For a CEO, the flight from management is not an HR file: it is a leadership-continuity risk that reaches the Executive Committee. A weakened management line — underprepared and under sustained strain — decides less well, decides later, and does not last as long; what degrades is the entire organization’s capacity to decide. This article belongs to a broader theme, the executive’s mental strength: the capacity to decide under pressure — yours, and that of the line of leaders who relay you.
The corporate landscape faces a costly paradox: while management roles are becoming more decisive for the organization’s performance, employees’ appetite for taking them on is declining sharply. For an Executive Committee, this is not a peripheral HR signal. It is a leadership-continuity risk that materializes at the company’s most strategic layer: the management line that carries decisions through and holds team performance.
Why your talent is turning away from the manager role
This reluctance stems from a combination of constraints and expectations that have changed in nature. The manager role, long perceived as the marker of professional success and the gateway to leadership, has become a demanding position, marked by heightened complexity and continuous pressure. Nearly 85% of French managers consider their role harder than it used to be — a perception most likely shared internationally. Three factors structure it.
Work overload
For many, the manager role means extended working hours and a substantial increase in load. The data indicates that 34% of managers work more than 50 hours a week, with exhaustion at the end of the line and an ever more porous boundary between professional and personal life. Demands frequently spill beyond the frame of work, eat into recovery time, and lead to chronic overcommitment. This is not a comfort issue: it is the biology of performance degrading — and with it, the decision quality of the entire management line.
Lack of preparation and support
Stepping into a management role most often comes with a critical lack of preparation and support. 87% of new managers say they expected more thorough preparation for the role. This missing foundation erodes their confidence and effectiveness, and limits their ability to meet the expectations of their new position. Promoting an excellent individual contributor without equipping them with the operating system of leadership means exposing a key asset without a safety net.
Lack of recognition
Managers occupy a position of structural tension, caught between the expectations of their leadership and the needs of their team. This unstable balance can lead to a loss of meaning and legitimacy, as the manager struggles to establish authority and earn the respect of peers. The absence of explicit recognition makes things worse and adds a further burden: having to prove their worth, constantly. Over time, this weakens the retention of your best managers.
Levers to restore the role’s appeal
Addressing the manager shortage requires action on several fronts: redefining the scope of the role, restoring its desirability, and building a robust support system for those who step into it.
Redefine the scope of the role
The first lever is to clarify what the role actually covers. The image of the manager as a “catch-all role,” saturated with vague expectations and contradictory demands, must be dismantled. Its core mission needs to be made explicit: raising the team’s performance while preserving the integrity of each of its members. This clarification refocuses the manager’s attention on the human dimension of the role, rather than leaving them to arbitrate an unmanageable accumulation of tasks.
Restore the role’s desirability
To attract potential leaders, it is decisive to reaffirm the value and impact of the role. A manager is not a mere supervisor: they set direction, grow people, and carry part of the company’s trajectory. Highlighting the reach of leadership and its capacity to durably transform team performance helps restore the role’s appeal to your high potentials.
Identify and develop the management pipeline
Many employees who have the potential to perform the role effectively never picture themselves in it, out of self-doubt or an incomplete understanding of what it involves. Putting dedicated HR mechanisms in place to identify these profiles and set them in motion is decisive. Career interviews, structured conversations about management, and transparent openings for management positions allow potential leaders to reposition themselves and commit to the path.
Support leadership transitions as early as possible
Stepping into a management role is a break in the trajectory of a leader in the making. Often experienced as a promotion, it is in reality a deep transformation that demands a new set of skills and a shift in mindset. Early, continuous support is decisive, both for the manager’s success and for the team’s performance. Several proven HR practices secure this transition.
Immediate support
Support from day one equips new leaders with the levers they need to take on their responsibilities. It helps them set clear expectations, articulate a mobilizing vision for their team, and balance performance requirements with leadership that is demanding yet fair. It also provides operating frameworks for time management, conflict resolution, and communication quality: fundamentals that condition the capacity to lead under pressure.
Integration into a peer collective
Belonging to a collective of managers is a major success factor for a manager in transition. That collective should bring together managers across seniority levels, so that analyses, lessons learned, and best practices can circulate. This network provides decisive support and a sparring frame that helps new managers face the challenges of the role with greater confidence.
Command of the technical fundamentals
While leadership, relational intelligence, and communication skills are decisive for managerial success, technical skills cannot be neglected. A manager needs at least a substantive understanding of their team’s work. Investing in this axis allows them to steer projects effectively, contribute to strategic decisions, and maintain a high-quality dialogue with their people.
What this means at Executive Committee level
Employees’ disaffection with the manager role is a structural risk for organizations everywhere. But that risk is also an opportunity to rethink how the company defines, supports, and develops its leaders. By clarifying the scope of the role, restoring its desirability, and deploying robust support systems, an organization can bring forth a new generation of managers.
Addressing the manager shortage requires a concerted effort to understand teams’ shifting expectations and adapt the role accordingly. That means not only identifying and developing potential managers, but also ensuring they get the support they need to last. As the work environment grows more complex, the manager role will keep evolving; with the right levers in place, the path to effective leadership becomes a high-return investment, for the manager and for the organization alike.
Activated together, these levers allow a company to better meet the challenge of forming its leaders, and to protect its competitiveness and resilience in an environment defined by acceleration and uncertainty.
The lever of individual and collective leadership development
A dynamic, calibrated approach to leadership becomes a competitive advantage. Management coaching and leadership work play a decisive role in developing management skills: they equip managers with the levers they need to absorb today’s complexity without sacrificing their capacity to decide over time.
The logic of management coaching
Management coaching is a structured process, centered on developing individual leadership skills in the service of collective performance. Through personalized work, it helps managers take an objective view of their strengths and areas of fragility, set sharp goals, and build the strategies to reach them.
Key contributions:
- Communication quality: developing communication that structures the relationship with the team and strengthens trust and cooperation.
- Decision-making: sharpening the capacity to decide with confidence and accuracy in complex, high-pressure situations.
- Load management: integrating levers to regulate mental load and preserve judgment over time.
Leadership work
Leadership work goes beyond developing management skills to address what makes leadership effective in the first place: the capacity to carry a vision, set direction, and mobilize teams toward shared goals.
Transformation effects:
- Strategic vision: helping leaders articulate a clear vision to drive their team toward performance.
- Mobilizing leadership: strengthening the ability to carry people along and keep teams durably engaged.
- Adaptability: raising the capacity to absorb change and steer through uncertainty with agility.
Integrating these mechanisms into the development path
Embedding leadership development in a broader strategy involves three steps.
- Needs assessment: identifying the precise areas where coaching strengthens management and leadership skills.
- Coaching framework: choosing a program and a counterpart whose standards and stance inspire full confidence.
- Effective commitment: engaging actively and translating what is learned into practice to produce lasting transformation.
Management coaching and leadership work are powerful levers for executives who want to raise their skills, mobilize their teams, and sustain their capacity to decide over time. Investing in this axis means securing the management layer on which, ultimately, the organization’s performance rests.