The real reason so many managers are miserable at work

They’re supposed to be the ones holding it all together. But many managers—especially in high-growth startups and lean teams—feel like they’re quietly falling apart.

It’s easy to point to burnout, performance anxiety, or a “bad culture” when trying to explain why management feels so difficult. But the real cause is deeper. What we call manager misery is often the result of systemic role confusion. Titles have outpaced structure. Expectations have grown faster than authority. And the very job of “being a manager” has morphed into a confusing blend of coaching, admin, firefighting, and diplomacy—with little clarity or support.

This isn’t just a talent problem. It’s a design flaw.

In most early-stage or post-growth organisations, managers aren’t built into the operating model—they’re bolted on. A strong individual contributor is promoted into a people role, but the underlying system doesn’t change. The tools stay the same. The expectations multiply. And suddenly, someone who was once confident and productive is now stuck in meetings, chasing updates, and trying to “lead” without ever being given clear ownership.

The core mistake is that many teams assign managers responsibility without clarity on control. They’re responsible for output, delivery, team culture, and morale—but they don’t own prioritisation, budgets, hiring levers, or escalation paths. They’re told to “lead” but not trusted to decide.

This disconnect slowly corrodes motivation. It’s not about ego—it’s about energy. When someone is on the hook for everything but has control over nothing, their default mode becomes defense.

The pattern often begins with good intentions. Founders want flatness. They want to empower everyone. They avoid hierarchy because they fear becoming corporate. So, they promote “leads” without giving them actual decision rights. They create dotted-line accountability where everyone collaborates, but no one has authority. In meetings, they praise initiative—but behind the scenes, key decisions still go through the founder or core execs.

As the company scales, things get even fuzzier. New managers inherit teams but not clarity. They’re given 1:1s to run, retros to facilitate, and OKRs to hit—but with no guidance on how to say no, resolve conflict, or push back on unreasonable timelines. Worse, founders sometimes bypass them entirely when talking to their team members—eroding trust and creating shadow chains of command.

Even in mature orgs, this issue persists. Managers become messengers, not leaders. They translate executive priorities without context. They absorb team frustration without resolution power. They’re stuck between vision and delivery, without control of either. And that makes them miserable—not because they’re weak, but because the system is broken.

When managers operate without real leverage, they start breaking silently. Execution slows because decisions get stuck in limbo. Team trust drops because their lead is seen as powerless. Attrition rises not because people dislike their manager—but because the manager isn’t empowered to solve problems. And psychological safety erodes because no one knows who actually owns the outcome.

A manager who isn’t clear on what they own can’t protect their team. And a team that senses that their manager is shielding them without influence stops raising concerns altogether. People start whispering about burnout, politics, or “weird vibes”—when what’s actually broken is role design.

In startups, this shows up in the form of high team churn, low delivery velocity, and misalignment between what’s said in all-hands meetings and what happens on the ground. In corporates, it manifests as performative check-ins, emotional exhaustion, and compliance over creativity. The symptom is misery. The cause is structural incoherence.

There is a better way—but it requires structure.

Every manager needs three things to succeed:

1. A clear span of control
   This isn’t about how many people they “manage.” It’s about what outcomes they own end-to-end. A good test: if they left for two weeks, what would stall completely? If the answer is “a lot,” but they can’t name what they’re responsible for, you’ve got fragility.
2. A visible ownership map
   Who decides priorities? Who approves resourcing? Who escalates blockers? Too often, ownership lives in people’s heads—or worse, in overlapping slides. Clarifying ownership flows across product, people, and process reduces rework and restores confidence.
3. Support rituals that serve them—not just their team
   Many managers are expected to run 1:1s, feedback loops, and standups. But who’s doing that for them? Manager support needs to be designed into the ops cadence. That could look like manager-only retros, skip-level check-ins with execs, or structured escalation hours that take emotional load off their plate.

Without this infrastructure, promoting someone into management is setting them up to drown politely.

Founders care about their people. They want managers to feel empowered. But caring without structure is ineffective. Telling a manager, “You’ve got this” or “You’re doing great” does nothing if the system still routes every decision through the exec team. Delegation isn’t just about intention—it’s about creating real permission, supported by systems that make the delegation visible and stable. Empathy feels good. Enablement changes behavior.

And enablement requires friction. Sometimes, it means putting a new layer in the org chart. Sometimes, it means making budget flows explicit. Sometimes, it means teaching managers how to say no and showing the rest of the org that their decisions will be upheld. Managers don’t need more motivational Slack messages. They need systems that let them lead.

The IC-to-manager transition gets a lot of attention. But the real danger zone is the middle layer—those who manage other managers or lead cross-functional teams.

These people often carry the most complexity. They bridge product and ops, commercial and tech, or founder vision and ground-level execution. But they rarely get structured development. They’re expected to mentor others while still producing work. They’re pulled into every crisis. And they’re often the first layer to absorb ambiguity, bad news, and culture decay.

If you don’t build with this layer in mind, your org will start leaking trust from the inside.

This question reveals everything.

• If the answer is “a bunch of delivery dependencies,” you’ve got a bandwidth issue.
• If the answer is “they’re holding team morale together,” you’ve got a culture bottleneck.
• If the answer is “I’m not sure what would break, but the team would feel weird,” you’ve built emotional dependency—not leadership resilience.

Every founder and ops lead should do this audit quarterly. Not to expose people—but to test system health. Managers should be multipliers. But if the system around them is incoherent, even the best will become bottlenecks—or leave.

In pre-seed and seed-stage teams, roles are fluid. That’s normal. But as soon as you create a manager role, structure must follow. The mistake many early teams make is hiring “player-coaches” without defining which part of the job they’re supposed to optimise. Are they delivering output? Designing process? Managing people? All three? For how long?

What begins as flexibility becomes fragility when nobody has time to untangle it.

The solution isn’t to slow down—it’s to clarify fast. Even a simple 3-line manager blueprint can help:

• Primary outcome owned
• Decision rights granted
• Support rituals scheduled

As your team scales, layer this into your org operating system. Make it part of onboarding. Review it quarterly. Update it when priorities shift. Manager role clarity is not a one-time event—it’s a living part of org health.

If your managers are unhappy, it’s not a sign they’re weak. It’s a sign your system isn’t designed to support their success. Leadership is not about giving titles—it’s about giving structure. Systems create confidence. Clarity reduces churn. And good managers, when supported well, unlock velocity that no tool or productivity hack can replicate.

So ask yourself this:

Who owns this—and who believes they own it?

If those answers don’t match, your next org redesign starts there.