The Unseen Weight You Carry — Understanding the Pressure Behind the Role
By Gretchen Raines
Gretchen Raines is Verdical Group’s People Operations Manager. May is Mental Health Awareness Month and a key time to highlight how the mental health of our team members is crucial to maintaining the positive impact that Verdical Group makes each day.
In any organization, managers play a critical role in driving performance, supporting team members, and aligning day-to-day efforts with larger strategic company goals. Yet while much attention is paid to the challenges faced by individual team members, the pressures direct managers face often go unnoticed.
At first glance, management might seem like a reward. However, behind the title lies a demanding and often isolating role that comes with its own set of unseen stressors. Here’s a closer look at what many managers quietly carry every day—and what Human Resources professionals can do to support them.
Responsibility Without Full Control
Managers are accountable for delivering results, but they don’t always have full control over the variables that affect those results. Whether it’s ever-changing organizational priorities, limited resources, or pressure from clients, managers are expected to perform under circumstances they didn’t create, while still being the steady and available leader for their team.
Emotional Labor and Team Well-being
A big part of a manager’s job involves supporting others emotionally. When a team is facing burnout, morale goes down, or a team member is struggling personally, it’s the manager who steps in first. They listen, coach, and encourage, all while managing their own heavy workload and stress. This emotional labor is very real, even if it goes unseen.
Navigating Conflict and Difficult Conversations
Whether it’s giving constructive feedback, addressing performance issues, or managing conflict between team members, managers are frequently tasked with difficult conversations. These moments require directness, empathy, emotional intelligence, and confidence, skills that are developed over time and often without any formal training.
Caught in the Middle
Managers must often balance directives from leadership with the realities on the ground. They may not always be involved in setting high-level strategy, but they’re responsible for implementing it. This position can feel isolating, particularly when managers must deliver tough news or advocate for their teams without clear support from “the powers that be.”
Mental Fatigue from Constant Switching
A manager’s day often includes back-to-back meetings, quick decision-making, budgeting, performance tracking, and coaching all within the course of a single workday. This constant “switching-tasking” leads to decision fatigue, which can impact not only productivity but also personal well-being.
Work That Isn’t Always Measurable
While metrics like project completion, billing, sales, or productivity are easy to track, some of a manager’s most meaningful contributions, including fostering trust, supporting professional development initiatives among team members, or cultivating company culture are not so easily measured. When these efforts go unrecognized, it can lead to frustration and a lack of engagement.
What Can Human Resources Professionals Do?
At Verdical Group, we value all levels of leadership and understand that supporting our managers is critical to the success of our company. Here’s how we help:
- Encourage open conversations about well-being. An example is our Health and Wellness Program with quarterly wellness challenges!
- Invest in leadership development that includes not just strategy but emotional intelligence, stress management, and coaching skills. An example is our Management Training Program that meets once a month to support the management team!
- Promote peer support by creating forums or groups to share challenges and experiences. An example is our In-Person Meetup and Volunteer Activities we conduct on a regular basis, like planting trees, doing beach clean-ups, rock-climbing, and game nights!
- Recognize and reward the qualitative aspects of management that aren’t always visible in reports. An example is giving “Shoutouts” during our weekly full team meetings!
In Closing
Managers are the bridge between strategy and execution, vision and reality. In most cases, these individuals were promoted to the management team because they were accomplished team members and know how to do their job well, but not necessarily because they already knew how to manage a team. Let’s recognize that behind every high-performing team is a leader who’s managing more than just everyday tasks. They are navigating human relations, emotions, expectations, and complexity.
By acknowledging these unseen stressors and creating programs to address them, Human Resources Professionals can help foster a more empathetic and supportive culture, one where managers who can sustain their own well-being, while doing their most important job… create the leaders of the next generation at work.
