If you want to know how an organization is really doing, don’t ask the executive team and don’t start with the front line. Ask the middle managers. They translate strategy downward and reality upward, absorb frustration from both directions and somehow still run the Tuesday staff meeting.

Right now, the middle is struggling. In recent research from Harvard Business Publishing, 85 percent of midlevel leaders reported experiencing burnout at least weekly. Only about half said their organization supports their wellbeing. Study after study identifies mid-level managers as the group most likely to burn out, caught between executive expectations and front-line needs.

It’s worth asking why. The middle manager’s job has quietly tripled. They’re still responsible for the traditional work: performance, scheduling, coaching, results. Layered on top is hybrid team management, which turned every communication norm into a judgment call. Layered on top of that is technology transformation, where managers are expected to champion tools they barely had time to learn themselves. And through all of it, they field the human questions their teams won’t ask the C-suite. Is my job safe? Why are we changing again? Does anyone up there see how hard we’re working?

No wonder the emotional load lands hardest there.

The risk for the organization is that when middle managers burn out, the damage is never contained to one person. Their teams lose the coaching, recognition and steadiness that drive engagement. Culture change initiatives stall, because the middle is where every initiative either lives or dies. And your leadership pipeline dries up, because high performers watch their exhausted managers and quietly decide the promotion isn’t worth it.

So what can executive leadership actually do? Start by auditing the load, not the person. The instinct is to offer burned-out managers a resilience workshop. Resilience matters, but if the job itself is undoable, resilience training is a bandage on a structural problem. Look honestly at what’s been added to the manager role over the past few years and what, if anything, has been removed. If the answer is nothing, you’ve found your starting point.

Next, invest in real development, not just compliance training. Managing hybrid teams, coaching through change and holding difficult conversations are learnable skills, and most managers were promoted for individual excellence, not for these. Nearly half of chief human resources officers now name leader and manager development as their top priority. The ones seeing results treat it as ongoing practice rather than a one-day event.

Then give your managers what they give everyone else: someone in their corner. Middle managers spend their days supporting others and often have no equivalent support themselves. Peer cohorts, coaching relationships and honest skip-level conversations all help. The form matters less than the message. You’re not expected to carry this alone.

Finally, watch what you model. If executives send midnight emails and praise round-the-clock availability, managers will conclude that boundaries are for other people, and their teams will conclude the same thing about them. Balance travels downhill. So does imbalance.

Some of the most capable leaders I’ve worked with sit in the middle of their organizations, and they’ve been holding a great deal for a long time. The organizations that recognize it, lighten the load where they can and develop those leaders on purpose will find they were sitting on their greatest competitive advantage all along. The ones that don’t will keep wondering why nothing they launch from the top ever seems to land.