Ill-prepared and burnt out: there’s a crisis facing adland’s managers

These managers are expected to do all of this alone, on top of their existing workloads and traditional managerial duties, while supporting their own mental wellness. With no training, no support and no guidance. And it’s not working.

The consequences are stark, not least because of the enormous influence that managers have over their teams’ mental wellness.

I’m a huge fan of Oliver Burkeman’s book Four Thousand Weeks. The book is named after the average number of weeks we have during our lives. In it, Burkeman asks us to candidly confront how we’re going to spend this finite time.

The bulk of our precious time is not spent with our family, our friends, or even by ourselves enjoying restorative ‘me’ time. It is with our colleagues. As a result, managers have just as much impact on people’s mental health as their spouses do (source: UKG Workforce Institute).

With this in mind, it seems logical that we would train and support managers as a priority, given the amount of responsibility and influence that they hold.

Unfortunately, in our industry, this is rarely the case and so the scale of the problem is huge. According to Nabs’s community consultation All Ears (2023), only 19% of managers were given any training before being promoted into their roles. Managers are overwhelmed as a result, while their direct reports are left anxious and adrift.

Of the All Ears respondents who said they were managed by someone who was recently promoted, 46% said their mental wellness suffered while their manager settled into their new role. A huge 60% said their manager was promoted with no training to handle their new responsibilities.

There’s a paradox here. More than 40% of people we spoke to for All Ears say that they would go to their line manager first if they were experiencing a mental wellness challenge. This is despite a widespread awareness that managers usually lack the skills required in these situations.

This leads, at best, to unhappy staff and, at worst, to people leaving their organizations or our industry because, as the saying goes, people leave managers, not their roles.

The issue is now spilling over into a new trend, ‘conscious unbossing,’ where Gen Zers are rejecting management as a career because they have seen how stressful it is and the money doesn’t reflect the additional expectations of being a manager. If we don’t end the management crisis, we’ll have nobody left to step into these crucial roles.

We all need to do much more to actively train and support our managers.

Let’s be honest about our collective habit of promoting managers without training. The frantic pace at which we work, the need to juggle client demands and the chaotic nature of the world in which we operate all leave little slack in our days – or our budgets - for training. Forced to prioritize the obvious bottom line, we put workload over training.

There is also the new way in which we’re working, with hybrid patterns the norm for most of us. With this comes many advantages, but it does mean that it’s challenging to learn by osmosis as we used to pre-pandemic.

However, these reasons, while understandable, can not stand in our way any longer. It is not acceptable to promote people into management positions without support and then leave them to sink or swim, because many of them are sinking. Too many people, especially managers themselves, are experiencing unprecedented levels of stress.

More and more people across adland contact Nabs for help each year. Last year, we received 4,500 calls from people who needed emotional support. Life in and out of work continues to be extremely challenging. We’ve lived in incredibly turbulent and precarious times since the pandemic and these are affecting us all. Managers need support to get themselves and their teams through this.

So what do you need to do about this? Create protected time to train and support your managers, both now and on an ongoing basis. Use Nabs, your mental wellness experts, to help you. Nabs has just launched the Managers’ Mindsets program in response to our All Ears findings. Managers’ Mindsets teaches skills including coaching, discussing mental wellness and creating psychologically safe spaces. It’s what our industry desperately needs.

We want to transform the overwhelm into confidence, the stress into safety. Our call to the industry is to team up with us on this vital mission. Our managers and our teams are at breaking point and they cannot carry on like this. Let’s give every manager in the industry the skills they need to support themselves and their teams.

Find out more about Managers’ Mindsets.