“Understanding ourselves, navigating the world around us, making sense of others, and recognising the impact we have on them. Because who are we, really, if not shaped by one another?“
Happy Thursday, everyone. I’m Shaida Darian, a Business and Organisational Psychologist. I’m fascinated by three questions: Why does this happen? What can we do about it? And when should we act? Join me down the rabbit hole. With any luck, we’ll find Wonderland.
This week in workplace whiplash 🌀
The Sickness Spike: Sickness absence in the UK has reached a 15-year high of 9.4 days per employee per year. Line managers already take primary responsibility for managing short-term absence in 70% of organisations, adding another operational demand when teams are stretched. Because apparently, when capacity disappears, the manager becomes the capacity.
Read the storyThe Great Flattening: The average team size supervised by a single manager has jumped from 10.9 in 2024 to 12.1 in 2025. Simultaneously, 97% of managers are trapped in "player-coach" roles, spending a median of 40% of their time on individual contributor tasks. Managers are expected to coach more people, in less time, while still spending 40% of their working time on individual-contributor tasks.
Read the reportThe AI Disconnect: While 56% of CEOs report seeing no significant financial benefits from their AI investments over the past year, frontline managers are three times more likely than senior leaders to be concerned about AI’s impact on the workforce. Senior leaders may set the AI strategy; managers are left handling the uncertainty, adoption challenges and employee concerns that come with implementation.
Read the research
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Thursday Reflections
If you are a manager, your weekend probably doesn’t start on Friday evening. It likely begins sometime on Sunday afternoon, when the low-grade anxiety of the week ahead finally coaxes you to open your laptop. You sit there, staring at a screen flooded with unread emails, resolving shift conflicts and approving timesheets. You are desperately trying to find a quiet three-hour block to catch up on the individual contributor work you were hired to do, but which was crowded out between Monday and Friday by meetings, crisis interventions and employee one-to-ones.
You tell yourself that you just need to be more resilient. You need to manage your time better. You need another productivity app, fewer meetings, or more mindfulness.
I’m Shaida Darian, a Business and Organisational Psychologist, and I am here to tell you that this is a lie.
Your exhaustion is not a personal failure of willpower, time management or resilience. It reflects a structural problem: more and more organisational pressure is being pushed into a role that was never designed to absorb it all.
Which brings me to the question: are we actually designing managers to succeed, or simply using them as human shock absorbers to insulate our organisations from their own design flaws?
🧠The organisational psychology lens
Organisational psychologists describe this through Job Demands–Resources theory. Every job demands time, attention and emotional effort, but also requires resources: autonomy, support, capacity and control. Problems begin when demands grow while resources do not. Increasingly, this is management. Larger teams, operational responsibilities, continuous change, employee wellbeing and AI implementation have been added without equivalent increases in time or authority.
This creates a mismatch between what organisations give managers and what they expect. A manager may spend 40% of their time on individual-contributor work while overseeing 12.1 people, yet still be expected to coach, notice burnout, resolve conflict, communicate change, maintain engagement and deliver performance. We then ask them to remain agile, empathetic and enthusiastic about the next transformation. The expectation is psychological flexibility; the reality is finite capacity.
A 2025 study of middle managers exposes this trade-off. Researchers found that role overload predicted resistance to organisational change through increased workplace anxiety. What looks like reluctance or lack of agility may therefore reflect depleted capacity rather than simple resistance.
What we often label as managerial resistance may actually be a predictable response to a role that has exceeded its capacity.
🚀What this means for leaders
If we want managers to navigate continuous change and technological disruption, we need to stop treating the role as an infinitely elastic catch-all. You cannot coach someone into greater resilience when the job itself leaves too little time and capacity to manage well. The shift must be from “fixing the individual” to “redesigning the environment”.
Deconstruct the “player-coach” illusion. We cannot expect managers to remain high-performing individual contributors while also providing thoughtful, empathetic leadership to large teams. Organisations should audit managerial workload and reduce IC responsibilities as spans of control increase. If managers are expected to coach and develop people properly, they need protected capacity to do it.
Realign autonomy with accountability. Rigid hybrid policies, software rollouts and performance mandates often leave managers responsible for enforcing decisions they had little influence over. Accountability without meaningful discretion simply turns managers into buffers. If managers are held responsible for engagement and performance, they need enough autonomy to adjust workflows, team rhythms and local resources.
Make room for the invisible work. Supporting employees through uncertainty, restructuring, conflict and technological change requires significant emotional and cognitive effort. This work cannot simply be squeezed between meetings and reporting requirements. Organisations need to recognise it by reducing lower-value administrative demands and protecting time for direct team support. Empathy without the capacity to practise it is little more than an expectation.
💬 Final thoughts
When you remove layers and support, the pressure does not disappear. It simply travels somewhere else.
Increasingly, it lands on the manager.
Perhaps we need to stop asking managers how they can become better at absorbing the impact and start asking why so much of the impact is reaching them in the first place.
How's the depth of today's edition?
Until next week,
Shaida
P.S. If you manage a team, where does the pressure land most heavily for you? Reply and tell me.
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