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MANAGERS DO NOT make for obvious objects of compassion. It is hard to feel sorry for the bossy office lead, let alone the big-shot chief executive who pockets millions of dollars a year in compensation. Yet their lot deserves scrutiny and even some sympathy. From the corner office to the middle manager’s cubicle, the many demands on their time are intensifying.
A recent survey of workers in 23 countries by Adecco Group, a recruitment and outsourcing firm, found that 68% of the 16,000 managers in the sample suffered burnout in the past 12 months, compared with 60% for non-managers, and up from 43% the year before. “I feel like I jumped on a treadmill where someone controls both the incline and the speed,” says a big-tech executive with a sigh. Plenty of his peers share the sentiment. Managers increasingly require literal stamina: recruiters report that firms often ask candidates for executive positions how much they exercise.
That is a problem not just for the haggard individuals, but also for their employers and, given the boom in management jobs in recent decades, whole economies. Today America has 19m managers, 60% more than in 2000. One in five employees at American companies manages others.
As firms in knowledge industries automate routine tasks and rely on the same digital tools—Amazon Web Services, Gmail, Microsoft office software—it is better management, not investments in technology, that can give them a competitive edge. Poor management can blunt it, by killing productivity and raising staff turnover. According to a Gallup survey from 2015, half of Americans who left a previous job did so because of a bad manager. Last year McKinsey, a consultancy, found that a similar share of job-leavers said they did not feel valued by their managers.
The value of good management, then, is rising. At the same time, the environment in which managers do their job is being transformed. This new landscape rewards some skills more and some less than in the past. As a result, your manager tomorrow will not look the same as your parents’ did.
Until the 2000s, remembers Christoph Schweizer, boss of BCG, a consultancy, “CEOs were superheroes”: larger than life, seldom wrong, never in doubt. For all manner of executive, “the highest compliment was...