Your Middle Managers Don’t Need to Suck it Up

The data is hard to ignore: mid-level leaders are the most stressed and burned out professional demographic — more burned out than individual contributors, more than senior executives. And yet most organizations treat manager development as an afterthought. Meanwhile, the generation coming up behind them is looking at middle management and quietly deciding it's not worth it.

This episode is for the senior leader. The executive. The person who's climbed out of the valley and is now looking down at it.

Adam shares a personal story from May 2009 — a breaking point in the valley, and what the senior leaders around him did and didn't do in response. What that moment revealed wasn't that they didn't care. It's that they'd navigated the valley themselves, but had no idea how to explain what they'd learned. They couldn't transfer what they couldn't articulate.

We walk through three signs your middle managers are struggling — and why what looks like a character problem is almost always a systems problem. Then we make the case for what senior leaders actually owe the people in their valley. Spoiler: it's not a pep talk, a mandate to push through, or a sink-or-swim moment. It's a repeatable framework and a leader willing to hand it down.

If your team's vision lives or dies through your middle managers — and it does — this one is worth your full attention.

Listen to How to Lead wherever you get podcasts.