Walk into your next town hall and look at who looks the most tired.

It’s not the executives on stage. It’s not the frontline in branded hoodies.

It’s the managers scattered through the crowd, half on their phones, half taking notes, already thinking about how they’ll translate the latest engagement push into yet another thing their team expects them to deliver.

You tell the company you’re investing in engagement.

They hear something different.

The top hears a campaign.

The frontline hears more surveys.

The middle hears one thing.

“Here’s more work for you to carry, on top of the work you already can’t get done.”

If you ignore that layer, you’re not just wasting engagement spend. You’re eroding the only people who can make engagement real.

The Layer Everyone Blames But No One Designs For

Executives love to talk about “our people.”

They talk about talent. They talk about teams. They talk about culture.

Listen closely though and you’ll hear a missing word.

Managers.

In presentations, the middle shows up as arrows and boxes. “We’ll cascade this through our managers.” As if they’re fiber optic cable.

In performance reviews, they show up as an excuse. “Strategy is clear. It’s just not landing in the middle.”

In engagement plans, they show up as a distribution channel. “We’ll get managers to run listening sessions and follow up actions.”

What almost never shows up is the true job you’ve given them.

• Hit an aggressive number.

• Protect wellbeing.

• Carry every change initiative.

• Run performance cycles.

• Be the face of every unpopular decision.

Now add your latest engagement push on top.

• “Run this new recognition program.”

• “Hold a monthly engagement check in.”

• “Make sure every voice is heard.”

Research has a name for what happens when people get demands that grind against each other. Role conflict. A meta analysis by Örtqvist and Wincent found that when you pull people in incompatible directions, performance drops and strain climbs fast. Source

Middle managers don’t need that study to know it’s real. They live it every day.

So before you pour another dollar into engagement, remember this.

The middle isn’t broken.

The role you’ve handed them is.

How Engagement Programs Exhaust The Middle

Here’s the part no one wants to say out loud.

Most engagement efforts don’t relieve pressure on the middle. They increase it.

You roll out a new engagement platform and ask managers to send more recognition.

You add a quarterly pulse survey and ask managers to respond to the feedback.

You design new “belonging” sessions and ask managers to facilitate them.

None of those things are bad in isolation. The problem is the math.

Every engagement action you tack on is extra time and emotional energy the manager has to find somewhere.

Where does it come from.

• Their own deep work.

• Their own recovery time.

• Their own ability to think instead of react.

So they start to split in two.

The outer manager who nods along, runs the engagement playbook, and fills in the tracker.

And the inner manager who’s thinking “I’m drowning and nobody cares as long as I smile and push this through.”

Your own data already shows what that split looks like. Middle managers absorb contradictions, protect their teams from fantasy timelines, and patch gaps in strategy without bringing the real problem back to the top.

On the surface, they look like heroes.

Underneath, they’re running on fumes.

That’s the ugly truth here.

When engagement efforts ignore the middle, you don’t get more engagement.

You get managers who are too tired and too exposed to tell you what’s really happening.

Which is exactly why the next part matters.

Why Engagement Scores Look Fine While Managers Fall Apart

Executives cling to engagement surveys because they look objective.

“Our scores are up three points. People must be feeling better.”

Maybe. Or maybe they’ve just learned what answer keeps trouble away.

There’s a body of research that should make every CEO uncomfortable here.

Hakanen and Schaufeli tracked workers over seven years and found that you can have high engagement on paper sitting right next to rising depressive symptoms when demands stay high and resources stay low. Source

In plain language.

People can look engaged while they’re burning out.

Middle managers are the poster child for that pattern.

They show up energized in meetings because they know everyone is watching.

They protect their teams from the worst chaos because they’re responsible.

They hit the number because their reputation depends on it.

Then they answer your survey.

They don’t want to throw their team or their leader under the bus. They don’t believe anything will change if they speak bluntly. They’ve watched other people raise hard truths and get labeled as “negative.”

So they pick the answer that keeps everyone calm.

Your dashboards look green.

Your managers go home wrecked.

The signals that would tell you the truth are already in your tools. Rising late night messages. More hedging language like “should be fine” instead of “I will.” Threads where managers keep saying “competing priorities” and “I’ll try” because they can’t say “this plan doesn’t add up” without risk.

If you only look at sentiment scores, you’ll miss it.

If you start looking at how the middle actually talks and works, you can’t unsee it.

Which brings us to the uncomfortable decision every CPO has to make.

Rule One: No New Engagement Ask Without A Tradeoff

Here’s the simplest way to prove you’re serious about the middle.

Every time you add an engagement task for managers, something else has to come off their plate.

Not in theory. On record.

Before you launch a new program, pull a cross functional group of respected middle managers into a room.

Show them the draft.

Then ask two questions and refuse to move on until you get real answers.

• “What does this collide with in your week.”

• “What has to stop, slip, or shrink if this becomes real.”

Write the answers down. Pick the things that will die. Announce them as loudly as you announce the new program.

If you can’t name what will stop, you’re not launching engagement. You’re launching resentment.

This is the part where executives usually flinch.

They want engagement to be additive. They want the story that says “we’re doing even more for our people” without admitting that time and energy are finite.

But progress in meaningful work is the strongest fuel of motivation we have. Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer showed this clearly in their research on the progress principle. Even small steps forward move engagement more than slogans or rewards. Source

When you ask managers to juggle one more thing without removing obstacles, you’re not increasing progress. You’re fragmenting it.

So start here.

Protect the middle from engagement overload, and watch how fast their willingness to support the work comes back.

Once you’ve done that, you’re ready for the real leap.

Give The Middle Real Power Over Engagement Conditions

If engagement is “everyone’s job,” it’s nobody’s job.

In reality, the people who own engagement day to day are managers.

They control almost everything that makes work worth caring about.

• Workload.

• Meeting load.

• Clarity of goals.

• Recognition that matches reality, not optics.

• Fairness in who gets chances and who gets stuck in support tasks.

Jason Colquitt’s work on organizational justice is brutal and clear. When people feel decisions and processes are fair and explained, they invest more energy and stick around longer. When fairness slips, they pull their effort back.

Who shapes that sense of fairness more than anyone.

The middle.

If you want engagement that lasts, stop treating managers as delivery agents for HR programs.

Give them non negotiable rights.

• The right to say “If this new initiative is real, here’s what my team has to stop.”

• The right to challenge fantasy timelines without being tagged as resistant.

• The right to fix broken workflows that are draining their team, without ten layers of approval.

• The right to see and use live cultural data about their team instead of waiting for annual survey summaries.

Tools like Workplace already read thousands of signals across burnout, psychological safety, conflict, engagement, alignment, and execution risk so leaders can see where conditions are breaking instead of guessing from survey comments.

Put that power in the hands of managers and back them when they act on it.

If you don’t, you’re asking them to sell a story about engagement they don’t control.

And they’ll remember that the next time you ask them to rally the troops.

Turn Managers From Messengers Into Engagement Engineers

Here’s the shift that separates organizations that talk about engagement from the ones that actually earn it.

They stop using middle managers as messengers.

They start treating them as engineers of the work experience.

That means three concrete moves.

1. Design With Them, Not For Them

Before you launch any engagement initiative, run it through a “manager lab.”

Bring in managers from different functions and levels.

Ask them to break your idea.

Where does this clash with real life.

What problem will it actually solve.

What side effects will it have on time, focus, and trust.

If your program can’t survive that room, it won’t survive the real world.

2. Pay For Emotional Work On Purpose

Look at who in your middle layer spends the most time coaching, calming, and translating during hard weeks.

Then compare that list to who you promote and reward.

If those lists don’t match, don’t send another all hands email about how much you value your people.

Start putting emotional leadership on the scorecard.

Promotion panels should ask “Where did this person protect their team from chaos and still deliver” as a first class question.

3. Track The Middle As Its Own Vital Sign

Stop hiding managers inside broad “people manager” averages.

Track the engagement and strain of the middle as its own line on your dashboard.

• Watch their after hours load.

• Watch their language for rising hedging and falling ownership.

• Watch where they’ve stopped surfacing risks in writing and started sanitizing every update.

Then treat that as a leadership emergency, not a background concern.

Because here’s the final truth you can’t escape.

The Question Every CPO Must Put In Front Of Their CEO

In the end, engagement doesn’t rise or fall in the HR roadmap.

It rises or falls in the middle of your org chart.

If you want one question that cuts through all the noise, here it is.

Walk into your next one on one with the CEO and ask.

“If every middle manager in this company did everything we’ve said is important this year, without cutting corners, would their job be sustainable or would it break them.”

If the honest answer is “it would break them,” you have your diagnosis.

You don’t have an engagement problem.

You have a design problem sitting right in the middle of your company.

Fix that and managers stop faking alignment just to survive.

They start amplifying the culture you keep talking about.

They stop absorbing every contradiction in silence.

They start pushing the real problems back to where they belong.

At the top.

Do that and you won’t need to beg people to feel engaged.

You’ll build a company where engagement is the rational choice, especially for the people in the middle who hold everything together when the slides are over and the work begins.