Running on Empty: Leader Depletion, the Lukewarm Middle, and How Organizations Can Restore Leadership Capacity

[00:00:00] So right now in organizations across the globe, the people who are actually driving the bus are, well, they're actually less engaged than the passengers. Yeah, it's a wild statistic. It really is. I mean, we are talking about a management engagement rate that has just plummeted to 22 percent. Right. Which for the first time in modern corporate history is actually sitting below the 19 percent engagement rate of the individual contributors they manage. It's completely unprecedented.

[00:00:26] So welcome to today's Deep Dive. Our mission today is to explore this really fascinating 2026 paper by Dr. Jonathan Westover. It's from the Human Capital Leadership Review, and it's titled Running on Empty. Great paper. Highly recommend it. Yeah. We're going to look at why the leaders running our organizations are just, you know, quietly fading out. We'll look at how this invisible drain impacts you and your team directly. And importantly, the concrete structural ways companies can actually fix it.

[00:00:56] And, you know, it is vital to understand right up front that the data we're looking at today, it isn't just based on like a few isolated exit interviews. Right. It's not anecdotal. Exactly. Dr. Westover has synthesized these massive comprehensive data sets. Specifically, he's looking at the DDI 2027 global leadership forecast, which and this is huge. It tracked over 11000 leaders globally. Wow. Yeah. And he paired that with some highly detailed recent Gallup reports.

[00:01:23] So what we have here is a rigorously quantified snapshot of the modern management landscape. Well, I want to jump straight into that DDI forecast because the numbers are just startling. They found that only 17 percent of leaders feel prepared to anticipate and react to change. Which is incredibly low. Right. But the metric that really stops you in your tracks is that 19 percent of leaders report feeling used up at the end of every single work day, every day. Yeah.

[00:01:52] And that brings us to a concept that DDI calls the lukewarm middle. They found that a staggering 50 percent of leaders are sitting exactly in that zone. The lukewarm middle. Yeah. It is such a crucial concept to grasp because it completely redefines how we identify organizational risk. How so? Well, because we are socially and culturally conditioned to look for, you know, dramatic, visible failures. The blow ups.

[00:02:17] Exactly. We look for a sudden angry resignation or a highly publicized team collapse or some major compliance violation. But the lukewarm middle, it doesn't look like a smoking crater. Right. These are people who haven't quit. They haven't publicly burned out. They are still answering your emails. They're hitting most of their quarterly deadlines and they are definitely still showing up to the Monday morning strategy meetings. But they're doing it on an entirely empty tank.

[00:02:44] It actually makes me think of your smartphone when it drops to like two percent battery. Oh, that's a great analogy. Right. And it automatically kicks into low power mode. Think about what your phone does in that state. You're still getting text messages. You know, you can still make a phone call. Sure. But background app refresh, that's turned off. The screen is incredibly dim. Everything is just a little sluggish. And if you try to open a heavy, complex app, like something that requires real processing power, the whole system just freezes.

[00:03:13] Because there's no capacity. Exactly. There is absolutely no capacity for anything extra. What's fascinating here is that because these leaders aren't in a visible crisis, the organization completely misses the problem. The screen is just dim, like you said. Yeah. And because the basics are still functioning, literally nobody notices the battery is dying until a critical deadline is missed. Or maybe a top performer just quietly exits.

[00:03:39] This lukewarm middle is exactly why that Gallup data you mentioned at the start is so deeply alarming. Right. That 22 percent manager engagement versus the 19 percent employee engagement. It completely inverts the historical norm. Precisely. Historically, managers have always maintained a significant engagement advantage over their teams. Because they had more perks, right? Yeah.

[00:04:02] They traditionally had more autonomy, better compensation, and a much clearer line of sight into the company's overarching goals. But that structural advantage has just evaporated entirely. Okay. Let's unpack this for a second. If half of all leaders are stuck in this 2 percent low power mode, I find myself, you know, looking at managers complaining about their inboxes. And part of me wonders, isn't this just a willpower issue? That is the common pushback.

[00:04:30] Like, isn't dealing with stress, absorbing team anxiety, putting out fires, isn't that literally in the job description? At a certain point, don't you just need the personal discipline to close the laptop? And that is exactly what corporate cultures believed for decades. It's actually rooted in an old, highly popularized psychological concept called ego depletion. Ego depletion. Yeah. It was this theory that human self-control and willpower act as a literal limited battery that drains with every single decision you make.

[00:04:58] Oh, right. Like decision fatigue. Similar, yeah. The idea was that if you use up your willpower resisting a donut at 8 a.m., you will inevitably be a more irritable, less effective manager by 3 p.m. Which kind of implies that burnout is just a personal failing. Like, you just have a weak internal battery, so toughen up. Exactly. But Dr. Westover is very careful to point out that over the last few years, massive multi-lab replication studies across thousands of participants,

[00:05:24] they've essentially debunked that strong short-term laboratory version of ego depletion. Wait, really? Mm-hmm. So it's not a willpower thing at all? No, not at all. We aren't talking about a lack of personal fortitude or a weak willpower battery. To understand the actual science of the drain, we have to look at something called the conservation of resources theory, or CORE. Okay, so how does COR change the way we look at a manager's energy?

[00:05:50] Well, COR states that humans are naturally driven to obtain, retain, and protect their resources, which includes physical energy, time, and critically, a sense of professional competence. Okay, that makes sense. But the theory outlines two vital mechanisms. First, the psychological pain of losing a resource is significantly greater than the joy of gaining one. Oh, wow.

[00:06:41] Yeah. And the goals of your job consistently outpace the resources you are given to meet them. Just simple math. Pretty much. And if we look at the modern workplace through the JDR lens, Dr. Westover outlines four massive drivers that are currently skyrocketing the demands side of that equation. Okay, what's the first one? First is accumulated change load. The DDI data found that 66% of organizations restructured in the past two years alone. Oh, man. Just think about your own company for a second.

[00:07:11] If you've gone through a reorg or a new software rollout or like a major shift in remote work policies recently, you know the cognitive load that takes. Exactly. Repeated change without any period of stability, it drains the exact same psychological resources a leader needs to actually guide their team through that change in the first place. Spot on. And the second driver is role expansion. Gartner recently found that the average manager currently holds 51% more responsibilities than they can effectively handle.

[00:07:40] 51%. That's half a job extra. Right. The organizational demands are skyrocketing, but the resources, the time, budget, headcount, those have completely stalled out. And then you add the third driver, which I imagine is attention fragmentation. We are talking about the endless barrage of Slack messages, Teams notifications, the email overload that just shatters any chance at deep work. Oh, absolutely. And the fourth is skills anxiety.

[00:08:08] The data shows 87% of leaders report actively worrying about their skills becoming obsolete. Let me guess. Mostly due to AI? Predominantly due to the rapid integration of AI. Yes. And, you know, we haven't even touched on the invisible multiplier of all these demands, which the paper identifies as emotional labor. Emotional labor. Like having to put on a brave face. Precisely.

[00:08:33] It is the exhausting daily task of projecting absolute calm and confidence when you are surrounded by organizational uncertainty. And simultaneously, you're absorbing all the anxiety of your direct reports. So you are forced to conceal your own completely valid worries in order to manage theirs. Exactly. So organizations are essentially turning up the heat on the furnace while actively dismantling the building's ventilation system and then acting surprised when the room fills with smoke.

[00:09:02] That's a great way to look at it. And I want to shift gears here to look at the business impact of this because, you know, a leader's lack of sleep isn't just an HR issue. It's an active operational liability, right? Oh, 100%. And that brings us to the contagion effect. When a leader is operating in that lukewarm middle, their behavior subtly but dangerously shifts. How so? Well, one of the studies cited in the paper tracked leaders and their subordinates daily over a two-week period.

[00:09:29] And found that when leaders had a poor night of sleep, meaning their physical resources were depleted, they engaged in significantly more abusive supervision the very next day. Oh, wow. Mm. So they start snapping at people, micromanaging, or, I don't know, sending passive-aggressive emails? Yep. And there was another finding about how depletion changes what a leader actually does during the day, right? Yes.

[00:09:51] So on days characterized by heavy email and administrative demands, leaders systematically abandoned the forward-looking developmental parts of their job. They just stopped. They stopped coaching entirely. They stopped motivating their teams. Instead, they reverted entirely to purely transactional reactive tasks just to clear their immediate plates. Because they just don't have the mental RAM left to open that heavy application. Exactly. And you can see how this creates a brutal feedback loop.

[00:10:20] A depleted manager stops coaching their team. The team feels unsupported. So the team disengages and makes more mistakes. Which creates new fires. Right. New urgent fires, which the already depleted manager now has to put out, draining them even further. And the ultimate business cost of this cycle is what Dr. Westover calls delayed detection. When a leader is locked in survival mode, just trying to survive whatever is directly in front of them, they stop scanning the horizon. They get tunnel vision. Completely.

[00:10:49] The DDI data reveals that depleted leaders are 3.9 times more likely to learn about critical problems later than they should. 3.9 times. I mean, if you are leading a team in a fast-moving market, early detection of a shifting customer need or maybe a supply chain hiccup or a competitor's new feature, that is quite literally your only competitive advantage. Absolutely. I look at middle managers like the load-bearing pillars of a building's architecture.

[00:11:16] If a load-bearing pillar begins to crack under the weight of the roof, going over and slapping a fresh coat of paint on it isn't going to stop the ceiling from caving in. Which is exactly why telling a manager who's carrying 51% too much work to, you know, try a meditation app or take a resilience seminar is not just insulting, it's a fundamental misdiagnosis of the problem. Yeah, it misses the point completely. Individual resilience training cannot fix a structural design flaw.

[00:11:45] Which brings us to the solutions. If we accept the JDR model that burnout is an imbalance between demands and resources, how do organizations mathematically fix the equation? Well, the paper outlines five concrete structural fixes backed by major corporate case studies. Let's start with the most obvious one, which is reducing the demands. Right. So the first structural fix is redesigning roles, specifically through task subtraction.

[00:12:12] The most prominent example here is Shopify. Oh, I remember this. Yeah. In 2023, they didn't just ask people to meet less. They ran a systemic automated meeting purge. They went into the system and automatically canceled all recurring meetings with three or more people. And what I love about the Shopify example is the friction they introduced. They didn't just delete them and walk away. They instituted a mandatory two-week cooling off period before anyone was allowed to put those recurring meetings back on the calendar.

[00:12:41] Yes, that was brilliant. By doing that, they deleted 322,000 hours of meetings in a single month. The mechanism there is key. It forced the organization to deliberately and mathematically justify which coordination work was actually worth a leader's limited attention. Right. Citigroup actually attacked the same demand-side problem, but through cultural norms. Their CEO, Jane Fraser, introduced Zoom-free Fridays specifically to stop the blurring of home and work boundaries.

[00:13:11] They were artificially extending the workday. But, you know, I want to push back on this idea of structural redesign for a second. Okay, sure. If you look at the corporate landscape right now, companies like Amazon and Bayer, they are engaging in massive de-layering. They are flattening the org chart by cutting out entire layers of middle management. On paper, doesn't removing all those layers naturally solve the bureaucracy problem and reduce demands?

[00:13:37] This raises an important question, and honestly, it's a critical trap that many executives fall into. De-layering is disastrous if you don't actually subtract the work. Because the work doesn't just vanish. Exactly. Middle managers don't just exist to exist. They perform administrative sludge. Approvals, compliance checks, performance reviews, reporting. Yeah. If you eliminate a layer of management, but you don't actively dismantle the approval processes they managed,

[00:14:04] all of that administrative sludge just falls right onto the plates of the surviving leaders. So you widen their span of control, but you don't widen their capacity. Exactly. Span of control decisions must be treated as mathematical capacity decisions. If you add five direct reports to a manager, you have to subtract a proportional amount of project work, or the JDR equation just breaks. That brings us to the second structural fix, which addresses how leaders recover. Collective recovery.

[00:14:31] We are talking about initiatives like LinkedIn's Rest Up Week, where they gave almost all employees a paid week off simultaneously. Or Bumble completely closing its offices for a week to combat burnout. Yeah. Right. Why does it have to be collective, though? The operative word is definitely collective. The reason a standard individual PTO policy fails to prevent the lukewarm middle is due to something called asynchronous debt. Asynchronous debt. What is that? What is that? Think about it.

[00:15:00] You spend the whole time dreading the return. And paying it off when you get back instantly wipes out any recovery you actually managed to achieve. You're essentially just borrowing time from your future self at an incredibly high interest rate. But when the entire company pauses, the demand generator is actually turned off. The inbox stays empty. Precisely. Now, if task subtraction and collective recovery handle the demands side of the equation, the next three fixes focus on boosting the resources side.

[00:15:30] Okay. Let's hear them. The third fix is providing coaching as a resource. Microsoft is a real pioneer here. They opened up their internal coaching ecosystem to employees at all levels, completely breaking the tradition of reserving executive coaches only for the C-suite. And the NHS in England did something very similar during a massive crisis period, right? They created a program called Looking After You 2, which offered free, highly confidential coaching specifically for primary care staff. Yes.

[00:16:00] But the paper notes a very specific caveat for this to actually work. A huge caveat. Mm-hmm. The coaching must be aggressively firewalled from performance evaluations. It can't be an HR test. Exactly. For coaching to function as a psychological resource, the leader has to be incredibly vulnerable about their shortcomings and their anxieties. If coaching is just another metric you are being graded on by HR, it ceases to be a resource and instantly becomes another job demand. It has to be a safe harbor.

[00:16:28] Here's where it gets really interesting because the fourth fix, peer community, it taps into some fascinating biology. The Mayo Clinic recognized the severe isolation of their medical leaders, and they created a program called Compass. It's such a beautifully simple program. It really is. They literally just pay for small groups of doctors to sit down and have a meal together every two weeks. There's no rigid agenda. It's just a space to talk about the rewards and challenges of their clinical work. And that targets the unique isolation of leadership.

[00:16:56] Research shows that constantly absorbing other people's problems is deeply draining. However, there is a profound biological shift that happens when you engage in peer support. Like actual physiological changes. Yes. Seeing the pro-social impact of your shared experience, realizing that another manager is struggling with the exact same budget constraints or personnel issues, it actually lowers cortisol levels. Wow.

[00:17:21] Reframing individual trauma into a shared structural challenge, it turns a drain into a psychological recharge. Okay. So the final fifth fix is measurement. Google's Project Oxygen is the famous gold standard here, I think. They realized you can't fix what you don't measure, so they instituted rigorous upward feedback. Teams rate their managers on very specific behaviors, like whether the manager communicates clear goals or helps with career development. But again, the implementation is what matters.

[00:17:50] Google uses this data strictly for targeted development. Not punishment. Right. If a manager scores poorly on a certain metric, they are offered specific training modules and support, not a punitive pay cut. Because an organization only measures what it truly values. That makes total sense. If your executive dashboard only tracks financial output and customer acquisition, but completely ignores leader capacity, you will inevitably exhaust that capacity to hit those financial metrics.

[00:18:18] So what does this all mean for the big picture? We have these five tactical fixes, task subtraction, collective recovery, coaching, peer communities, and upward measurement. But how do you actually build a culture that sustains them? If we connect this to the bigger picture, it requires a fundamental shift at the board level. Organizations have to start treating human energy as a finite, heavily constrained strategic resource, exactly the same way they treat financial capital or technology bandwidth. Let's frame that with a financial analogy.

[00:18:48] You would never walk into a Q3 planning meeting and try to fund 10 massive company-wide corporate initiatives with a total budget of $100. The CFO would laugh you out of the room. Right. Yet organizations routinely launch multiple massive change initiatives simultaneously. A new CRM, a return to office mandate, a new product line. And they expect the exact same pool of middle managers to fund all of it with their incredibly limited attention and energy.

[00:19:18] And sustaining this, it requires the absolute death of the heroic leader myth. Oh, we really need to kill that myth. Corporate culture has long dictated that a great leader absorbs infinite pressure, sends emails at midnight, and wears their exhaustion as a badge of honor. That mindset is fundamentally toxic to the JDR equation. And policies alone cannot dismantle it. Right.

[00:19:41] I mean, you can mandate Zoom-free Fridays all you want, but if the CEO is still blasting out video meeting invites on Friday at 4 p.m., the policy is completely useless. The culture always follows the calendar of the leadership. Exactly. Senior executives must publicly and visibly model taking a step back. When a CEO acknowledges that the current pace isn't sustainable and demonstrably changes their own behavior,

[00:20:06] it grants vital psychological permission to the lower-level leaders to actually disconnect without fearing for their jobs. Well, this has been an incredibly eye-opening look at what is really happening beneath the surface of our org charts. To summarize our deep dive today, leader depletion, that lukewarm middle where 50% of managers are just surviving on 2% battery, it is not a personal failing. It is a predictable mathematical outcome of an organizational design flaw.

[00:20:33] We can't necessarily slow the pace of global change or supply chain disruption or AI integration. But we can absolutely stop asking the very people tasked with navigating us through those disruptions to run on empty. Before we wrap up, I want to leave you with a deeply provocative thought that stems directly from this data. Gartner found that 79% of HR leaders heavily weigh a person's past performance as an individual contributor when deciding to promote them to a first-time manager role.

[00:21:03] Right. That's standard. So standard practice is to take your most brilliant, high-performing individual contributors and reward them with a management promotion. But consider what those individual contributors are observing right now. They are sitting there watching their current managers suffer in the lukewarm middle. Yeah. They see the 51% increase in workload, the emotional labor, the constant anxiety, and the complete lack of structural support. Exactly.

[00:21:31] If the current model of leadership is this visibly draining, this isolating, and this mathematically broken, who in your organization is actually going to want to step up and lead tomorrow? It's a scary thought. Are we accidentally building a future pipeline where only the people willing to be completely miserable will accept a promotion? Take a hard look at your own organization's demands and resources this week. Thank you for joining us on this deep dive, and we'll catch you next time.