Manager burnout prevention strategies rarely work when they focus on resilience and self-care alone. The deeper driver is structural: managers hit a ceiling of authority, and when support doesn't arrive from above, the pressure lands on them and their teams. Here's what effective organisations do differently, and what it looks like in practice.

The project plan succeeds. The people carrying it out pay a price that the project plan never recorded. By month eight, the system was operational, and the person was quietly updating their CV, weighing up whether to stay or leave an organisation they had been loyal to for years. This is not an unusual story. It is a pattern that repeats whenever the mechanics of change are prioritised over the human experience of it.