Australia is losing up to 500 managers to retirement per day and the line of people willing to step up to replace them is becoming shorter. Here’s how HR can help to fix that.

Middle managers, or the B-Suite as I refer to them, have always had it tough, but 2025 could prove to be their toughest year yet.

Boxed in by the quadrilateral threats of retrenchment, retirement, burning out and opting out, and with a vast majority feeling overwhelmed by an increase in their responsibilities, the middle manager has never been more encumbered – or endangered.     

Below, I outline some of the unique challenges our organisations’ middle managers are facing and suggest four ways HR practitioners and leaders can help to reinvigorate the critical middle layer in your business.

The challenges of middle management

Increased retirement rates are driving the largest exodus from leadership in our history. Forbes has coined it the ‘Silver Tsunami‘, and it’s happening in Australia too; we’re losing 500 experienced managers per day to retirement, according to ABS data.

For a leadership community of our relatively modest size, this is astronomical. For context, the leadership retirement rate is 10,000 per day in the USA. Despite being able to predict that this would happen for the past 60 years, the permanent removal of experience from the middle has not been adequately planned for by corporations.

For starters, we retrench middle managers more than any other cohort.

Australian businesses are laying off middle managers at a disproportionate rate, according to data from Employment Hero published via the AFR. It also found that despite employment growth increasing overall by 5.4 per cent over the year to August, jobs with ‘manager’ in the title have fallen by 7.1 per cent.

While our current economic situation makes the Silver Tsunami look like a blessing in disguise, we need to remember that retirement is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.       

When our economic cycle changes, and we look around to replace leaders as we have done so often in the past, we may very well  find they have permanently vanished.

Our research [gated] also showed that burnout was a particularly challenging element of working in middle management, with 1 in 3 middle managers citing  burnout as their biggest challenge.

Alarmingly, our research shows that higher-impact leaders are burning out more than lower-impact ones (in our model, impact is determined by the competency-frequency rate extracted from self-reported and 360 assessments).  This shows us that it’s our best middle managers that we’re losing to burnout.     

Middle managers are experiencing stressors from all directions. In between leaders who are retiring or being retrenched, are the leaders who carry the remaining weight – and it is crushing them. Having bigger teams to lead and more initiatives to manage is bringing the remaining managers to breaking point. 

Plus, they are often squeezed due to pressure from the leadership level and employee base. Perceptyx research indicates that 39 per cent of mid-level managers say pressure from leadership has increased since last year and 37 per cent  say pressure from direct reports has also increased.

No one wants to be a manager any more          

Due to these worrying trends, it seems that no one wants to step into management anymore. Research from Perkbox backs this up, showing that only four per cent of the workforce currently have leadership aspirations.

The traditional pipeline of promotion and new manager training is failing us. Emerging leaders are suffering the lowest-ever interest in furthering their leadership careers. 

Along with the undesirable workloads, the cost-of-living crisis means Gen Y and Z are being increasingly shut out of the middle-class promises that previous generations enjoyed, such as: having stable careers, buying a home and starting a family. The career ladder – which was previously seen as a pathway to achieve all of those things –  no longer holds the same appeal, as many feel the hard work they need to put into being an effective manager simply isn’t worth it.      

Not only this, many don’t feel adequately prepared to take on such roles. Our annual benchmarking survey showed that emerging leaders report the lowest confidence in their own leadership abilities. They’ve had it tough –  they learned to lead during COVID-19, have had to manage hybrid teams, and haven’t had the day-to-day exposure to role models that generations of managers before them have depended upon.       

These factors put both the quantity of experienced managers and leaders at risk, and, as a result, the quality of  future C-Suite leadership in jeopardy.

So how can we fix things?      

HR and leadership must reimagine and empower the role of middle managers, ensuring they feel valued and equipped to drive engagement and resilience amid ongoing workforce transitions. 

By focusing on the four areas below, they can help middle managers to see the important role they play within the organisational ecosystem, resparking a sense of passion and energy for this important work.

1. Improve the reputation of this function

Ever since 1977, when American scholar and teacher Abraham Zaleznik decided to brand middle management as ‘administrative’ and the executive as ‘visionary’, it has been hard to shake the reputation of middle managers as being ‘paper pushers’ – a counterproductive narrative that has become entrenched. 

In reality, we know their value and scope is so much more strategic and valuable than this, but how can we get others to see it like this? Try the following:

• Regularly celebrate the achievements and contributions of the leaders in the middle of your organisation.  Make them feel proud of their important work.
• Include them in your planning and invite them into the tent for important conversations. Make them valued.
• Communicate the cultural value of the middle manager rank to your workforce regularly. Make their role a career destination, rather than a stepping stone, which is often how it’s perceived.

Give your middle management layer the critical skills they need to succeed. Sign them up for AHRI’s Leadership and Management short course.

2. Re-define the scope of their role  

Anyone who manages managers all the way until you reach the C Suite  is a middle manager. It’s  too big and deep a cohort to be treated as a single, amorphous mass –  and yet that’s what we do.

You know those survey questions that relate to ‘leadership’ and result in a debate about who is captured within this cohort? If we can’t even define middle managers in an engagement survey, what hope do we have of defining their roles for them? Without clear definition, how can we expect accountability or performance from them, especially when the goal-posts are moving so often.

According to Gartner, 75 per cent  of HR leaders report that managers are overwhelmed with the expanding scope of their responsibilities. What was a typical ‘middle management’ job of managing people and tasks has experienced chronic scope creep, and is now characterised by increasing levels of individual contributor work (Gartner      estimates as much as 51 per cent), more strategy work than they’ve been trained for, and colossal amounts of administration – or what they define as ‘work to do work’, which research shows is soaking up a huge amount of the average employees’ time every day.  This is a symptom of poor role definition.

Here’s a selection of things we can do to better define the role of middle managers:

• Delegate decision making – increase middle manager autonomy through delegations of authority, roles on committees and streamlined approvals. Their ability to move faster will release significant pressure from the centre. 
• Change the expectation – ban the narrative of ‘do more with less’ and start the narrative of ‘do less with less.’  
  • Proactively and collectively identify the things managers and their teams are allowed to stop, and then help them stop it, such as unnecessary meetings (tip they won’t unless you insist – at first).  
  • Establish tiered service levels instead of allowing them to assume the gold standard is the right response at all times.
  • Empower them to negotiate expectations, by role modelling that expectation from the top and training them to negotiate expectations.
• Descope their role where appropriate.  

• • Most middle managers are getting broader and broader in their roles, but often without more seniority. This means they have shallow leadership teams and insufficient capability, so more weight falls on their shoulders. If you can’t have fewer direct reports (which would help to relieve pressure), can you bring in a coach to help middle managers better understand the expectations of leadership?

  • Give them fewer projects: projects are becoming increasingly complex and require more collaborative time to execute on them properly. Therefore, the volume of these tasks should be shrinking rather than increasing, but that’s not the case. Explore how to get a better line of sight over middle managers workload and establish their true capacity.

• Make AI their friend.  Many businesses are already investing in targeted, smart technologies as a key companion to middle managers to reduce their administrative burden. Email management, reporting and task management are all seeing rapid advances as a result, but we really need to keep innovating to create as much capacity as possible for managers.

3. Empower middle managers      

Many organisations believe they already empower their mid-level leaders – and some are – but that’s not the case for all businesses.

The success of middle managers requires effort from both sides. Our work with medium and large organisations shows that simply giving managers permission to bring more agency into their roles and take on more accountability is not sufficient to make them feel empowered.

Many mid-level leaders are not sufficiently trusting enough nor skilled enough to manage expectations, and many  executive leaders are not letting go of authority or providing the psychological safety needed for empowerment.       

There are three telltale signs that will help you identify whether you are genuinely empowering your leaders or not:

• Strategy and priorities: Are your middle managers trained to develop their functional strategy, and are they included in setting the corporate or divisional strategy? If not, you are not empowering them to be strategic – and if your leaders aren’t connected to the strategy, then chances are your workforce will be even less so.
• Expectations and negotiations: Are your middle managers expected merely to preside over execution, or do you expect them to negotiate priorities with their peers and the executives? If it’s the former, you might risk creating efficient order-takers rather than value-adding impact-makers.
• Engage and include: Are you leaning on middle managers’ expertise and experience? They are senior enough to understand what you’re trying to accomplish and can give you valuable feedback on the capacity and capability of their workforce to deliver it, so use them as your viability counsellors, not just as a channel between decision and execution.

4. Development

Last year, global HR analyst Josh Bersin said: “In 25 years, I have never seen such low levels of investment and maturity in leadership development.”This year, organisations are responding.  

Gartner‘s most recent research found that 76 per cent of organisations significantly updated their leadership programs and are planning to increase spending in 2025,  yet 71 per cent of HR leaders still don’t think they are effectively developing their mid-level leaders. 

A separate study from the Chartered Management Institute found that 82 per cent of new leaders have never been trained or coached to lead. In our own survey of 250 leaders, we found that 96 per cent of experienced leaders are desperate for targeted, experience-appropriate training. 

There are a couple of big mistakes many organisations are making, which are easily resolved:

• Many organisations are huge fans of in-person training, but most B-Suite leaders are not. They prefer short, sharp online experiences backed up by real-life application and accountability. They like being practical, they like to know they are not alone, and they need their learnings to be immediately relevant or they might struggle to retain the information.
       
• Many organisations also run in-house mentoring programs. Many B-Suite leaders find that challenging; they often need to talk about their emotions, strategic or cultural misgivings or political dynamics, but can feel exposed and vulnerable doing that with an important internal party.

So they talk about surface topics instead, and gain little transformation as a result. Try including alumni mentors and external mentors instead to create the safe distance required for more nuanced conversations.

The middle manager conundrum is a true systems-thinking challenge, sitting at the very heart of the corporate design.  It takes a systemic approach to unravel, but we are beginning to see progressive employers move the needle now; and I have confidence more will follow.  

Rebecca Houghton is a middle management expert, the author of ‘The Annual B-Suite Benchmarks’, and founder of BoldHR. Rebecca builds B-Suite leaders with C-Suite impact by working at an organisational, team and individual level.