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I spent several years of my career in the uncomfortable role of middle manager. On one side, I had executives asking me why my team couldnt do more, and on the other side, my employees told me they were stretched too thin. It was an endless tug-of-war. I was both the enforcer of company expectations and the advocate for my teams needs. At times, my role felt at complete odds with itself. Executives push for efficiency and growth, while employees look for empathy and stability. Middle management, understandably, feels like a pressure cooker. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/04\/workbetter-logo.png","headline":"Work Better","description":"Thoughts on the future of work, career pivots, and why work shouldn't suck, by Anna Burgess Yang. To learn more visit workbetter.media.","substackDomain":"https:\/\/www.workbetter.media","colorTheme":"green","redirectUrl":""}} The shifting role of middle management My role as a middle manager was many years ago. Todays middle managers have the added pressure of potentially becoming obsolete. Big companies like Amazon, Google, and Citigroup have opted to make their management teams leaner. Not to mention the looming threat of AI. With flattening org charts and AI-driven efficiencies, the role of middle management has changed. Theyre no longer the roles that keep things moving. Instead, theyre responsible for people: managing culture and communication across departments and locations. Yet even though the expectations and job descriptions have changed, many of the underlying limitations of middle management havent. Middle managers often have limited authority to implement changes. Yet, somehow, they have unlimited accountability for outcomes. Unlimited accountability that often leads to burnout, especially when managing people. I spoke to one former middle manager who said that she felt like she had to compensate for her employers unsustainable growth practices. I had to choose between screwing people over or shielding my team, she said. It was emotionally draining. Eventually, she quit and took a new job as a non-manager. The reimagined role of middle management To survive in the new world of middle management, you have to acknowledge that youll mostly be a people-manager rather than a task-manager. To succeed in this type of role, youll need to do all of the following: Set the right expectations with upper management, making your teams bandwidth and capabilities clear. Push back strategically and learn to frame conversations around outcomes (If we do X, here is the impact on Y). Protect your teams trust by being transparent, admitting the limitations of your authority, and advocating for fair workloads. Protect your own boundaries by caring for your team without carrying the burden of everyones problems. For many companies, middle management is the only way to get ahead (and earn more money). Yet its an increasingly risky role for companies that see the job only as task-based, not people-based. Those employers are most likely to lay off managers during rough economic times or when AI can replace tasks. Take on a middle manager role with your eyes fully open. If the company doesnt value a people-based role, you might want to find a new job elsewhere. Otherwise, youll find yourself underappreciated, constantly pulled in different directions, and at risk for losing your job. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/04\/workbetter-logo.png","headline":"Work Better","description":"Thoughts on the future of work, career pivots, and why work shouldn't suck, by Anna Burgess Yang. To learn more visit workbetter.media.","substackDomain":"https:\/\/www.workbetter.media","colorTheme":"green","redirectUrl":""}}
Category:
E-Commerce
Below, Jodi-Ann Burey shares five key insights from her new book, Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work. Jodi-Ann is a writer and critic on race, culture, and health equity. Her essays appear in various arts, business, and literary publications. She created and hosts the prose and poetry salon Lit Lounge: The Peoples Art, as well as the Black Cancer podcast. Whats the big idea? Authentic is more than a critique of the empty promise of being authentic at work. It is an invitation to question the structural realities of what it takes to be a person at work. To begin, we must take seriously the health and wellbeing of workers most impacted by harmful policies, performative practices, and opportunistic rhetoric about representation and inclusion. Listen to the audio version of this Book Biteread by Jodi-Ann herselfbelow, or in the Next Big Idea App. 1. Center the voices of those most impacted. For years, Ive heard the phrase, bring your full, authentic self to work to support diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. In public, Ive heard workers of marginalized identities talk about their desire to be more authentic and the barriers preventing us from letting our full self flourish. In private, however, Ive witnessed friends and colleagues scoff at the idea of workplace authenticity, saying something along the lines of, Yeah, right, or They dont want that, or They dont even know what that means. I wrote this book to raise the volume of those conversations. The reality is that the more of ourselves we give, the more institutions take from our careers, health, and well-being, and therefore the more we risk our livelihoods and lives. The stickiness of the bring your full authentic self to work narrative relies on the erasure and silence of those workers who are most harmed by fair-weathered inclusion policies and practices. But we cannot understand how work works without talking to Black people and other people of color, people with disabilities, women, queer people, and especially those of us sitting at the intersections of marginalized identities. These are the identities companies cyclically like to say they value, while targeting us with discrimination, bullying, abuse, and inequities in pay and opportunity. 2. Collective access, not reasonable accommodation. I have a spinal cord injury and must take care of my body in a way that minimizes neuropathic pain flares. Before the global COVID-19 pandemic, my employer made it very difficult for me to meet my access needs. Remote work policies were restricted to two designated days per week. The conference room policy allowed teams to book rooms anywhere on campus, which made my meeting-to-meeting commute chaotic. My co-workers questioned and judged why I took on-campus meetings remotely from my desk or carried a heating pad with me wherever I went, or why I fatigued so quickly walking from building to building. When a colleague tested positive for COVID-19, just one email shut down our whole campus. Around the country and the world, work, school, and life moved onlinefor years. Remote work and other so-called reasonable accommodations previously denied to disabled workers because it was too expensive, too complicated, and bad for productivity and morale, soon became standard procedure. How companies pivoted during the COVID-19 pandemic revealed what had always been possible. Employers restructured jobs, made spatial modifications, and provided personal protective equipment. Relaxed policies allowed workers to reduce their schedules or flex their work hours. This restructuring did not reach everyone. The pandemic affected office workers and frontline service workers unevenly. People who could not work remotely bore the brunt of death and disease because employers and legislators failed to protect them. Still, the COVID-19 pandemic began an experiment of collective access at an unprecedented scale. The support and structure we need as disabled workers are not accommodations, as weve learned to call them. Our access needs must be met to do our jobs. It is unnecessary (and prone to unchecked, unlawful discrimination) for companies to define and determine what is reasonable. Without a doubt, how companies pivoted during the COVID-19 pandemic revealed what had always been possible to ensure disabled workers can have their access needs met. Unfortunately, all those learned lessons seem to have already been lost. Just a few years later, many employers have eliminated access practices, forced compliance through threats of termination, and enacted other punitive measures to constrain an empowered workforce. Ableism hurts us all. 3. No sector is immune to inequity. Its common to make for-profit companies the boogeymen of inequitable, hostile workplaces. Ive spent most of my career working at mission-driven organizations. Early in my career, I worked as a teacher and administrator in charter schools. I spent five years in the global health and development sector. And I worked at a women-focused start-up. Each organization grounded its work in a progressive mission for equity, but that did not exempt these industries from the very same practices of discrimination, bullying, and abuse better known to characterize so-called Corporate America. Institutions that contradict their own missions can corrupt the part of our authenticity fulfilled by mission-driven work. Instead of nurturing possibility, it breeds cynicismnot just toward one institution, but the entire sector. Authenticity isnt just who we are, but what we believe in: our mission and purpose in our careers. We must include practices and policies across sectors to better understand workplace inequities and their impacts on all workers. 4. Being more authentic cannot change company culture. Every workerany personwould want the space and safety to be themselves. We want to express ourselves without contorting who we are. This is especially true for workers subjected to historical and active identity-based discrimination. Institutions often define authenticity by markers of difference. These accoutrements of identity can include hairstyles, clothing, pronouns, assistive objects, religious paraphernalia, or the words we speak. But inclusion takes more than just wheelchair ramps, pronoun pins, or inclusive dress codes. We want to express ourselves without contorting who we are. As workers, we exchange our talent and time for wages. There are much larger institutional levers impacting our professional lives than self-expressionwage theft, pay inequity, workplace fissuring, technological and managerial surveillance, occupationl segregation, racism, sexism, and other forms of structural violence. Redefined as individual acts of self-expression, authenticity narratives abstract unjust and unlawful labor practices that perpetuate workplace discrimination. 5. Community is our greatest resource. Employee resource groups (ERGs) are employee-led identity-based groups that provide formal channels for connection and collaboration. These groups are sponsored by employers, in that they are acknowledged, supported, and sometimes funded. ERGs are a lifeline for marginalized and underrepresented employees. No matter what our rank, department, office location, state, or region, we turn to ERGs for a place to belong. As corporate DEI programs evolve, more than 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies have active ERGs today. I always found the resource part of employee resource groups a bit curious. Who are the resources for? As workers, whatever space weve carved out for ourselves belongs increasingly to the business. Institutions rely on ERGs to support their workforce at large, demonstrate their commitment to diversity, and comply with federal EEO mandates. ERGs help institutions attract and recruit more people of color, women, and other marginalized professionals. Our lived experiences serve critical parts of the business function: sensitivity readers, product innovation, and PR damage control. Do ERGs have the capacity to agitate for the kind of protections we need, as workers, to be our full, authentic selves? Can ERGs provide safety for workers in the form of labor protections? ERGs are projects of representation. By design, their power to ensure material labor protections is limited. ERGs appear union-like but cannot act in ways that are dealing with the organization. They cannot negotiate on the terms and conditions of employment. They cannot hold, act on, or represent collective worker grievances. They cannot engage in any collective bargaining with the employer. No organization-sponsored employee group can be structured to truly empower its workforce. To be more authentic, we need community, protection, and a definition of authenticity that goes beyond projects of representation. Enjoy our full library of Book Bitesread by the authors!in the Next Big Idea App. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
Category:
E-Commerce
Hyper-independence looks like your best employee. The one who never says no, stays late, and carries the team on their back. Leaders often interpret it as strength, but researchers and workplace experts warn it is often a coping mechanism that masks burnout, erodes collaboration, and stalls leadership growth. The behavior has gained cultural visibility. On TikTok, the hashtag hyper-independence has racked up millions of views in videos tagged hyper-independence is a trauma response and signs of hyper-independence. For many viewers, the content is striking because they assumed this was simply how success was achieved, not a survival strategy with hidden costs. That viral visibility makes it even more important for workplaces to recognize the pattern and promote healthier interdependence, rather than rewarding the unsustainable behaviors it reinforces. The academic lens mirrors that. A May 2025 study in the Research Journal of Psychology found a significant link between childhood trauma and hyper-independence among university students, reinforcing that the trait develops as a survival mechanism rather than pure ambition. In workplace contexts, the pattern plays out more quietly: rising stars burn out, teams fragment, and leadership pipelines falter. What Hyper-Independence Looks Like at Work On the surface, hyper-independence resembles high performance. Employees take on extra projects, work late, and avoid asking for help, appearing to be model contributors. Licensed psychotherapist and workplace mental health expert Topsie VandenBosch explains that this pattern is reinforced by decades of being rewarded for self-sufficiency. One of the most common misconceptions hyper-independent performers hold is that their value lies in their ability to carry everything themselves, she said. Their value in the workplace is based on how much they can take on without asking for help. That misconception is what makes the behavior difficult to detect. Employees continue to take on more than they can sustain, while concealing the strain leaders need to see. What appears to be resilience is often an early stage of burnout. The Hidden Costs to High Performers, and Their Teams Modeling Unsustainable Behavior The individual impact extends outward. When one employee takes on everything alone, colleagues often adjust. Some mimic the behavior, believing this is the path to recognition, while others disengage, sensing theres no space to contribute. When hyper-independence goes unaddressed, it doesnt just burn people out, it sends a signal to others that this is the behavior that gets rewarded, said Laurie Territo, head of Learning and Development at Altera and a former senior talent leader at Intel. Teams either disengage or self-select out, which erodes culture and drains organizational creativity. Eroding Engagement This pattern shows up in engagement numbers. Gallups 2025 State of the Global Workplace report found that manager engagement declined from 30% to 27%, while individual contributor engagement remained flat at 18%. Researchers note that disengaged managers often create disengaged teams, compounding the problem. When managers hold everything themselves, theyre not only setting themselves up for burnout, theyre disengaging their team, Territo added. People dont stay where theyre underutilized or feel their contributions dont matter. Stalled Upward Mobility At the individual level, hyper-independence halts career growth. Leaders who refuse to delegate never develop the trust, collaboration, or coaching skills required for senior roles. DDIs Global Leadership Forecast notes that 81% of new leaders lack delegation proficiency, a gap that experts say fuels burnout and blocks upward mobility. The ripple effects are organizational. Teams fracture, rising stars plateau, and companies lose both performance and potential. VandenBosch cautions that what starts as one individuals over-functioning rarely stays contained. Hyper-independence looks like an individual issue until one persons burnout triggers a chain reaction that spreads throughout the entire organization, she said. The Shift From Survival to Sustainable Leadership Researchers and leadership experts point to interventions that can reduce the risks of hyper-independence while building healthier performance systems. Model Vulnerability at the Top According to Harvard Business Review, when managers admit challenges and ask for support, their teams are more likely to collaborate and less likely to carry burdens alone. The findings highlight the role leaders play in normalizing vulnerability as a strength. Redefine What Gets Rewarded Experts also point to performance systems. You extol the virtues of people who are doing that well, by celebrating them. Thats how you consciously create the culture, by spotlighting and rewarding the people who are modeling that healthy interdependence, said Stew Friedman, organizational psychologist at Wharton and founder of the Wharton Leadership Program. VandenBosch added that one overlooked but powerful lever is to reward leaders not just for their own output, but for how effectively they activate and grow others. Organizations should create reward systems that celebrate leaders for how well they activate, grow, and develop their people, not just for what they personally deliver, she said. Building Delegation and Trust Training plays a role as well. Leadership development programs that focus on delegation, collaboration, and feedback can help shift high performers from survival patterns to growth-oriented leadership skills. What Companies Can Do Next Experts highlight several steps organizations can take to reduce hyper-independence risks and build healthier performance systems: Elevate collaboration above heroics. Redesign recognition systems so that collaboration, coaching, and developing others are valued more highly than solo output. Equip managers to model vulnerability. Provide frameworks and language for leaders to admit challenges and ask for help, signaling that interdependence is strength, not weakness. Make delegation and talent growth core metrics. Embed trust-building, delegation, and people development as measurable competencies for leadership progression. Even with its viral rise, hyper-independence still masquerades as high performance. Left unchecked, it burns out top performers and weakens leadership pipelines. Experts say the real measure of strength isnt how much one person carries, but how effectively leaders grow and multiply the performance of others. Companies that reward cllaboration and development over heroics wont just prevent burnout, theyll safeguard their future talent.
Category:
E-Commerce
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