What managers want: what we learned about supporting today's leaders
The numbers tell a sobering story: managers today oversee three times as many direct reports as just a few years ago, while shouldering one and a half times more responsibilities than they feel equipped to handle.
These startling Gartner statistics set the stage for a recent Textio webinar where I joined Kieran Snyder and Anessa Fike to explore what managers really need – and how organizations can better support them in today's complex workplace.
Here are the four key areas we discussed in the webinar, and how you can use the insights we shared to support your team.
The Hidden Weight of Leadership
I remember the moment burnout finally had a name to me. After months of late-night crisis calls during the pandemic, making complex decisions that could impact hundreds of lives, I stumbled across an article about burnout. Suddenly, my experience had context – and I realized that if I, a CPO with decades of experience as an HR leader, hadn't recognized these signs in myself, how could I expect managers to recognize them in themselves or their teams?
This personal revelation became a turning point for me. Like many leaders during the pandemic, I had been operating in survival mode, pushing through exhaustion because that's what the moment demanded. But sustainability requires something different. Here's what helped me recover, and what I now recommend to managers facing similar challenges:
1. Reconnect with Your Professional Purpose
Don't just power through – actively rebuild your relationship with your work. For me, this meant attending industry events that had nothing to do with immediate crises, connecting with peers who reminded me why I chose this field, and carving out time to learn new approaches to people leadership.
2. Redefine Self-Care as Non-Negotiable
This is about maintaining your capacity to lead. Block time for exercise, sleep, and activities that energize you with the same dedication you give to critical meetings. I started protecting my morning exercise time and family dinner time as zealously as my most important business commitments.
3. Make Vulnerability Your Strength
Have honest conversations with your leadership about your struggles. When I finally opened up to my CEO about my burnout, it led to constructive discussions about workload and support systems that benefited our entire management team.
4. Reset Performance Expectations
After prolonged overextension, giving 100% might feel like underperforming. Acknowledge this explicitly with your team and your leadership. This transparency helps everyone adjust their expectations thoughtfully.
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Reimagining Management Development
Traditional management training often fails because it ignores a fundamental truth: learning isn't one-size-fits-all. At my previous company, we reimagined training by developing personalized learning paths. This gave managers and team members the ability to learn through the method that best worked for them.
Here are a couple of examples: You may have a rising manager who absorbs leadership concepts best by shadowing experienced leaders. You can create a rotation program that let them observe different leadership styles across departments. Or you may have znother manager who prefers systematic learning – you can provide them with a structured curriculum of micro-learning sessions they can complete between meetings.
But here is the challenge: even with flexible options, managers often say they "don't have time" for development. This is where organizations need to take a hard look at their priorities. If a 30-minute investment in learning could save hours of inefficiencies, why aren’t we making time for that?
The Performance Management Revolution
At my last company, one of our most transformative changes was eliminating traditional performance reviews. We decoupled pay increases from the annual review cycle and then shifted to a model of continuous feedback and growth conversations.
This wasn't just about eliminating paperwork or a process. It was about recognizing that humans naturally give and receive feedback all the time. As Anessa pointed out in the webinar, we do it with friends and family effortlessly. By removing the artificial construct of annual reviews, we freed managers to have more authentic, timely conversations about performance and development.
The key? Training managers to give feedback in the moment, tied to specific situations rather than saved for formal reviews. This approach requires more skill but yields better results.
Building Tomorrow's Management Culture
As we discussed in the webinar, the future of management is human-centric, and organizations need to adapt. This means:
- Creating clear career paths for both people managers and individual contributors
- Building psychological safety that allows for honest, two-way feedback
- Supporting middle managers with better context and resources
- Encouraging vulnerability and authenticity at all leadership levels
The Road Ahead
The pandemic forced a reckoning with how we work, but the evolution of management was overdue long before 2020. Today's managers face unprecedented challenges, but also unprecedented opportunities to reshape workplace culture.
The key is intentionality. Every policy, every training program, every conversation is a chance to build more sustainable, human-centered management practices. Our managers are the heart of organizational success – their wellbeing directly impacts everyone they lead.
I'm grateful to Textio for hosting this crucial conversation and to Anessa and Kieran for their insights. But the real work happens in your organizations, in daily decisions about how to support and develop your managers.
💪✨ What steps will you take this week to better support your management team? The future of work depends on the actions we take today.
- Tracie Sponenberg