Modern management borrowed a word from athletics and forgot what it meant. A sprint is a burst you recover from, defined by the rest that follows it. In much of corporate life the sprint became the steady state: quarter after quarter of maximum effort, each one framed as the crunch before things calm down, the calm never arriving. The people who feel this first are not the executives who set the pace or the frontline who absorb it, but the managers in between, and the data now show them buckling.
The middle layer is the first to break
Gallup (2025), drawing on 263,810 respondents, recorded a striking decline exactly where an organization can least afford it. Manager engagement fell nine points since 2022, with the steepest annual drop between 2024 and 2025, from 27 percent to 22 percent. Overall global engagement sat at just 20 percent, the lowest since 2020, and the productivity cost of that disengagement ran to roughly 10 trillion dollars worldwide. Managers are the shock absorbers of a company's pace. When they disengage, the tempo does not become more humane; it simply passes through to everyone below with less to soften it.
This matters because managers are also the mechanism by which any sustainable-pace policy is actually delivered. A calmer cadence set at the top means nothing if the person translating it into weekly priorities is themselves running on empty and defaulting to "just push through." A depleted management layer converts good intentions about balance into more of the same urgency, because urgency is the path of least resistance for someone who has stopped having the energy to negotiate scope.
There is a compounding dynamic that makes the manager number especially dangerous to ignore. A disengaged manager does not simply underperform; they drag down the engagement of everyone they touch. Gallup (2025) holds that managers account for much of the variance in team engagement, so a nine-point slide in the tier that most shapes daily experience does not stay contained in that tier. It cascades. The permanent sprint, in this sense, is self-accelerating: the pace exhausts the managers, the exhausted managers relay the pace with less judgment about what to protect, and the frontline inherits both the tempo and a thinner buffer against it.
Autonomy is the counterweight to relentless pace
If permanent sprint is the disease, what does a sustainable cadence rest on? The research points to control over one's own work. Morikawa, Martela and Hakanen (2025), across a sample of 425 employees and a nationally representative sample of 2,000 Finns, found both organizational and employee self-management positively associated with engagement and negatively associated with burnout, with part of the effect running through job demands. The study is correlational and cannot prove causation, but the pattern is instructive: people who can shape how and when their work gets done carry a load they can actually sustain. Pace becomes bearable when the person setting it locally has room to adjust it.
That reframes the manager problem. A manager trapped in a rigid, top-driven sprint has no lever to protect either their team or themselves; they can only relay pressure. Give that same manager genuine authority over sequencing, scope and deadlines, and they become the place where an unsustainable tempo can be absorbed and reshaped rather than merely transmitted.
Recovery is not a soft benefit, it is the physics
The clearest demonstration that easing the cadence restores people comes from cutting hours outright. Fan, Schor, Kelly and Gu (2025), in a six-month trial across 141 organizations in six countries, found that reducing working time without cutting pay lowered burnout and improved health, with the gains mediated by better work ability, less fatigue and fewer sleep problems. The study is quasi-experimental rather than a randomized trial, so it should be read as a strong signal rather than proof, but the mechanism is telling. What restored people was recovery: the sleep and the slack that a genuine easing of pace makes possible. A sprint works in sport because the athlete then stops. Remove the stopping and you have not built a high-performance culture, you have built a fatigue machine.
Set a cadence the middle can hold
The practical move is to treat the manager engagement number as a gauge on the dashboard, not a footnote in an HR survey. When it falls, the organization is running hotter than its most load-bearing layer can sustain, and the frontline decline that follows is only a matter of time. Gallup (2025) shows that gauge already deep in the red.
Fixing it is less about celebrating a big final push and more about designing a cadence with recovery built in and enough local autonomy that managers can flex it. Morikawa, Martela and Hakanen (2025) point to control as protective; Fan, Schor, Kelly and Gu (2025) show that real recovery moves wellbeing. The sprint metaphor was never wrong. It was half-remembered. The half everyone dropped, the part where you rest, was the part that made the running possible in the first place.
Sources
- Gallup (2025). State of the Global Workplace 2025. Manager engagement fell to 22 percent with the sharpest drop in 2024-2025, evidence that the middle layer is breaking under relentless pace. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/659610/state-global-workplace.aspx
- Morikawa, Martela and Hakanen (2025). Self-management and employee well-being. Self-management was linked to higher engagement and lower burnout partly via job demands, supporting autonomy as the counterweight to top-driven pace. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23409444241307734
- Fan, Schor, Kelly and Gu (2025). Work time reduction via a four-day workweek. Cutting hours lowered burnout via better work ability, less fatigue and fewer sleep problems, showing recovery is the mechanism behind sustainable pace. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02259-6