Redesigning the Manager Role: From Meetings to Leadership

Do your managers feel like they’re drowning in meetings and unclear expectations? You are not alone.

Every organization wants to be leaner and more agile. Flatten the hierarchy, cut layers, and push decisions down, so the thinking goes. But in practice, those cuts often hit the layer that carries the culture: middle management. Recent data shows that middle management roles account for more than 30% of white-collar layoffs [2]. For the managers left behind, the work does not disappear; it multiplies. Two-thirds of managers say they struggle with heavy workloads because they spend up to 75% of their day in meetings [1]. And 44% cite bureaucratic drag as their primary frustration [2]. When the people who translate strategy into action are burned out, the whole organization suffers.

This is not just a numbers problem. It is a role design problem. Managers today juggle competing demands: coaching team members, ensuring deliverables, connecting with customers, aligning with senior leadership, and handling administrative tasks. When those tasks stack without boundaries, managers become meeting machines and email routers instead of leaders.

A Governance Reset in Practice

In one department I supported, performance and reporting were wildly inconsistent. Some teams were top notch, others delivered very little, and the department’s leader was often embarrassed when her group did not meet expectations. The stronger teams ended up overworked, carrying the load when weaker teams passed off tasks at the last minute. Managers who should have been leading spent their time cleaning up the imbalance.

To address this, we worked with leadership and stakeholders to establish a governance framework, a playbook of clear roles, responsibilities, and communication standards. It set consistent expectations for status reporting, outlined decision rights, and created a simple weekly rhythm. The result was a level playing field: every team was accountable, workloads were shared more fairly, and managers could focus on coaching and problem-solving instead of firefighting.

The Costs of the “Manager Squeeze”

The typical manager spends their day jumping between meetings, emails, and status reports. This leaves little time for the things only a manager can do: coaching, clarifying priorities, and removing obstacles. When managers are overloaded, they become bottlenecks rather than enablers. Employees feel neglected and misaligned, and executives lose sight of ground-level realities. It is no surprise that managers drive about 70% of the variance in employee engagement; overburden them, and engagement plummets [3].

In the governance reset I described earlier, employees often fell into a “hurry up and wait” cycle: rushing to deliver under urgent deadlines, only to stall while leadership delayed decisions or shifted priorities. What was labeled a priority often received little true attention, leaving employees frustrated and managers caught in the middle.

Redesigning the Role

To break the cycle, leaders must rethink how they use managers. Here are practical steps:

1. Map the invisible work. Before making cuts, map out every meeting, approval, and status report a manager touches. Identify which ones directly support decisions or outcomes and which ones exist because “we have always done it this way.” In our governance reset, this mapping exercise exposed unnecessary committees and duplicative reporting.

   
   

2. Clarify purpose and authority. A manager’s job should center on three things: coaching, prioritizing work, and clearing obstacles. Administrative tasks should be automated or delegated. Create simple guidelines that make clear who has decision rights for what and encourage managers to decline requests that do not align with their purpose.

   
   

3. Reduce meeting bloat. Institute a “meeting reset.” Require clear agendas and outcomes for every meeting. Combine overlapping sessions. Move updates to asynchronous channels like dashboards or shared notes. Protect at least one day or half-day per week when managers have no recurring meetings. Use that time for deep work and team development.

   
   

4. Formalize distributed leadership. If some functions shift to individual contributors after flattening, clarify responsibilities and provide training so the work is visible and valued. In one case, we structured work by portfolios rather than scattered projects. This gave Project Managers visibility into a full body of work, made reporting easier, and created stretch assignments that allowed emerging leaders to step into project lead roles and build new skills, without requiring formal promotions or pay changes.

   
   

5. Invest in manager well-being. Offer coaching, mental-health resources, and realistic workloads. Encourage managers to take time off and model it. Burnout is not a badge of honor; it is a risk to organizational performance.

What Leaders Can Do Next

Redesigning the manager role takes thoughtful planning, but leaders do not have to wait for a full-scale change to see improvement. There are practical steps managers and executives can take daily that move the organization closer to a healthier model while laying the groundwork for bigger redesign efforts.

• Audit manager capacity regularly. Instead of waiting for burnout, build quarterly reviews of workload and well-being into leadership routines.

  
  

• Pilot a new model. Choose one team or department to redefine manager roles, reduce meetings, and align around portfolios. Measure changes in engagement and delivery.

  
  

• Invest in manager development. Shift training from process compliance to coaching, prioritization, and strategic thinking.

A smarter organization is not one with fewer managers. It is one with managers who do the right work. As my experience showed, when you implement clear rules, roles, and communication standards, you free managers from chaos. They become catalysts for clarity and trust.

Imagine the relief your managers feel when the weight of bureaucracy is lifted and replaced with clarity, focus, and the space to lead. That is what redesigning the role can achieve.

Sources

[1] HR Dive – “Manager burnout may hit hard in 2025.” Data on meeting overload and percentage of managers’ time in meetings.

[2] Forbes – “Burnout By Design: How Cutting Middle Management Affects Company Culture.” Notes that 30%+ of white-collar layoffs hit middle managers; 44% cite bureaucracy as top pain point.

[3] Gallup research via Forbes – Managers drive about 70% of variance in employee engagement.