Why Does Nobody Want to Be a Manager Anymore?

Been there. Don't want to do it again.

Management used to be the obvious next step. 

Do your job well. Get promoted. Manage a team. Earn more money.
Eventually become the person making decisions rather than sitting through meetings about decisions somebody else has made. 

The deal was clear. 

Now, for a growing number of people, that deal looks terrible. 

You take on responsibility for other people’s output, performance, pay conversations, wellbeing, holidays, recruitment, resignations, disputes and development. You are expected to keep senior leadership informed, keep your team motivated and keep the business moving through whatever new system, restructure or “strategic reset” has appeared this quarter. 

You may also be expected to continue doing the job you were promoted from. 

And, quite often, you do all of this without meaningful control over budgets, salaries, headcount, company policy or the decisions that are making your team’s life difficult in the first place. 

Then the business wonders why its best engineer, salesperson, designer or consultant says no to the promotion. 

The mystery is not why people are reluctant to manage. 

The mystery is why companies are still surprised. 

Management is one of the most important jobs in any organisation. A good manager makes work clearer, fairer and more productive. They give people useful feedback. They spot problems early. They make sensible decisions when the handbook runs out. They help someone improve without making them feel like a failure. 

A bad manager can make even a good job unbearable. 

Yet businesses routinely treat management as a reward for technical competence rather than a profession in its own right. 

The best salesperson becomes sales manager. The best developer becomes engineering manager. The person who never misses a deadline becomes team leader. In some cases, they turn out to be brilliant. In others, the business removes a strong individual contributor from the work they are good at, gives them a new set of people problems and offers a management course sometime after the damage has happened. 

The Chartered Management Institute says 82% of people entering management roles have had no formal management or leadership training. That is a remarkable figure when you consider what managers are now asked to handle.

It is also an expensive way to run a business. 

New managers are expected to have difficult conversations, manage underperformance, recruit well, coach people, deal with conflict and make judgement calls that may have legal, financial and human consequences. Those are skills. They are not automatically installed when someone receives a new job title and access to a calendar full of meetings. 

Hybrid work has made the role harder still. 

Managing people who are not always in the same place requires more deliberate communication, clearer expectations and greater trust. Research on hybrid managers has found that the model can extend working hours and responsibilities, while organisations do not always provide the direction, resources or development needed to compensate.

At the same time, managers are caught in a particularly awkward middle position. 

Senior leaders want strategy delivered. Employees want flexibility, development, recognition and an adult answer to “what is happening here?” HR wants processes followed. Finance wants costs controlled. Customers want more for less. The manager is standing in the middle, attempting to turn all of this into a functioning Tuesday. 

No wonder the role can feel like responsibility without authority. 

Gallup’s recent data should worry any business owner. Manager engagement has fallen sharply in recent years, and the organisation argues that lower manager engagement explains much of the overall decline in employee engagement. It also reports that the average span of control has increased, while 97% of managers in its US study retain some individual-contributor responsibilities alongside leadership duties.

In plain English: managers are tired, increasingly stretched and often still doing two jobs. 

This does not mean management is doomed. It means the old career ladder needs rebuilding. 

First, companies need proper specialist routes. Not everybody who wants more money, influence, challenge or status should have to acquire direct reports to get it. A senior engineer, sales specialist, analyst or craft expert can be hugely valuable without becoming responsible for performance reviews. 

Second, a management promotion should come with training, coaching, time and authority. Not just a new title and a slight salary increase that disappears into the cost of being permanently available. 

Third, businesses should stop treating people management as invisible work. If a manager is expected to lead well, they need time to lead. That means reducing, redistributing or properly resourcing the individual-contributor work they used to do. 

The point is not to make management easy. It is not easy. Nor should it be handed out casually. 

The point is to make it a credible career choice. 

A good manager is not a failed specialist who got promoted out of the real work. They are one of the people who make the real work possible. 

If businesses want more people to lead, they need to stop designing management jobs that sensible people rightly avoid.