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Your Most Resilient Manager Is Your Biggest Burnout Risk

Writer: Eric Jones
Eric Jones
1 day ago
2 min read

Resilience is not always a buffer.

Sometimes, it is the reason an overloaded manager keeps saying, “I’ve got this,” while the organization keeps adding weight.

That is the uncomfortable reframe: the people you lean on hardest may be absorbing the most. Resilience coaching becomes harmful when it teaches people to carry pressure that leadership should be redesigning.

A 2026 study of 482 managers found that resilience did not protect people from stress in high-surveillance environments. Among highly resilient managers, each one-unit increase in AI-based surveillance predicted a 0.405-unit rise in psychological distress, compared with 0.139 among managers with lower resilience.

Resilience did not remove the pressure. It amplified the manager’s response to it.

Notice

Your strongest managers may be hiding the clearest warning signs.

Gallup reports that 45% of managers experience significant daily stress, compared with 39% of individual contributors. Korn Ferry found that 55% of remaining managers are exhausted, while 62% of employees report heavier workloads.

Look for:

  • Consistent performance paired with shrinking energy.

  • Managers solving problems they do not have authority to fix.

  • “Reliable” people becoming the default emergency system.

  • Wellness conversations that never change workload, monitoring, or staffing.

Editorial illustration of a resilient manager acting as a bridge beneath a heavy stream of workplace demands

Reframe

Resilience is not an individual endurance contest.

It is a relationship deliverable.

Through the ROR lens, leadership asks a different question: What are we asking this person to absorb, and what are we willing to carry with them?

That means treating distress as organizational information, not a personal failure. In the Frontiers study, distress was the strongest negative driver of wellbeing, while surveillance reduced perceived autonomy.

A resilient manager still needs:

  • Voice in how work is measured.

  • Permission to challenge impossible priorities.

  • Clear boundaries around technology and availability.

  • Relationships where honesty does not threaten credibility.

3D clayart-style Roxanne avatar holding the ROR book, with a balanced scale representing people and performance

Rebuild

Do not coach people to tolerate a broken system more gracefully.

Redesign the system.

  • Remove low-value reporting and duplicated work.

  • Audit whether AI tools create clarity or constant evaluation.

  • Make workload conversations routine, not crisis-based.

  • Reward managers for sustainable performance, not heroic overextension.

  • Build peer support so resilience is shared rather than extracted.

ManpowerGroup reports that 63% of workers are experiencing burnout and 49% report high daily stress. The answer is not another lesson in pushing through.

Editorial illustration of a team rebuilding a supportive workplace structure together

ROR reminds us that performance grows through connection. Resilience-based leadership becomes healthier when responsibility moves in both directions.

What pressure are your most dependable managers quietly normalizing?

Where could stronger relationships help your organization redesign the load instead of praising people for carrying it?

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© 2035 by Roxanne Dehodge.

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