Permanent anxiety, the fragility of our wellbeing

Manager burnout gets discussed almost everywhere as a wellbeing problem. Offer support, run resilience sessions, encourage people to protect their own boundaries, and hope the pressure eases. Australia is one of the few places on earth where that framing is now legally insufficient.

Under Australian work health and safety law, psychological harm sits alongside physical harm as a risk a business must identify and control. Safe Work Australia’s model code of practice names high job demands, low job control, poor support and low role clarity as hazards, which converts most of what we call manager burnout from a mood into a regulated exposure with a duty holder attached.

Then comes the part almost nobody says out loud, and it is the reason this article exists.

Managers are cast everywhere as the instrument through which an organisation protects its people from those hazards. Under the same framework, a manager is also a worker, which means the duty is owed to them as well. The layer we ask to absorb the pressure is inside the population the law is protecting.

Permanent anxiety is my name for what that layer carries. It describes a standing state of apprehension rather than a response to any particular event, and it is the second of the four characteristics I use to describe the age of fragility.

The scale is now measured rather than argued. Safe Work Australia reports that mental health conditions account for 12 per cent of all serious workers’ compensation claims, a rise of 161 per cent over ten years, with a median time off work almost five times longer than for other injuries.

So this article treats manager burnout as a structural matter rather than a personal one. What permanent anxiety is, why the Australian framing differs from the rest of the world, what actually produces it in the manager layer, and what an organisation genuinely owes the people holding the line.

The condition	Why Australia sits apart	The reversal that changes the response
Permanent anxiety, definedPermanent anxiety describes a standing state of apprehension rather than a reaction to a specific event, arising from the gap between the control people expect to hold and the control they actually have. Manager burnout is the form it takes in the layer asked to convert unclear situations into clear instructions every week.	A regulated hazard rather than a wellbeing topicMost jurisdictions treat psychological strain at work as a matter for support services and training. Australian work health and safety law names high job demands, low job control, poor support and low role clarity as psychosocial hazards that a business must eliminate or minimise so far as is reasonably practicable.	Managers are also owed the dutyOrganisations treat the manager layer as the mechanism for protecting everybody else from those hazards, and a manager is a worker within the same framework. Reading the duty in both directions changes what an organisation is expected to do about the load it places on that layer.

What permanent anxiety actually means

Permanent anxiety describes a feeling of powerlessness, of being overtaken by what you are facing. It arrives with stress, worry and the fear of being unable to meet what is being asked, combined with not knowing what is coming, which makes good decisions hard to identify. Unlike stress, it has no specific trigger and no natural end point.

Stress and anxiety are different things

The distinction matters practically rather than semantically, because the two call for different responses. Stress is a normal adaptive reaction to a specific situation, it mobilises resources, and it resolves once the situation does. Anxiety is a prolonged state without an immediate trigger, and it does not resolve on its own.

Four differences separate them cleanly.

1. Origin. Stress comes from an identifiable event or pressure, while anxiety comes from persistent internal uncertainty.
2. Duration. Stress is temporary and generally fades once the trigger is resolved, while anxiety persists.
3. Response. Stress mobilises effort towards the problem, while anxiety produces continuous anticipation of danger and difficulty letting go.
4. Effect over time. Stress can be useful in short bursts, while sustained anxiety erodes sleep, judgement and health.

Getting this wrong produces the standard organisational mistake. A business that reads permanent anxiety as stress will offer recovery time, which works beautifully on stress and does very little on a condition with no trigger to recover from.

The gap between expected and actual control

Anxiety is produced by the distance between the control people expect to have and the control they experience. People expect to be in charge of their circumstances, and for a long stretch that expectation was comfortable to hold. Unrest, crisis and disruption have always been part of life, so the change is in the noticing rather than in the world.

Information supply is what closed the gap between the expectation and the evidence. The more bad news people see, the more anxious they become, because there is very little any individual can do about most of it.

Notice the mechanism precisely, because it determines what you can change. Nobody has been made less capable by the volume of information, and everybody has been shown repeatedly that their capability does not reach the things they are being shown.

Inside an organisation the same effect runs on internal information. Broadcasting the full scale of a problem to people holding no authority over any part of it delivers that demonstration weekly, which is why transparency without transferred authority does more damage than opacity.

Why manager burnout concentrates in one layer

Manager burnout concentrates in that layer for a structural reason rather than a personal one. A manager is accountable for outcomes they cannot determine, using information they know to be incomplete, on behalf of people who expect them to sound certain. The role description assumes a control the role does not confer.

Add the second squeeze and the picture is complete. Managers absorb the uncertainty arriving from above and the uncertainty arriving from below, and they are expected to pass neither on.

That absorption is genuinely valuable work, and it is almost never described as work. It does not appear in a role description, it is not measured, and it is not resourced, which makes it the largest unfunded task in most organisations.

So the honest framing is uncomfortable for a leadership team. If your managers are visibly depleted, they have been doing the job as designed rather than doing it badly.

There is a further squeeze specific to this period, and it comes from the direction of travel in most organisations. Layers have been removed, spans of control have widened, and the coordination work that used to sit with a middle tier now lands on people who also carry delivery targets.

Flatter structures were sold as an empowerment measure and they moved a real quantity of work rather than removing it. The saving showed up in a headcount line and the load showed up somewhere the accounting does not reach.

Australia treats this as a safety matter, and most of the world does not

Australia has moved further than most jurisdictions in making psychological health an enforceable work health and safety duty rather than a matter of goodwill. The model code of practice names specific psychosocial hazards, and a business must eliminate or minimise those risks so far as is reasonably practicable, using the same process applied to physical hazards.

The named hazards, and why naming them matters

The shift from a general obligation to a named list is the whole change. Safe Work Australia’s guidance requires businesses to eliminate or minimise psychosocial risks so far as is reasonably practicable, and it identifies specific hazards rather than leaving the concept abstract.

Four of those named hazards describe the ordinary conditions of management work. High job demands, low job control, poor support and low role clarity are not exotic failures, and most managers could tick at least two of them on an average quarter.

The guidance also stresses that these hazards compound. High demands alone may be survivable, and high demands combined with low control and weak support produce a risk considerably larger than the sum of the parts.

Read that combination back against the manager layer and you have described the role. Heavy demands, limited authority over the constraints, and a support structure designed for the people below rather than for them.

The number that made it unavoidable

Australian regulators did not arrive at this position through fashion. The claims data moved in one direction for a decade, and it moved further and cost more than any other category of workplace injury, which made a general duty look increasingly unequal to what was happening.

Safe Work Australia records 17,600 serious claims for mental health conditions in 2023-24, an increase of 2,300 claims or 14.7 per cent over a single year. Across ten years the growth reached 161 per cent, the largest change of any injury category.

The duration figure is the one that changes how a chief financial officer reads it. Median time lost for these claims runs almost five times longer than for other injuries and diseases.

So the Australian position rests on evidence rather than sentiment, which matters when you are trying to fund a structural change. This is one of the few workplace arguments where the compliance case and the human case point at exactly the same intervention.

Managers are workers too, which almost nobody says

Every discussion of psychosocial duties casts managers as the delivery mechanism. Train them to spot the signs, equip them to have the conversation, hold them accountable for the climate of their team. All of that is reasonable, and it quietly writes the manager out of the protected population.

Under the framework a manager is a worker, so the same duty is owed to them by the business they work for. That reading is not exotic and it is rarely acted on.

Test it in your own organisation with one question. When you last assessed psychosocial risk, did the assessment cover the job demands, job control, support and role clarity of the managers themselves, or only of their teams.

In my experience the answer is almost always the second, and the omission is not deliberate. The people designing the assessment were managers, and it did not occur to them to include themselves in the population at risk.

What actually produces manager burnout

Manager burnout is produced by three specific features of the job rather than by a generalised sense that things are difficult. The translation task, the combination of full information with partial authority, and the accumulation of managerial practices that never get retired. Each is fixable, which is the good news buried in the diagnosis.

The translation job nobody writes down

Every week a manager receives a situation that is unclear and produces instructions that are clear. That conversion is the actual job, it happens continuously, and it appears in no role description I have ever read. Doing it honestly means carrying the gap privately, and doing it dishonestly means projecting a certainty the room does not believe.

Notice that both options cost something. The honest manager absorbs the ambiguity personally, and the dishonest one spends credibility instead.

There is a third option that organisations rarely permit, which is to pass the ambiguity through undiluted. Saying plainly that the direction is unclear, that a decision is expected on a date, and that the team should plan for two versions is available to almost nobody.

Cultures that treat an admission of uncertainty as weakness have therefore made the translation task compulsory. They have also made it invisible, which means the load it creates cannot be named in any conversation about workload.

Full information, partial authority

The second driver is the combination that modern transparency practices create. Managers now see the whole picture through dashboards, all-hands briefings and open reporting, and their authority to act on that picture has generally not moved. Seeing a problem you may not fix is the most reliable anxiety generator in an organisation.

This is exactly the low job control hazard the Australian code names, arriving through a practice everyone considers progressive.

I have watched organisations increase transparency deliberately as a wellbeing measure and produce a measurable deterioration in the manager layer. Nobody was wrong about transparency being good, and the missing half was the authority to act on what people could now see.

The test is straightforward. For each of the five things your managers can currently see and worry about, count how many they are permitted to change without asking anyone.

The accumulation of practices that never end

The third driver is layering. When a new management style arrives, the previous ones rarely leave, so a manager ends up carrying practices from several eras at once, some of which contradict each other and some of which no longer match the organisation’s stated values. Each addition was individually sensible and the accumulated weight is nobody’s decision.

Count the rituals a manager in your organisation is expected to maintain. One to ones, team meetings, performance conversations, engagement actions, wellbeing check-ins, development plans, project stand-ups and reporting cycles.

Every one of those arrived attached to a good argument. Almost none of them arrived with something being removed, and none of them are ever formally retired.

Two structural problems make it worse. Many managers are appointed with no initial or ongoing training, so they meet the accumulation with no framework for sorting it, and nobody holds the authority to declare a practice finished.

Three responses that do not work

Three interventions get offered to depleted managers and each of them fails in a predictable way. Resilience training delivered before any structural change, optimism issued as an instruction, and advice to set personal boundaries inside a system that does not permit them. All three place the remedy inside the person carrying the load.

Resilience training in the wrong order

Resilience training helps people recover from load and does nothing to reduce load. Australian regulators have been explicit that training and support cannot be the dominant control where the work design itself is producing the harm, which places most resilience programs in a supporting role rather than a leading one.

I am not against these programs and I recommend them regularly. The sequence is what decides whether they land.

A resilience offer that arrives before any structural change communicates something precise to the people receiving it. It says the load is staying and your capacity to absorb it is the variable under review.

Run the order the other way and the same program is received completely differently. Reduce what can be reduced, widen the authority people hold over their own work, then offer support for what genuinely remains.

Optimism issued as an instruction

Pragmatic optimism genuinely helps a person navigate an uncertain period, and it stops helping the moment it becomes a requirement. Telling a depleted manager to stay positive converts a coping resource into an additional performance expectation, and it adds the obligation to conceal the state they are actually in.

Watch what that does to your information flow. A manager required to project confidence will stop reporting the early warnings that would let you act.

So the mandated optimism costs twice. It burdens the individual and it blinds the organisation, and the second cost usually exceeds the first.

The useful version is entirely different in kind. Make it safe to say that something is not working, then respond to the first person who does it in a way that makes the second person more likely to speak.

Boundaries advice inside a system that forbids them

Advice to set personal boundaries assumes the person holds enough authority to enforce one. A manager whose workload is set by demand they do not control, arriving through channels they cannot close, has been handed a solution that requires a power they were never given. The advice then becomes evidence of personal failure.

Australia’s right to disconnect provisions changed part of this picture by placing some of the boundary in law rather than in individual assertiveness, which is precisely the right direction.

The principle generalises well beyond after-hours contact. A boundary that depends on one person’s willingness to defend it repeatedly is a boundary that will fail under pressure, and it will fail first for the people under the most pressure.

Boundaries that hold are structural. A capped number of direct reports, a protected block in the calendar that the organisation defends, an escalation path that ends somewhere other than the same manager.

What a manager can genuinely do for themselves

Everything above places responsibility with the organisation, and that is where most of it belongs. Three things remain genuinely available to an individual manager, and they work because none of them requires permission or capacity the person does not already have.

The first is to name the translation job out loud, once, to your own manager. Saying plainly that you are converting unclear direction into clear instruction every week, and that this is the part consuming you, makes visible a task that has never appeared on any workload measure.

The second is to stop absorbing ambiguity by default. Passing a genuine uncertainty through to your team, with the date a decision is expected and a plan for two versions, costs less credibility than most managers fear and returns a surprising amount of capacity.

The third is to write down the list of recurring obligations you carry and take it to a conversation rather than to a resolution to work harder. A list is negotiable, and a general feeling of being overloaded is not.

None of these will fix a structurally unmanageable role, and I would rather say so than pretend otherwise. They will tell you fairly quickly whether the role is structurally unmanageable, which is information worth having while you still have the energy to act on it.

What an organisation actually owes its managers

Three things carry most of the weight, and all three are structural rather than supportive. Reduce the load before offering anything to help people absorb it, give back control over the parts of the work managers can reasonably hold, and make the layer visible in the measurement so that its exposure appears in the same data as everybody else’s.

Reduce the load before offering support

Load reduction sounds expensive and it is usually a subtraction rather than a spend. Most manager workload is accumulated practice, so the fastest reduction available is a formal retirement of rituals that nobody would introduce today if they were being proposed for the first time.

Run the exercise properly and it takes an afternoon. List every recurring obligation on a manager’s calendar, then ask of each one what would break if it stopped for a quarter.

The answers divide sharply. A handful are load bearing and everybody knows it, and a surprising number produce a long silence followed by an explanation of who originally asked for it.

Stop those, publicly, and say why. The reduction matters and the signal matters more, because it tells the layer that somebody upstairs is willing to take something away rather than only add.

Give control back where it can be held

Low job control is a named hazard, and it is also the cheapest of the four to address, because most of what managers cannot decide is a matter of habit rather than of risk. Widening the authority a manager holds over their own work reduces exposure and improves decision speed at the same time.

Three specific rights make most of the difference in practice.

1. Authority over their own calendar, meaning the ability to decline or reschedule a meeting without justifying it upwards.
2. Authority to say no to new work, or at least to name what will be dropped in exchange, with that trade recorded rather than negotiated informally.
3. Authority to decide a defined class of operational question without escalation, which I set out step by step in my pillar on VUCA leadership and where decisions are made.

None of those three costs money and all three cost something harder. Each one requires somebody senior to give up a small amount of control they are currently enjoying without noticing.

Make the layer visible in the measurement

The manager layer disappears from most organisational data because it sits between the two populations everybody measures. Executives are assessed on outcomes and teams are surveyed on experience, so the people in the middle report on others and are reported on by nobody. Fixing that is an administrative change with a disproportionate effect.

Ask three questions of your own reporting before your next review cycle. Does your psychosocial risk assessment cover the job demands, control, support and role clarity of managers as individuals.

Does your engagement survey allow a manager to answer about their own experience rather than about their team’s. And does anybody hold accountability for the manager population as a group, in the way that team leaders hold it for their teams.

Where the answer is no on all three, you have a population carrying a named regulated hazard with no measurement and no owner. That is worth fixing on the compliance argument alone, before anybody even reaches the human one.

Support programs, training or work redesign, which one does your evidence justify

Three investments get proposed when manager burnout reaches an executive agenda, and they occupy different positions in the hierarchy of controls. Support services help people already affected, training builds individual capacity to absorb, and work redesign removes the source. Australian duties push the order of preference towards the third.

Comparing the three investments on explicit criteria

Read across from the second column and match it to evidence you actually hold rather than to an impression. The final column matters most under Australian law, because a control that sits low in the hierarchy carries a weaker defence if a regulator ever asks what you did.

Investment	What it changes	Fits when	Time to effect	Where it sits as a control
Support services and counselling	Access to help for people already affected	People are already unwell and need a route to assistance	Immediate for individuals	Lowest, since it acts after harm rather than preventing it
Resilience and capacity training	Individual ability to absorb and recover from load	Load is genuinely irreducible and the team is otherwise sound	Weeks, with decay unless reinforced	Low, and cannot be the dominant control where work design is the cause
Work redesign and decision rights	The demands, control, support and clarity themselves	Your assessment shows named hazards concentrated in a layer	One to two quarters	Highest, since it removes or reduces the hazard at source

One caution on the first row, and it is a caution about sequence rather than about value. Support services are necessary and every organisation should have them, and offering them as the primary response to a structural cause tells your people exactly where you think the problem sits.

The signals that tell you which one to fund first

Three signals settle it. If people are already unwell, fund access to support immediately and treat that as urgent care rather than as strategy. If your assessment shows named hazards concentrated in one layer, fund redesign. And if managers can describe the load precisely and still have capacity, training will hold.

A fourth signal cuts across the others and I look for it first. Ask whether any recurring obligation was removed from your managers in the past twelve months.

If nothing was removed, no amount of training will produce capacity, because you have been adding to a system that has never subtracted. That single answer predicts the outcome of the investment better than any survey score.

Whichever you fund, document the reasoning against the assessment. A control chosen against evidence can be defended and reviewed, and a control chosen against discomfort can only be repeated next year.

How I can help you address manager burnout

I work with executive teams, boards and manager communities on the load carried by the middle of an organisation, in English and in French. The work is designed to finish with something removed from a calendar and something added to a delegation, rather than with a room that now agrees managers are under pressure.

Keynotes on the load managers carry

I speak on permanent anxiety and manager burnout at conferences, leadership offsites and industry events, using the Australian regulatory framing because it reliably changes how an executive audience hears the subject.

The session lands best when it closes with the executives in the room naming one obligation they will take off their managers. Booking sits on my page on BANI leadership and the age of fragility.

Workshops on load, control and decision rights

Over a half day or two days we inventory every recurring obligation on your managers, test each one against what would break if it stopped, and move one decision right down with a written boundary.

The output is a list of retirements with owners and dates, which sits alongside my managerial transformation workshop.

Diagnostics for HR and work health and safety teams

For organisations running psychosocial risk assessments, I run a short review of whether the manager layer appears in the instrument as a population at risk rather than only as a reporting channel.

It is a small piece of work with a disproportionate effect, because it usually changes what the next assessment measures rather than only what this one found.

Conclusion: manager burnout is an outcome of how the role was designed

Permanent anxiety describes a standing state produced by the gap between the control people expect and the control they hold. In the manager layer that gap is not incidental. It is written into a role that asks for accountability without authority and for certainty without information.

Australia has done something most of the world has not, by naming the conditions that produce this as hazards a business must control. High job demands, low job control, poor support and low role clarity describe the ordinary experience of managing, which places most of manager burnout inside a regulated duty rather than inside a wellbeing budget.

And the duty runs to managers themselves, which is the part that keeps getting missed. The layer you rely on to protect everybody else is inside the population you are required to protect.

So take something off them before you offer them anything to help carry it, widen what they are permitted to decide, and put them in the measurement as people rather than as a reporting channel. Those three moves cost less than the programs they replace.

Manager burnout is what a well-designed role produces when it is asked to absorb what the organisation has not resolved, and it stops being inevitable the moment somebody senior treats it as a design question.

A closing note, written plainly rather than implied. This article deals with a subject that affects real people, and if any of it describes your own situation rather than an organisational one, that is worth acting on. Speaking to your general practitioner is a reasonable first step, and Australian services including Lifeline and Beyond Blue exist for exactly this.

Frequently asked questions about manager burnout