This is what’s really crushing middle managers (and 3 simple strategies to fix it)

It’s 6:14 a.m. and you, the middle manager, wake up to the rumbling of your phone on your nightstand. You know you should have notifications silenced but your VP’s time zone is three hours ahead and when they want an update, everyone is expected to drop everything. 

Seven unread Slack messages. Your stomach drops. The Q1 goals check-in was this morning and your direct report didn’t update the slides with the latest metrics. You throw off the sheets, hit “brew” on the coffee maker, and open your laptop. 

“I’m on it!” you respond and jump into the deck to make the changes. 

Your day was already slammed with meetings, but now you have to come up with time to give your team member feedback on missing those updates. Getting your 5-year-old out the door with matching shoes on is a piece of cake compared to the day you have ahead of you:

• 9:30 a.m.: Smooth things over with your VP after they got to the meeting with an incomplete deck. 
• 10 a.m.: Team meeting to relay the plan ratified in the Q1 goals meeting, discussing each team member’s priorities and load balancing where necessary.
• 11 a.m.: Interview a new project coordinator candidate.
• 11:30 a.m.: Lead a cross-functional project kickoff meeting.
• 12:30 p.m.: Squeeze in the feedback meeting with your team who put the wrong updates in the deck. Listen to their counter feedback that it’s actually your fault because you didn’t remind them the day before.
• 12:55 p.m.: Scarf down a sandwich at your desk.
• 1 p.m.: Talent review meeting with HR.
• 2 p.m.: 1:1 with a direct report to brainstorm the next steps on a project.
• 2:30 p.m.: Work on the project strategy deck for tomorrow’s review. 
• 3 p.m.: Attend a meeting that four of your team members are also in
• 3:30 p.m.: Quick chat with a team member giving their two-week notice.
• 3:45 p.m.: Silently scream in a bathroom stall while rocking yourself, thinking about the mountain of work that the team member is leaving behind.
• 4 p.m.: The manager stops by to brief you on a new project to take on.
• 4:30 p.m.: Jump back onto the deck for tomorrow’s meeting.
• 5 p.m.: Race to the car to get to school in time for 5:30 p.m. daycare pickup.

. . . and you’ll do it all again tomorrow.

This is just a peek into the day in the life of a middle manager. Sounds like a little much?

Research on context switching says it takes about 23 minutes to regain focus once we’ve stopped doing something, making the rapid-fire 30-minute back-to-back-to-backs a problem in and of itself. But these wouldn’t be such an issue if the nature of the meetings were the same. 

It’s not the volume of things that’s the kicker, it’s the continual “altitude shifting” from strategic partner leading kickoff meetings with senior leaders to presentation designer building slides that someone else will present that makes the job of a manager so exhausting. 

As a former corporate middle manager myself, now a consultant and trainer of managers across companies big and small, the shift from big picture to granular over and over throughout the day prevents you from really feeling like you can contribute in a meaningful way. 

We might be sick of hearing about burnout, but people are still feeling it, big time. As recently as recently as 2023, according to Microsoft 2023 Work Trend Index Report, 53% of managers reported feeling burned out, 5% more than their non-manager counterparts. No wonder some have resorted to ghosting their teams.

So what do we do about it? Here are three simple ways to reduce the pain caused by altitude shifting.

Group similar meetings

Group together similar kinds of meetings on the same days, for example having all of your 1:1 meetings on Mondays to kick off the week or project meetings on Tuesdays when folks are in othe ffice together. When our calendar looks like Swiss cheese, we can get in the habit of slotting in meetings whenever we have a free moment, but this reinforces the overwhelm of having to operate at so many different levels in one day. You might not be able to make this change today, or even this week, but make it a goal to look two to three weeks ahead and start grouping similar meetings on the same days. 

Plan and schedule heads down time

One of the biggest challenges created by “meetings overload,” something that pretty much every manager I’ve ever worked with experiences, is that there’s virtually no time for project work. This often means project work is left to the hours of 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. before you finally pass out from exhaustion (and we wonder why we’re burning out). Instead of fitting work in where you can, plan for it. Find and schedule one to two hours every week for project time, during working hours, that you don’t schedule over. This will allow you to get stuff done without incurring the cost of the 23 minutes lost from context switching.

Delegate the small stuff

Managers hate when I talk about delegating in the context of time management, but I’m sorry, my friend, because it is your secret weapon for getting more time back. More than that, it’s going to get you to the right level of altitude you should be focused at, instead of dropping into the details all of the time.

Look across all of the meetings you have each week and tasks on your plate, and identify what meaningful things you could hand off to a team member that will help you scale better. For example, invite a team member to do a first-round interview with a potential candidate, skip the meeting your team members are also in, and ask them to email you a recap, give that team member another chance on the slide updates, and let them own the deck.

Handing these off (while setting clear expectations and defining what success looks like) allows you to spend more of your limited time actually leading your team. 

Ultimately, the middle manager’s role is to empower their teams to grow. It’s impossible to do this when we’re too stuck in all the details and barely able to come up for air. 

Get ahead of this by actively managing your calendar, planning your work, and delegating effectively; you will not only have a team that rises to the challenge of taking more on, but your job will get a lot easier as a middle manager.