For two decades, the story of voluntary turnover was simple. Frontline workers churned, individual contributors switched employers for raises, and managers stayed put because the path up the ladder still paid. That arrangement has broken.
The 2024 and 2025 data show people with direct reports leaving their jobs at noticeably higher rates than the people they manage, and the gap is widening fast.
The Numbers Are Worse for the Bosses
The most striking single data point sits in meQuilibrium’s September 2024 workforce analysis, which found managers were 36% more likely than non-managers to feel burned out and 24% more likely to seriously consider quitting within the next six months. The pattern shows up across several recent surveys:
- Cariloop’s 2025 workplace burnout study put the manager burnout rate at 82%, against 73% for entry-level employees.
- Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report tracked manager engagement falling nine percentage points since 2022.
- The steepest single-year drop landed between 2024 and 2025, when manager engagement slid from 27% to 22%.
- Individual contributor engagement held essentially steady across the same window.
- The “engagement premium” that used to define management work has gone flat.
Older research from Harvard Business Review still holds the line on what happens next. Managers who feel exhausted are 1.8 times more likely to leave their company than those who do not, and managers experiencing cynicism are 3.0 times more likely to walk. Once a manager checks out emotionally, the resignation usually follows within a few quarters.
What’s Driving the Manager Exodus?
The drivers are visible across multiple data sets, and they cluster around two structural shifts that have made the role harder than it was five years ago.
Spans of Control Are Getting Wider
Gallup’s U.S. survey found that the average number of direct reports per manager climbed from 10.9 in 2024 to 12.1 in 2025.
That single-year increase represents the steepest jump Gallup has tracked since it began measuring spans of control in 2013, when the figure sat in the eight-to-nine range.
Each additional report adds one-on-one obligations, performance review cycles, conflict mediation, hiring loops, and emotional labor.
The manager’s calendar fills with administrative throughput while the strategic work that originally made the role attractive gets squeezed into evening and weekend hours.
The Pay Premium Is Eroding
Glassdoor’s 2025 mid-year analysis of job switchers found that 22% of managers who changed employers in 2024 accepted a pay cut, compared to 17% of all workers and 18% of tech workers. Managers transitioning to individual contributor roles saw an even higher rate of pay reductions.
The traditional financial reward for taking on people-leadership has shrunk in many sectors, and in some cases, reversed entirely.
When the compensation gap narrows to within a few thousand dollars of a senior IC role, the math on accepting the extra responsibility starts to look bad to anyone who has run the spreadsheet.
The Great Flattening Is Doing Half the Work
Quitting is only one side of the manager departure story. Layoffs targeted at middle management have accelerated in parallel, creating a phenomenon now widely called the Great Flattening or the Great Unbossing.
Korn Ferry’s Workforce 2025: Power Shifts report surveyed 15,000 professionals across ten countries and found that 41% had seen their employer trim management layers in the past year; 44% of U.S. respondents said the same.
A Bloomberg and Live Data Technologies analysis put middle managers at roughly one-third of all layoffs in 2023, and the pattern accelerated through 2024 and 2025. Several company-level data points illustrate the scale of the shift:
| Company | Cuts | Year | Stated Rationale |
| Microsoft | ~15,000 positions | 2025 | Management layer reduction, AI strategy |
| Amazon | ~14,000 managers (~4% of white-collar) | 2024-2025 | Org structure efficiency |
| Korn Ferry survey average | 41% of companies trimmed layers | 2024 | Cost-cutting, span-of-control expansion |
| Gartner 2026 forecast | >50% of mid-management at 20% of orgs | Through 2026 | AI-enabled flattening |
Some of those exits are involuntary, but many managers are pre-empting the cuts by leaving on their own terms while the broader job market still offers options.
The Knock-On Effect for the Wider Economy
When a layer of the workforce comes under sustained pressure, the changes show up in places that look unrelated at first glance.
Mid-career professionals who exit a manager role often spend the months that follow recalibrating: career coaching, side projects, longer evening hours focused on personal interests, and a measurable uptick in time spent on online entertainment.
The leisure economy has been picking up the slack from a more burned-out professional class, with streaming services, mobile gaming, podcasting, and online communities all reporting growth tied to weeknight evening use.
The iGaming sector sits inside the same trend. Online casino operators have moved toward the same merchandised front end found on streaming services, and fs.casino is one example of that shift in the segment.
The shift in how mid-career professionals spend their time, attention, and discretionary income has consequences far outside the HR conversation about retention.
What Comes Next for Mid-Career Workers?
The most useful way to read this data is as a forward-looking signal, not a verdict on the current moment. Managers facing the choice tend to sort themselves into four distinct lanes. The first is staying put despite the wider span and flatter org chart, which usually leads to higher burnout and slower advancement.
The second is moving sideways into a senior individual contributor role, accepting a flat or slightly reduced salary in exchange for lower stress and a clearer scope.
The third is leaving for a smaller company, accepting a higher span over a smaller team, and a result that depends almost entirely on the destination culture.
The fourth lane is exiting corporate work to build something independent, with an income reset balanced against full control over the day.
The clearest pattern in the recent labor data is that managers are sorting themselves more deliberately than they did before 2023.
Gallup notes that 71% of voluntary turnover can be traced back to manager-related factors, and 75% of voluntary departures are preventable according to the Work Institute’s 2025 Retention Report.
Employer decisions about manager support, span of control, and career paths in 2026 will shape the next cycle of retention data more directly than any benefits program.
