The middle is on fire (metaphorically)
If you spend any time online, you have probably seen the videos. The millennial manager who would absolutely go to bat for their team. The one who is flexible, emotionally literate, protective, and deeply invested in making work feel humane. They are funny because they feel true, and because they are clearly doing something different from the managers many of us grew up with.
But behind the humour is something less funny that keeps coming up in our work and in conversations with people we trust. Millennial managers are exhausted, and they are being pulled apart.
They are managing teams through economic uncertainty, understaffing, constant change, and rising expectations, at the same time as they are being managed by leaders who often have very different assumptions about work, authority, loyalty, and what is considered reasonable to ask of someone. On the other side, they are managing newer generations coming into the workplace with expectations that are far outside what most workplaces were built to support, including expectations around flexibility, accommodation, pace, feedback, and the idea that work should never come at the cost of wellbeing. Some of those expectations are overdue. Some of them are genuinely difficult to reconcile with how work currently operates. All of them land, day after day, on the desks of millennial managers who have very little power to change the systems they are enforcing.
This is the part that matters. Millennials are now one of the largest cohorts of people managers. They are the layer holding teams together, translating decisions, managing performance, absorbing frustration, and making the day-to-day world of work function. At the same time, they are also one of the groups most likely to report high stress, burnout, and an intention to leave their roles. When managers burn out or walk away, the impact is not abstract. Teams lose continuity. Decision-making slows. Trust erodes. Turnover increases. The costs add up quickly, and not just in recruitment dollars.
A lot of analysis stops there, or turns this into a story about generational attitudes, resilience, or confidence. That framing misses what is actually happening.
Most millennial managers came up under leadership they actively do not want to replicate. Many experienced managers who took pressure out on their teams, who blurred boundaries, who made stress feel normal and unavoidable, and who treated care as weakness. When millennials stepped into management, they tried to do something else. They tried to be thoughtful. They tried to protect their teams from unnecessary harm. They tried to lead with more awareness of power, impact, and context, often without clear guidance on what leadership should look like instead.
At the same time, workplaces have changed faster than their underlying structures. Expectations of managers have expanded dramatically, while authority, clarity, and support have not kept pace. Managers are expected to deliver results, support wellbeing, handle conflict, coach performance, respond to grievances, accommodate individual needs, and hold everything together, often without clear decision rights, updated policies, or meaningful escalation pathways. When expectations are unclear or contradictory, managers end up improvising. When policies are outdated, managers make judgment calls. When leadership avoids hard redesign work, managers absorb the fallout.
Add Gen Z into this mix, and the pressure increases. Many younger workers are pushing for a version of work that prioritizes wellbeing, flexibility, and voice in ways that millennials themselves could only have dreamed of early in their careers. Some of those demands challenge long-standing assumptions about performance, availability, and pace. They are not inherently wrong, but they are colliding with systems that were never redesigned to hold them. Millennial managers are left trying to reconcile incompatible expectations with no map, no authority, and very little backup.
This is why the burnout feels so acute. It is not because millennial managers care too much or lack grit. It is because they are being asked to resolve structural contradictions with interpersonal effort.
From an organizational perspective, allowing this to continue is expensive. High manager attrition weakens teams, increases risk, and makes it harder to navigate change. Treating this as an individual wellbeing issue or a generational personality problem avoids the harder truth, which is that many workplaces are relying on managers to compensate for systems that no longer fit the reality of work.
Real solutions do not start with telling managers to cope better. They start with redesigning how responsibility, authority, and accountability actually function inside organizations. That includes clarifying decision rights, updating policies to reflect current realities, building clear escalation pathways so managers are not left holding issues they cannot resolve, and aligning expectations so that care, performance, and sustainability are not constantly in conflict.
To support this work, we have developed “Caught in the middle: A toolkit for clarifying manager responsibility and authority,” designed to help organizations surface where expectations, authority, and accountability are misaligned, and where managers are carrying informal or invisible work that should be addressed through role design, policy, or governance changes.
The toolkit is intentionally structured to capture both the manager’s perspective and the organization’s perspective separately, before bringing them together to identify discrepancies and patterns. It also includes guidance for leadership on reviewing multiple completed exercises to identify system-wide issues rather than treating each case in isolation.
The toolkit is available through our paid resources for organizations that want to move beyond diagnosis and begin doing this work in a structured, intentional way.
At QuakeLab, we partner with organizations to examine how responsibility, authority, and accountability are currently distributed, and to redesign the systems managers operate within so leadership is sustainable rather than sacrificial. This includes policy and process redesign, role clarity work, and governance support, all grounded in how work actually happens rather than how it is assumed to happen.
If what you are seeing in your organization echoes what is described here, and you want support moving from ad-hoc coping to intentional design, we would welcome a conversation about what that could look like. Get in touch!
