tight but employees are disaffected and burnt out and then for areas like tech like you know layoffs and economic trouble and there's been economic trouble we've been for a lot of companies around the pandemic as well so as a manager you know you're stuck in the middle because you don't get to decide if there's layoffs you have to deal with it you don't get to decide you don't solely influence how well the company's doing but you're representative of it and that's a burden yeah yeah well welcome everyone to maybe not the most cheerful of discussions around the table today in management cafe but a very pressing one so if it's the first time you join us well tim and i are going to be here talking for about 20 minutes around well it sounds like something around well-being manager well-being so you're very welcome to stay with us my name is pilar or tea and this of course is tim burgess with me i say this of course i mean this person sitting with me this but this isn't tim uh so yes this uh so just if anyone wants to uh have a look at the article while they've grabbed a cup of coffee it's an article from gallup gallup.com from january 31st 2023 six trends leaders need to navigate this year and we're particularly struck by the bit around manager well-being and the fact that actually this is something that's been on tim's mind about the burnout in managers and then we found this article so that's a it's a nice compliment but just what you were saying just now tim um i found something i quote let me see if i can remember which was it was something like managers were translators and scapegoats maybe is what i found um i need to look through but and that's due to your point that they're really being caught in the middle between decisions that are being made by top leadership and their people yeah exactly like as the line manager in particular you know you're effectively representing the organization but you're not that much more powerful or connected to like what's happening then you know you're only one step up like the power ladder from an individual intruder and yet like we're saying before like if there's you go to the layoffs they go to the manager and say hey you got 10 members in your team you gotta lose two people you pick who they are you can't win in that situation it's a terrible thing to be in and i think for managers there's so much more that we expect from them i think in the modern context uh or you know maybe it's just maybe we've always had high expectations but you know you expect the manager to understand what's going on with you you expect them to understand what's going on with the company you expect them to be transparent with you you expect them to be a safe place for you to talk and to hold you in a safe space and yet managers don't really you know they have to represent the organization they can't just they can't just show up and say oh this is terrible no one knows what they're doing i feel terrible today i don't feel like doing anything so it's a lot of pressure i think yeah i completely agree and one thing that i that also struck me from the article was that they said also that managers were feeling less in touch with the company culture as well yeah it's really interesting that if we're having to be that translator in the word of the article as well but we still feel detached it's really difficult to serve our team members like that yeah i think it's the same like this notion of quiet quitting that people are just i'm just collecting paycheck i'm just gonna go through the motions like why would managers be immune from that in fact in some senses they have they might have a more finely tuned experience of the disconnect between the day-to-day work and experience of the organization or the the behavior that the organization rewards and punishes and so on if just one thing if you're managing seven people that's seven people you know what's going on with them you know whether they're trying to promote it you know whether they're you know whether they need flexible work because they've got a sick parent whatever's going on manager knows all that stuff so you also know how the organization reacts to it you have conversations with hr with your manager and you know when someone's project gets canceled you might have more context in terms of what happens to that so it can be a very difficult situation to be in terms of cognitive dissonance i think where you're trying to present one version of reality but you know that there's also a different a different version very hard what you're saying as well it's making me think that throughout especially the last few years managers have had all the issues that everyone else has had plus the extra burden that you're saying and plus this pressure to continue to be supportive but also translating uh what is going on and also a lot of the times because at the moment there's a lot of experimenting in organizations especially those that have well actually not just not just those that have the ability to have remote workers and hybrid workplace but also if we look at things like a four-day week experiment in the uk that actually has been also going on in spain and other places there's this realization that we can work in different ways so there's a lot of experimentation and that experimentation is hard and i'm wondering as well the managers are caught in those experiments sometimes they haven't decided to do that experiment or to try something out or they're having to one go with it whether they like it or not then translate it make sense of it and then experiment as an individual and then experiment with team members so i can see how it's just all piling up yeah it's hard to to be like you need a lot of support and i think a lot of managers don't get that support from the organization i think that there's a lot of goodwill particularly coming out of hr you know i think hr wants the best for people but often the way that they implement things is a sort of detached program you know we know that people are feeling burnt out so we're going to put in an eap or like employee assistance program or you know we'll provide provide them access to counseling whatever and we talked about this the other week you know it's the symptom not the cause well the manager doesn't really benefit from that because the cause is something that the manager is not able to change which means the problem is continuing to uh like continuing to appear and i think it can be very um so many examples that come to mind where people are asked to like hey you gotta manage your team's expectations or you need to uh you know people are unhappy i want you to try and try and practice and managers just stuff like so uh can we push a deadline on the project no no no you can't do that or you know can we hire more people because no no no you can't do that and as a like as a manager or as a i've done this to managers myself uh you know where they've been in a difficult situation they've asked for support and i said i can't give you that support i'm trying to be different support or sometimes i can't give you any first support at all and you really as a manager it's such a like it's such a difficult position to be in and who has you back in that situation who you go to for comfort yeah yeah you're touching on so many things the feeling of helplessness and lack of autonomy as well is something that is really draining uh that feeling that you say of i think this would solve it but we can't for whatever reason or we won't and then the support aspect something else that came up in this article was how some managers are feeling especially that well actually we just said that three whether it's hybrid or remote or all office they're more less experiencing the same percentage but what the hybrid um managers are finding is their support systems are missing because they were informal a lot of our support networks are informal and i think especially at a management level unless you have an organization that is really into internal communities that's usually the case and maybe we need to find new ways of finding that informal support and we're not quite there yet i think we still rely on bumping into people in the office and having coffee in the office and that's not there anymore and that's a big part that's something that whereas maybe we've changed our training programs in the organization we haven't thought about the informal networks and how to facilitate those yet well yeah i would argue that's institutional failure because the informal networks generally only spring up because there's no formal network you know yes i'm gonna find other ways where i can where i can source it uh and you know if we talk about how managers keep going how do they how do they manage themselves uh that that i think is a big way to do it is to build an informal network uh of peers i think it's really helpful to have particularly peers outside your organization where uh where you can talk to them freely about about what's going on and uh yeah sometimes it's just for someone to recognize that yeah that sucks you know what you're doing true sucks nothing you can do about it you just gotta grind it out but i feel like being at this point where um if you're in a company for example that's doing layoffs and you're the manager and you're feeling like oh it's just been hit after hit after hit for the last three years you know there's pandemic there's all this social upheaval in a bunch of different countries you know there was uh there was major um major social upheaval going on which impacted individuals and managers had to try and navigate that hopefully skillfully with the people providing the support and economic stress like unable to hire people having to lay people off it's all over the place and i'm imagining there are a lot of managers at the moment who just like when's this gonna like when do i get right you know when do i get to replenish my reserves like what do you think when you've been in that situation have you been in that situation as a manager where you felt like no no i haven't i i can i can very luckily say that i've never felt burnt out i felt loneliness but for other reasons just in a way when you think oh okay i'm the one responsible or yeah it all comes down to me so that's different very very different but i've never been in a context where i had to feel all of this and where the real burnout was happening but i've seen it i'm seeing it now i'm seeing it now with just people saying things like well yeah we have to do this i don't agree with you but i'm going along with it and that going along with it is really painful especially if you're also struggling with the other people and you have to like you were saying before when you're having to pull something and implement something and go through a situation which you think should be different because then it's not just about the long hours and it's not just about absorbing or sharing or knowing of other people's burdens uh it's also that sense of i can't believe i have to ask people to do this that really that is at the core i think a lot of the time in general not just now but in general i think that's where they're real and there's no and it's really interesting that when you're thinking of organizational support i wonder and i don't know i really don't know whether there is a recognition within the organization that we are doing something that maybe half of our people don't support in this case it's a hybrid setup but it could be anything else we're asking our people to do something one do we know whether they agree with it or not because if everyone agrees that's great and two how do we help those people who fundamentally disagree with something new how do we help them implement it because i think it's different strategy and different kind of support yeah it makes a big big difference just to be acknowledged you know we've talked about uh authenticity and those things and part of that i think is just at an individual level and then expanding out to an organizational level to your example to acknowledge that this is bad for some people you know some people don't like it uh or that's something we're finding it difficult that's one big step because all of a sudden then you're not like oh i'm by myself here or nobody cares of course it might be worse if it's uh yeah we understand this is bad but we don't really care we're doing it anyway well there's always reasons i don't think anyone i think we're i would like to think that in the 21st century we're at a point where we might say we know this is not great for some but we think it's good for others and that's why we're doing it or you know these are the reasons why i hope we're oh for sure and to your point before as manager you gotta like you gotta sell it to yourself as well yes first because you know you're gonna have to go out and sell it to other people so you gotta sell it to yourself first and it helps if they give you the story you know uh i was having lunch with a with a friend the other day uh who's a manager in an organization the organization's struggling a bit going through a lot of change and we were talking about some of the stuff that was going on and i'm not in it right so i can say whatever i want i was like i don't know that sounds a bit uh that sounds a bit nuts what's happening and and she was she was stuck because she didn't she didn't want to step across that line and say oh this is yeah you're right or no i think it is i think it doesn't make sense because it's too much of a cognitive dissonance from what she has to do on a day-to-day basis and so she said look uh i'm just trying to see i'm trying to see the bright side i'm trying to see the best side of this and so that's one way you know again i think that's one way you still have to put the blinkers on and go if i view it this way i'm going to be able to keep going uh the danger is if you keep going like that for too long you don't know where you're gonna end up because you've got your blinkers on yeah i think changing perspective is always if you can do it in a helpful way is a good way of getting through a lot of stuff i think so i just feel we could you know i feel like we could stay here for our listeners forever i would love to hear as well i guess the message that i have a lot of sympathy for the position managers are in and i particularly have sympathy for i think there's a lot of managers out there that would love to be addressing the cause of their burnout you know workload targets goals uh you know economic performance all those things but that are having to sort of stay at that symptom level uh and tell themselves how to keep going uh you know we feel for you yeah i think that's a that's a great way to end our coffee uh today for from two people who are well we've got loads of empathy and sympathy for you and uh and best wishes actually so yeah and if you've got any tips for how you're dealing with it that you want to share with other managers we'd love to hear that that'd be great i think the main thing is you're not alone uh i have to say that i was reading about this yesterday i'm reading a great book called chatter i can't remember the author and you know it's all about our internal talk and one of the things they're saying half of the time when we're struggling with something even knowing that we're not alone in the struggle sometimes can make a huge difference so remember that if this is you dear listeners so again listeners if you want to get in touch with us managementcafe at gmail.com is the email address or managementcafepodcast.com is the blog site where you can find a contact form and also a summary of this episode so how's your how's your tea going tim oh it was lovely it was great And I look forward to our next coffee. Well, listeners, coffee's over for us. Now it's over to you. Thank you for joining us at the Management Cafe.
Remember, you can subscribe to the show or whatever podcast art you use to make sure you get your weekly dose of reflection. Our website is management.cafe and on Twitter we are at Management Cafe. That's all for this episode from myself, Pilar Orti, and our fellow co-host, Tim Burgess. Thank you for listening.