Have we made management an impossible job?

There’s a short list of things I think might be impossible at work. Going an entire day without a single ping on Teams. Getting through a week without attending a meeting that could have been an email. Attending a virtual meeting without someone asking if you can hear them or see their screen. 

Lately, I’ve been thinking we might want to add another to the list: being a manager. 

Managers are faced with issues rolling down from the top and boiling up from the bottom. Essentially, they're stuck in the middle with pressure coming from all directions, often with little support on how to navigate the ever-increasing responsibilities of a manager.  

So perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that some employees are looking at the role and deciding they don’t want it. In fact, Dayforce research shows that only 14% of employees surveyed said they aspire to be a people manager. 

There’s even a buzzword for one version of this trend: “conscious unbossing,” which describes workers intentionally opting out of management roles. It would be easy to interpret this as a sign that younger generations are simply less interested in leadership. 

I think that misses the bigger story. 

When talented employees look at management and say “no, thanks,” we should be curious about what they see. Maybe they aren’t rejecting growth, responsibility, or leadership. Maybe they’re making a rational assessment of the job we’re asking them to take on. 

Management has become the catch-all for complexity 

Being a manager has never been easy. And we shouldn’t expect it to be. Leadership comes with responsibility, tough decisions, competing priorities, and difficult conversations. 

But somewhere along the way, the role expanded significantly. 

Think about how many organizational priorities ultimately land with managers. Building culture. Improving engagement. Developing talent. Supporting wellbeing. Driving productivity. Leading change. Navigating hybrid work. Helping teams understand what AI means for their jobs. And many are doing all this while carrying deliverables of their own. 

Individually, each expectation makes sense. The problem emerges when we keep adding expectations without examining their cumulative weight. 

Managers have effectively become the place where organizational complexity lives. Whenever there’s a new business priority, workforce challenge, or transformation to execute, we often turn to them to make it real for employees. 

But every new responsibility competes for the same finite resource: their time. If we want managers to spend more time coaching, something else may need to take less time. If we want them to lead employees through transformation, we have to create capacity for it. 

The management contract has changed

The issue isn’t simply workload. It’s also the growing disconnect between responsibility and authority. 

Managers can find themselves accountable for retention without controlling compensation. Responsible for engagement while communicating decisions they didn’t make. Expected to maintain morale through changes they can’t control. Asked to develop employees when there’s little room in the calendar for meaningful career conversations. 

In other words, responsibility can grow faster than authority. Only one-third of surveyed managers said their organization empowers them to have autonomy over their team. 

And prospective managers notice. 

Employees aren’t evaluating management based solely on a job description. They're watching their own managers. They see the packed calendars, constant context switching, difficult conversations, and pressure coming from both directions.  

Your current managers are, in many ways, the advertisement for your future leadership pipeline. If your best people look at that and decide the tradeoff isn’t worth it, that’s worth paying attention to. 

Conscious unbossing isn’t an ambition problem 

An employee can want to expand their influence, tackle harder problems, deepen their expertise, and make a bigger impact without wanting to manage a team. Yet many organizations still treat people management as the natural next step for exceptional individual contributors. 

That can leave employees with a choice between accepting a job they don’t want and limiting their opportunities to advance. 

It can also become a leadership pipeline problem. If talented employees increasingly opt out, the pool of future managers shrinks. Existing leaders may take on larger teams or broader responsibilities, making an already demanding job even harder and potentially less attractive to the people watching them. 

That’s a cycle HR leaders should want to break. But the answer isn’t a better sales pitch for management. Instead of asking, “How do we get more people to become managers?” I think there’s a more useful question: How do we make management a job worth wanting? 

Make management a job worth wanting again 

Get clear about what managers actually own 

If you wrote down everything your organization expects from its managers, how long would the list be? More importantly, when was the last time you took something off it? 

Examine what sits with managers and why. Some responsibilities require human judgment, empathy, context, and trust. Others may sit there simply because that's where they've always landed. 

The same scrutiny should apply to accountability. If managers own an outcome, do they have the authority, information, resources, and time needed to influence it? Accountability without agency is a fast route to frustration. 

Use AI to give managers capacity, not another responsibility 

AI perfectly illustrates the tension managers face. We’re asking them to encourage adoption, rethink workflows, manage uncertainty, and help employees navigate how their jobs may change. 

But AI should also relieve some of the pressure. 

Where can technology simplify routine administration, surface useful information, or reduce time spent navigating processes? The goal shouldn’t simply be helping managers do more work faster. It should be giving them more capacity for coaching, problem-solving, decision-making, and the other distinctly human parts of leadership. 

Prepare people to manage before and after the promotion  

Reducing unnecessary demands on managers is only part of the equation. We also have to make sure people are prepared for the responsibilities that should remain with them. 

Too often, someone excels as an individual contributor, gets promoted, inherits a team, and then starts learning how to manage. Instead, development should begin before the promotion through opportunities to lead projects, mentor colleagues, navigate difficult conversations, and influence across teams. That gives employees a realistic view of the role while helping organizations identify who has both the potential and desire to lead. 

And development shouldn’t stop once someone becomes a manager. But it often does. In our research, 33% of managers said they hadn’t received any learning or development opportunities in the past year. 

The skills required to lead people through change, coach effectively, manage performance, and navigate new challenges like AI aren’t learned in a single training program. Managers need ongoing development, practical resources, and support that evolves as the job does. 

Listen to what the “no” is telling you 

“Conscious unbossing” might disappear from workplace vocabulary. Most buzzwords do. But the behavior behind it is worth paying attention to because when capable, ambitious employees decide management isn't for them, their decision tells us something about the role we’ve created. 

The answer isn’t to make leadership effortless. People management comes with real responsibility, and organizations need strong leaders who can coach, make difficult decisions, guide teams through change, and deliver results. But difficult and impossible are two very different things.  

If we keep expanding what managers are accountable for without reconsidering the time, authority, and support we give them, we shouldn’t be surprised when the next generation questions whether the tradeoff is worth it. 

They may not be rejecting leadership at all. They may simply be rejecting the version of it they see today. If we want them to lead tomorrow, it’s worth asking whether we need to redesign the job today.