Transparency, Margin, And Peer Support Help Organizations Address The Hidden Leadership Burden
You can feel really engaged and motivated to do your best at work, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're feeling emotionally happy, content, or satisfied.
Chris Heinz
Director of People and Associate Experience
Carter Myers Automotive
Middle managers are living a double life. On paper, they look fantastic. They’re driven by purpose, post high engagement scores, and by all standard measures, are thriving. But in practice, many of these same leaders carry the highest emotional burden inside the organization, absorbing stress, anger, sadness, and loneliness that rarely show up anywhere measurable. According to BambooHR’s State of the Workforce 2026 Report, 85% of employees are experiencing significant workplace stress, while 55% are actively job hunting or considering leaving. The leaders carrying their teams through this environment are absorbing the same pressure with fewer outlets.
Chris Heinz knows that pressure firsthand. As the Director of People and Associate Experience at Carter Myers Automotive, which has 1,300 employees across 27 stores, he oversees workplace culture in an often-demanding quota-driven retail environment. In his experience, high workplace engagement often exists independently from what a leader is actually feeling.
“You can feel really engaged and motivated to do your best at work, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re feeling emotionally happy, content, or satisfied,” he points out. The distinction matters because most engagement programs measure motivation and assume well-being follows. The two often diverge sharply, and the cost falls on the leaders themselves.
Pressure without control
Heinz sees one source of leadership stress as the gap between accountability and authority. Leaders are often measured on outcomes they cannot personally deliver, and when strong performers who are accustomed to driving their own results move into leadership, they have to relinquish control. “You’re being judged on your team’s results, but you’re not the one responsible for performing and creating those results,” he explains. “A manager’s job is to create the environment where high performance can happen, but many of the negative emotions come from that sense of lack of control.”
The BambooHR report’s findings regarding AI in the workplace reinforce the dynamic. 81% of leaders say productivity has increased over the past year, but 54% of workers report AI has disrupted their daily work, and 47% have negative reactions to workplace AI tools. Leaders are being asked to deliver higher output through teams that are stressed by the very conditions producing that output.
The invisible emotional load
The team-level emotional load is the part of the job that rarely appears in any operational metric. Heinz describes routinely walking team members through personal challenges like pregnancy loss, cancer diagnoses, cross-country moves, and chronic illnesses, while continuing to deliver the results the role is measured on. “As the manager, your employees look to you to carry their load a bit and bear them up under it. That comes at a cost. Even if you can keep work at work task-wise, you’re still carrying the emotional and psychological weight of the work. Where does that go?”
The cost is compounded by the fact that the leadership role doesn’t turn off in team settings. “Any time when I’m with my team, even in a social setting, my guard’s not down because I’m aware I’m the leader. I’m held to a higher standard. It can be lonely when you have to operate on that level when everyone else can just show up and let their guard down,” he shares.
Why vulnerability gets hidden
The paradox of high engagement paired with high stress is reinforced by an incentive structure that makes leaders hide the stress. “Leaders want to look like they can handle the pressure, especially leaders seeking upward mobility,” Heinz explains. “We don’t want to show vulnerability or weakness because we fear that opportunities won’t come to us if it looks like we’ve hit the top of our capacity.” The fear cuts in two directions. Leaders worry that visible strain will block vertical promotion opportunities and that signaling capacity limits will reduce the breadth of responsibility they’re trusted with. Either way, the safest move feels like masking the load, which compounds the isolation.
The data underscores why that masking has structural consequences. The single most desired leadership quality is transparency, named by 58% of workers. When leaders can’t model an honest dialogue about their own sense of pressure, the trust they ask their teams to extend becomes harder to earn.
What organizations can actually do
In Heinz’s view, the fix is structural as much as personal. He advocates for two specific organizational moves that change the conditions producing the burden in the first place.
The first is lateral peer infrastructure. Leaders need relationships with peers outside their reporting line where they can release the weight of the role without performance implications. Surprisingly, Gallup research has found that more than any other indicator, an affirmative response to “I have a best friend at work” is the strongest predictor of performance. “They’ve experimented with different modifiers, like ‘best’, ‘good’, ‘vital’, and ‘trusted’. What they found is that if you feel like you have a best friend at work, that’s more closely tied to engagement than any other modifier. It’s someone you can vent to and let it all out with no expectations, no performance mandate.”
The second is the cultural decision to protect managerial margin, which is where those unmeasurable, interpersonal aspects of the job tend to happen most. “If every minute of the day is scheduled, you just don’t have margin. We can say people are our most important asset, but do managers feel the latitude to build margin into their day?” He believes organizations need to find ways to recognize managerial quality the way they recognize visible performance, even though the work resists conventional metrics.
The closing question Heinz poses to leaders is one that no one else is going to ask on their behalf. “What makes me well? Maybe it’s paying attention to your spiritual life, or your physical health, or spending time with loved ones. No one’s going to protect our health but us. If we can ask ourselves ‘What makes me well?’ and go after those things, we will start to put the pieces in place that actually keep us well.”
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TL;DR
Chris Heinz
Carter Myers Automotive
Director of People and Associate Experience
Director of People and Associate Experience
Middle managers are living a double life. On paper, they look fantastic. They’re driven by purpose, post high engagement scores, and by all standard measures, are thriving. But in practice, many of these same leaders carry the highest emotional burden inside the organization, absorbing stress, anger, sadness, and loneliness that rarely show up anywhere measurable. According to BambooHR’s State of the Workforce 2026 Report, 85% of employees are experiencing significant workplace stress, while 55% are actively job hunting or considering leaving. The leaders carrying their teams through this environment are absorbing the same pressure with fewer outlets.
Chris Heinz knows that pressure firsthand. As the Director of People and Associate Experience at Carter Myers Automotive, which has 1,300 employees across 27 stores, he oversees workplace culture in an often-demanding quota-driven retail environment. In his experience, high workplace engagement often exists independently from what a leader is actually feeling.
“You can feel really engaged and motivated to do your best at work, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re feeling emotionally happy, content, or satisfied,” he points out. The distinction matters because most engagement programs measure motivation and assume well-being follows. The two often diverge sharply, and the cost falls on the leaders themselves.
Pressure without control
Heinz sees one source of leadership stress as the gap between accountability and authority. Leaders are often measured on outcomes they cannot personally deliver, and when strong performers who are accustomed to driving their own results move into leadership, they have to relinquish control. “You’re being judged on your team’s results, but you’re not the one responsible for performing and creating those results,” he explains. “A manager’s job is to create the environment where high performance can happen, but many of the negative emotions come from that sense of lack of control.”
The BambooHR report’s findings regarding AI in the workplace reinforce the dynamic. 81% of leaders say productivity has increased over the past year, but 54% of workers report AI has disrupted their daily work, and 47% have negative reactions to workplace AI tools. Leaders are being asked to deliver higher output through teams that are stressed by the very conditions producing that output.
The invisible emotional load
The team-level emotional load is the part of the job that rarely appears in any operational metric. Heinz describes routinely walking team members through personal challenges like pregnancy loss, cancer diagnoses, cross-country moves, and chronic illnesses, while continuing to deliver the results the role is measured on. “As the manager, your employees look to you to carry their load a bit and bear them up under it. That comes at a cost. Even if you can keep work at work task-wise, you’re still carrying the emotional and psychological weight of the work. Where does that go?”
The cost is compounded by the fact that the leadership role doesn’t turn off in team settings. “Any time when I’m with my team, even in a social setting, my guard’s not down because I’m aware I’m the leader. I’m held to a higher standard. It can be lonely when you have to operate on that level when everyone else can just show up and let their guard down,” he shares.
Why vulnerability gets hidden
The paradox of high engagement paired with high stress is reinforced by an incentive structure that makes leaders hide the stress. “Leaders want to look like they can handle the pressure, especially leaders seeking upward mobility,” Heinz explains. “We don’t want to show vulnerability or weakness because we fear that opportunities won’t come to us if it looks like we’ve hit the top of our capacity.” The fear cuts in two directions. Leaders worry that visible strain will block vertical promotion opportunities and that signaling capacity limits will reduce the breadth of responsibility they’re trusted with. Either way, the safest move feels like masking the load, which compounds the isolation.
The data underscores why that masking has structural consequences. The single most desired leadership quality is transparency, named by 58% of workers. When leaders can’t model an honest dialogue about their own sense of pressure, the trust they ask their teams to extend becomes harder to earn.
What organizations can actually do
In Heinz’s view, the fix is structural as much as personal. He advocates for two specific organizational moves that change the conditions producing the burden in the first place.
The first is lateral peer infrastructure. Leaders need relationships with peers outside their reporting line where they can release the weight of the role without performance implications. Surprisingly, Gallup research has found that more than any other indicator, an affirmative response to “I have a best friend at work” is the strongest predictor of performance. “They’ve experimented with different modifiers, like ‘best’, ‘good’, ‘vital’, and ‘trusted’. What they found is that if you feel like you have a best friend at work, that’s more closely tied to engagement than any other modifier. It’s someone you can vent to and let it all out with no expectations, no performance mandate.”
The second is the cultural decision to protect managerial margin, which is where those unmeasurable, interpersonal aspects of the job tend to happen most. “If every minute of the day is scheduled, you just don’t have margin. We can say people are our most important asset, but do managers feel the latitude to build margin into their day?” He believes organizations need to find ways to recognize managerial quality the way they recognize visible performance, even though the work resists conventional metrics.
The closing question Heinz poses to leaders is one that no one else is going to ask on their behalf. “What makes me well? Maybe it’s paying attention to your spiritual life, or your physical health, or spending time with loved ones. No one’s going to protect our health but us. If we can ask ourselves ‘What makes me well?’ and go after those things, we will start to put the pieces in place that actually keep us well.”