When the manager is the risk — and the organisation is the cause

For years, organisations have approached wellbeing by asking how to support the people who are struggling. It is a fair question, but under Australia's Work Health and Safety duty for psychosocial hazards it is no longer the first one. Regulators now ask something more structural: what is it about the way work is designed, organised and managed that is creating the risk? That shift moves the focus from the individual to the system — and sometimes, uncomfortably, the system has a face. Sometimes the manager is the immediate source of psychosocial risk. The mistake is assuming that is where the story ends.

How does a manager become a psychosocial hazard?

Rarely through anything as visible as bullying or aggression. Far more often, harm accumulates quietly, through small behaviours repeated over time. One-to-ones cancelled because the manager is "too busy". Priorities that change every week without explanation. Good work that goes unacknowledged. Workloads that keep rising without discussion. Questions read as resistance; mistakes met with blame rather than curiosity; conflict avoided rather than addressed. Each is minor in isolation. Together they create uncertainty, low trust, poor role clarity, inadequate support and steady emotional exhaustion — which are not just "culture problems". They are recognised psychosocial hazards arising from how work is led.

This is why the manager is not a minor variable. In a global study of 3,400 people across ten countries, 69% said their manager has as much impact on their mental health as their partner does — more than their doctor or therapist (UKG Workforce Institute, 2023). Gallup puts a similar weight on it, finding managers account for around 70% of the variance in team engagement. The person leading the team is, for most workers, the single biggest feature of how work feels. And intention does not soften impact: a manager can care deeply about their team and still be the channel through which organisational pressure reaches people as harm.

Is the manager the cause — or a product of the system?

Usually both, and that distinction changes everything about the response. A manager who is overloaded, under-resourced and held accountable for outcomes they cannot control tends to narrow. They become more reactive, more controlling, less available and less able to tolerate challenge. They start to hear requests for support as complaints and signs of strain as proof the team "isn't coping". In that state, a manager can genuinely believe they are holding things together while, from the team's side, they are amplifying the very risks they are trying to manage. They are not simply the source of the hazard. They are also a product of it.

Middle managers occupy one of the hardest positions in any organisation — absorbing pressure from every direction while being asked to be change leader, coach, wellbeing champion, conflict mediator and performance manager at once. Without support, they become casualties of the systems they are meant to run. So before an organisation individualises the problem, it should ask a prior question: who is supporting the manager? Sometimes the manager is the immediate risk. Just as often, the organisation has created the conditions in which poor leadership behaviour becomes far more likely — and that is a work-design question, which puts it squarely inside the WHS duty.

Why doesn't more training fix it?

Because most managers already know what good leadership looks like. They know they should communicate clearly, give feedback, manage conflict and support their people. The challenge is enacting those behaviours consistently under pressure — and a chronically overloaded manager can know exactly what good looks like and still be unable to deliver it. They may not need another empathy workshop. They may need fewer conflicting priorities, clearer authority, a more realistic span of control, better executive support, and permission to raise concerns without it being read as incapacity.

Send that manager on a course and return them to the same workload, the same contradictory instructions and the same punishing pace, and you have changed the language, not the behaviour. The symptom is addressed; the cause remains. This is not an argument against leadership development — it is an argument against using development as a substitute for organisational accountability. The individual is asked to adapt. The system stays untouched.

What is the better question to ask?

Not "why are your people struggling?" but "what is making it difficult for you to lead well?" That single change replaces blame with curiosity, creates psychological safety for the manager, and often surfaces organisational problems that have been normalised for years — because managers frequently need exactly what their teams need: clearer priorities, realistic workloads, real support, fair processes and permission to ask for help. Healthy leadership begins with healthier systems.

There is still a place for personal accountability, and a simple exercise gets there without blame. Ask a leader: "what do your people experience when they experience you?" — not your intentions or your values, your impact. If every team member were interviewed independently, what three words would they use? Compare those with the three you hope for. The gap between intention and experience is often exactly where psychosocial risk begins. Then pair it with the executive's question — "what is this manager carrying that is shaping how they show up?" — so accountability is never confused with blame, and both the behaviour and the conditions producing it are examined together. Leadership can no longer be measured by performance outcomes alone; increasingly it is measured by the conditions leaders create for others to perform, and to stay.

So the real call to action for an executive team is not to hunt for a manager to fix. That would only build another psychologically unsafe workplace. It is to ask what conditions the organisation has created that make good leadership difficult — and to be willing to hear that the answer may sit higher in the structure than first assumed. Many significant psychosocial risks are not truly hidden; they are simply normalised as "the way we do things around here". The sharpest version of the question is also the most uncomfortable: are we asking our people to become more adaptable while remaining unwilling to adapt ourselves? In a world of accelerating change, that may be the greatest organisational risk of all.