Article Summary
- Why poor leadership development often results from flawed systems, not individual shortcomings.
- How structural design affects leadership behaviour, performance, and burnout.
- Practical ways to redesign leadership roles, support structures, and performance measures for long-term success.
When leadership goes wrong we tend to blame the individual. The manager lacked empathy. They didn’t communicate clearly. They weren’t cut out for the role.
But poor leadership rarely starts with character flaws. More often it begins in the system.
Many managers are operating inside structures that were never designed to help them lead effectively. They’re asked to inspire teams, support wellbeing, uphold values and hit targets, all while navigating unclear expectations, siloed decision-making and relentless delivery pressure. And they’re doing it without the scaffolding needed to sustain that complexity over time.
If poor leadership is endemic we need to look upstream. The issue may not be the people. It may be the system they’ve been asked to survive.
The invisible architecture of leadership
We often talk about leadership as if it’s a trait. But most of what leaders do – how they allocate attention, what they prioritise, how they behave under pressure – is shaped by the systems around them.
Job design, reporting lines, incentives, appraisal frameworks, psychological safety, team structures, communication flow – these are the real levers that shape what management looks like in practice.
Yet many of these systems have barely evolved. In too many organisations the role of the manager still resembles a patchwork of inherited assumptions. We give people broad accountability, limited authority, unclear metrics and fragmented feedback. We ask them to champion culture while chasing quarterly results. Then we wonder why so many burn out, disengage or default to command-and-control behaviours. It’s a design flaw.
The pressure to perform without protection
Middle managers, in particular, are caught between what the Harvard Business Review calls the competing demands for compassion and performance: “Middle managers are often the ones feeling that tension most acutely. They feel torn between performance demands from above and calls for compassion from below,” they say.1
The emotional toll is growing. Our latest research finds stress is the key reason many people do not want to move into management, with 54% of those surveyed saying they perceived management roles as involving too much stress.2
And if you think it’s all about workload you would be wrong. It’s about role ambiguity, constant context switching and the isolation of being accountable for people, performance and wellbeing, often without adequate support. No amount of individual resilience compensates for system strain.
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If we were designing management for 2025 would we design this?
Imagine designing the role of people manager from scratch today. Would you build layers of hierarchical oversight? Would you measure impact solely through output? Would you assign eight or more direct reports, each needing individual support, while removing administrative help to cut costs? Or would you design for focus, clarity, relationships and trust?
Some organisations are beginning to experiment. Buffer, for example, initially removed all managers in favour of a flat structure. But, as their team soon found, too much freedom without support or guidance quickly led to confusion, disengagement and lost direction, especially for new joiners. Over time they reintroduced mentoring, leadership roles and strategic vision-setting, embracing what they call “actualised hierarchy”: a form of leadership based on natural influence and responsibility, rather than command-and-control authority.3
Buffer hasn’t rejected self-management but realised that leadership structure, done well, can support autonomy rather than restrict it.
Companies like Buffer ask the right question: how do our systems support, or block, the kind of leadership we say we value? Leadership design is about building environments that make effective leadership more likely.
What managers actually need
The most common response to poor management is more training – and we are certainly advocates of good leadership development. But this response assumes the issue is skill. Often, the issue is structure and if we don’t look at that our investment in training may not solve the problem alone.
Managers need time to think. Clarity about what success looks like. Systems that reward coaching, not just completion. Feedback loops that aren’t only top-down. Fewer conflicting demands. Psychological permission to be human.
Support means reshaping how the organisation works around its leaders rather than pouring more expectations into an already overstuffed job description.
Research shows that it’s often not a lack of leadership skill or motivation that holds managers back but the organisational environment in which they operate. For example, studies on evidence-based management suggest that time pressure, role overload and a lack of structural support, rather than capability gaps, are the biggest barriers to better decision-making and leadership practice.4
At the heart of this is a shift in belief. As organisational culture and leadership specialist Blaire Palmer observed in conversation on the Work’s Not Working… Let’s Fix It podcast : “We assume people are trying to get away with something. That’s a Victorian belief. But if you actually give people freedom, and trust them to act like citizens, most will rise to it.”5
This mindset shift from control to citizenship changes everything. It invites leaders to design for trust, not just monitoring. And it acknowledges that most people want to contribute meaningfully when they are given the autonomy and responsibility to do so.
View from the Community
At Pick Everard, we’ve evolved our leadership structure twice within our five-year business plan. At the heart of this has been a strategic aim to play to strengths and drive accountability. It’s involved setting out clear lines of reporting, communication and transparency around how roles interact with each other.
As a result, staff retention has seen a 9% improvement this year, up to 90% and 15% of our people have been promoted. This, alongside a strong growth plan will result in us growing the business by 20% headcount this year.
We’re aware of the risks of promoting high performers into leadership roles based on technical skills, without fully assessing leadership potential or providing adequate leadership development to support the transition. To avoid this, we’ve introduced several key solutions from succession and career development planning at the most senior level, leadership competencies, 360 feedback and executive coaching.
We’ve also implemented a transparent promotion framework and published all job descriptions to ensure our people have a clear understanding of expectations. It’s essential to us to ensure any established or upcoming leader has proven abilities in driving team success as well as individual growth & success.
Elizabeth Hardwick-Smith
Group People and Culture Director, Pick Everard
From individual failure to system responsibility
Blaming the individual is tidy. But if we want to make leadership better we need to interrogate the systems shaping how leaders behave.
Investors in People’s We Invest in People framework supports this shift. It moves beyond surface-level fixes and helps organisations build the structures, expectations and feedback environments that underpin strong, sustainable leadership. It recognises that good leadership isn’t just a matter of personal style but a product of design.
The framework’s emphasis on Structuring Work, Empowering and Involving People, and Creating Sustainable Success highlights the real levers of change. Leadership doesn’t thrive in a vacuum. It needs infrastructure.
Practical actions to redesign leadership development systems
Organisations serious about improving leadership outcomes should focus less on heroic individuals and more on the systems around them. These actions can help:
- Audit the leadership job: Examine how management roles are defined. Where are responsibilities piling up without authority or support?
- Simplify reporting lines and decision rights: Reduce bottlenecks and clarify who decides what.
- Rebalance performance measures: Include metrics for trust, team development and employee experience and not just delivery.
- Redesign spans of control: Adjust team sizes and layers to enable real leadership relationships.
- Create space for reflection and community: Build peer forums where managers can share experiences and problem-solve together.
- Embed cross-functional collaboration: Reduce silos that isolate managers from each other and their context.
- Ensure regular bottom-up feedback: Help managers understand how their teams experience their leadership.
- Reward learning and not just output: Recognise managers who adapt, reflect and model good leadership and not just those who hit targets.
- Align manager expectations with business strategy: Stop layering cultural and emotional work onto people without adjusting time or recognition.
Conclusion
When managers struggle it’s rarely because they don’t care. More often it’s because the system surrounding them makes great leadership harder than it needs to be.
Effective leadership development requires more than individual skills. It requires infrastructure. That means systems built for humans, not superheroes.
As Palmer reminds us: “Most organisations still have an outdated idea of what a manager is for because they have an outdated idea of what their people are for.”6
The opportunity now is not to train around the edges of a broken model but to redesign it entirely.
This article is inspired by the theme of Who’d Be a Manager? Rethinking Leadership for a New Era, which keynote speaker Blaire Palmer will explore at the upcoming Investors in People Make Work Better conference. Join us there to take the conversation further and to help build healthier, more sustainable leadership cultures across the UK.
Sources
- Harvard Business Review (2022). Managers Are Trapped in a Performance-Compassion Dilemma — https://hbr.org/2022/04/managers-are-trapped-in-a-performance-compassion-dilemma
- Investors in People (2025). The Broken Ladder: Why People are Avoiding Manager Roles – and how to fix it
- Widrich, L. (2015). What We Got Wrong About Self-Management: Embracing Natural Hierarchy at Work, Buffer blog. https://buffer.com/resources/self-management-hierarchy/
- Barends E, Villanueva J, Rousseau DM, Briner RB, Jepsen DM, Houghton E, et al. (2017, Managerial attitudes and perceived barriers regarding evidence-based practice: An international survey. PLoS ONE 12(10): e0184594. https://cebma.org/assets/Uploads/Barends-et-al-Managerial-attitudes-and-perceived-barriers-v2.pdf
- Blaire Palmer, Work’s Not Working… Let’s Fix It! podcast episode From Cog in Machine to Human at Work: Why Victorian Beliefs are Holding Us Back, (2024) https://www.worksnotworking.com/2126320/episodes/15492761-from-cog-in-machine-to-human-at-work-why-victorian-beliefs-are-holding-us-back-with-blaire-palmer
- Investors in People (2025). The Broken Ladder: Why People are Avoiding Manager Roles – and how to fix it
