A strange consensus is beginning to form among managers in tech.

It isn’t the usual talk of burnout or complaints about workload. No, it’s showing up a little more quietly in side conversations and private confessions, a collective recognition that something fundamental has shifted.

“There’s something going on with managing in tech,” Danielle, a senior leader and people manager in the tech sector, told me. “The majority of my peers are looking at each other right now and saying: this doesn’t feel right.”

I’ve heard some version of this phrase across roles and contexts: frontline, first-time, even founders. That feeling came through in interviews, private messages, and Reddit threads where workers tend to speak most bluntly.

So I started looking more closely. What the broader data suggests is that this feeling isn’t confined to a few conversations.

The malaise is more widespread. Gallup reports that global employee engagement has stalled at historically low levels, with managers among the most disengaged cohorts. Deloitte’s Human Capital Trends research points to a widening gap between the pace of change organizations demand and the capacity of managers to absorb and translate that change for their teams.

Today, millions of workers feel less connected, less energized, and less sure about their direction than they did even a few years ago. Managers are expected to hold that uncertainty—for themselves and for everyone else.

“Managers are being stretched thin.” It’s a common refrain from workplace pundits, but I’m not sure it captures what's really happening.  

The role doesn’t feel like it’s stretching anymore. What if it’s collapsing, instead?

An unfamiliar, unrelenting pace of change

For many managers, the breaking point arrived long before the data ever showed up in a Gallup report.

It didn’t come as a single crisis or defining moment, but as a series of shifts that landed, accelerated, and compounded all at once.

“This isn’t the normal pace of change that comes with startup life,” said Raph, a startup founder in the HR tech space. “There was a break in the system, and everything has been speeding up ever since. Leadership has been left to catch up with itself.”

That change came from all corners. COVID permanently altered how teams coordinate and communicate. Remote and hybrid work reshaped expectations around presence, trust, and availability. Economic headwinds slowed hiring in a sector accustomed to rapid growth, distorting team planning and career pathing.

And then there’s AI, no longer a promise of the future but a daily force changing how work gets done. Nearly 40% of U.S. employees say their organizations have implemented AI tools to support productivity and quality of work, even as uncertainty about roles and expectations persist.

None of these forces is small on its own. Together, they fundamentally reshape what’s expected of a manager in ways most modern organizational structures weren’t built to handle.

​​“The way we work was already radically changing,” Raph said. “With AI and the economic slowdown layered on top of that, managers are trying to lead while the ground is still moving.”

The work may be getting done, but the job of making sense of it has become far harder.

New responsibility, without new authority

Managers feel this tension most acutely because they sit between strategy and reality.

They’re responsible for translating executive decisions into human terms, often while privately grappling with those decisions themselves.

“Managers are the middle of a proverbial shit sandwich,” said Sunita, an engineering manager I spoke with. “You’ve got to figure out how or if to toe the company line, deliver a message you might not agree with, handle the weight of other people’s careers—and all the while navigate your own.”

That burden has grown heavier as economic conditions have shifted. Conversations about headcount and efficiency now carry more existential undertones.

“People are worried about losing their jobs to AI. And when people are existentially worried like that, it changes how they show up to work,” she said.

While organizations continue to invest aggressively in AI, only a small fraction believe they have meaningfully integrated it into how work is structured or led. The result is a gap between executive optimism and managerial reality—one that managers are left to bridge, often without much guidance.

That helps explain why, as Gallup reports, manager engagement has declined even more sharply than overall employee engagement.

Therein, the problem: the people responsible for holding teams together feel less empowered and less connected to the work.

A few years ago, taking care of people meant belonging initiatives, development programs, and cultural rituals. Those still appear in organizational playbooks, but they no longer capture the tenor of modern work.

“The fundamental human needs haven’t changed,” Raph said. “People still want purpose, progress, and belonging. But when everything feels like it’s in flux, those things become harder to anchor.”

This isn’t abstract. Gallup data shows that roughly 40 percent of employees worldwide experience high levels of daily stress, with loneliness and sadness remaining nontrivial across roles and regions.

Managers are not immune to those feelings. They feel them alongside their teams, while also trying to anticipate change and maintain performance.

Tools with too much lag

Despite how much work itself is changing, the systems meant to support management still assume a slower, more predictable world.

Performance systems, review cycles, cascading goals—these were all designed for a time when work was easier to quantify and development easier to map. They struggle to capture ambiguity, rapid learning curves, or the dynamic contexts in which modern teams operate.

“The worst is these processes for performance management,” Danielle said. “No one uses them. They end up just copy-and-pasting stuff in.”

That frustration is structural, not personal. Much of modern HR tooling has been optimized for traceability and compliance. Research from Deloitte suggests that while these systems provide organizational reassurance, they often fail to capture what drives effectiveness at the team level.

“HR has historically optimized for structure and compliance,” Raph said, “but that doesn’t tell you whether people feel purpose, clarity, or belonging.”

What managers need instead, he said, are environments that support continuous growth—the kind that surface confusion early, encourage ongoing development, and build shared understanding across a team.

Studies have unearthed persistent engagement issues even as organizations invest in new tools and platforms. It’s a sign that technology built on old belief systems can’t automate us out of our current HR headaches, because that version of work simply no longer exists.

“The whole system is blowing up,” Danielle said.

When progress stops feeling like progress

One of the most under-discussed consequences of rapid technological change is how it disrupts people’s sense of momentum. Specifically, skills that served as reliable career growth levers yesterday may be less relevant tomorrow.

As a result, progress no longer feels linear. For many workers, and the managers who lead them, that means constantly relearning, often without a clear map or institutional support.

“When there’s a tectonic shift in technology, the feeling of progress takes a hit,” Raph explained. “Suddenly the skills you spent years developing don’t feel as valuable, and it’s scary to be a novice again. Belonging gets threatened too. People start wondering how they meaningfully contribute in a paradigm they’re still learning.”

Danielle agreed with this sentiment, and said she’s seeing this play out across roles and levels. “2026 is going to be the year of reskilling and learning new things,” she said. “Literally everyone’s job is going to change. Giving people the time and safety to say, ‘Your job is about to change, and that’s okay’ matters, because the uncertainty is out of their control.”

Data from Microsoft and LinkedIn’s Work Trend Index supports this idea. According to that report, AI adoption is accelerating, but confidence in long-term role clarity is on the decline.

That means managers are increasingly responsible not just for delivery, but for helping people metabolize all of this uncertainty, too.

Naming the gap

When asked what good management should look like now, the leaders I spoke to didn’t reach for buzzwords or frameworks. Instead, they talked about things like coherence, trust, and helping teams move forward together without pretending certainty exists where it doesn’t.

“Good management is helping people come together in the best way to move a team toward their goals,” Sunita said. “That takes honesty and authenticity—and an understanding that people are fundamentally human, not productivity units.”

What’s falling away, instead, are those rigid management playbooks built for a different era.

“So much management learning happened under paradigms that just don’t exist anymore,” Raph said. “Context changes too fast now for rigid playbooks to work.”

Today’s managers aren’t asking for less responsibility. They’re asking for environments where responsibility feels doable, where their authority matches their accountability, and where facilitating learning is part of the job, not a burden thrown on top of it.

There’s no quick fix here. But there is relief in recognition.The data shows that this isn’t an individual shortcoming or a temporary dip in resilience. It’s a role under pressure.

Managers themselves aren’t failing. It’s just that the role might be.

Recognizing that gap is the first step toward reshaping management into something more sustainable.