May 11, 2026

The Role Nobody Wants: 85% of Employees Have No Interest in Becoming a Manager

By Becky Norman

The progression from individual contributor to manager used to be the dominant career aspiration. Not anymore. New research from Ipsos Karian and Box, published today, finds only 15% of non-managers think the people manager role looks appealing, raising concerns about the management pipeline. 

That lack of appeal, the survey of 5,000 UK employees suggests, is rooted in what employees observe in the managers around them every day. Rather than lacking ambition or the drive to progress, non-managers are forming a particular view of the role – and what they see puts them off.

Earlier research from Robert Walters pointed to the same disillusion, particularly among Gen Z, with more than half (52%) saying they had no interest in moving into middle management. Ipsos’ study not only corroborates this ‘conscious unbossing’ trend but suggests the problem is deepening.

The Reality of Management

Managers today face greater demands but feel insufficiently supported to carry them. Nearly two in three employees say people management roles involve significantly more responsibility than they did a few years ago, and more than one in four UK managers report ten or more day-to-day expectations as part of their role. Despite this broadening scope, fewer than a quarter feel their organisation fully sets them up to succeed.

This growing burden is likely linked, in part, to the waves of layoffs that have targeted the managerial layer as organisations accelerate AI transformation. Gallup’s 2026 data connects declining manager engagement with organisational flattening and wider team sizes. Now, Ipsos’ findings are showing the downstream effect of overstretching managers: a weakened progression pipeline.

Many organisations assume individual contributors will naturally want to move into management. This research suggests that assumption may no longer hold, especially if the role itself lacks widespread appeal.

The Instinctive Response Misses the Point

Organisations’ knee-jerk reaction to this problem is often to invest more heavily in the individual. For example, to offer resilience training, leadership development and a more comprehensive suite of wellbeing provisions. But this approach addresses symptoms, not causes.

“This instinctive response to fix the person often misses the point,” says Fiona Daniel, Founder of Archangelica, a systems-transformation leadership practice. “While this may help individuals cope within the role, it does not redesign the conditions surrounding it.”

Ipsos’ data signals that low management appeal stems from a systems problem. Employees are seeing the managers in their workplace grapple with competing priorities, an unrealistic workload, and growing people-related responsibilities.

Not only this, they’re also spotting how the system treats people in these positions. “They notice what behaviours are rewarded, what gets recognised, and whether managers are genuinely expected to lead people or primarily absorb pressure and deliver short-term results,’ says Daniel.

If the system continues to reward managers who are always-on, always saying yes, and who prioritise fire-fighting over longer-term strategy, then management behaviours will be difficult to change. This, in turn, will leave organisations with the same problem of disinterest in promotion among employees and a weak management pipeline. “The same behaviours and experiences will continue to repeat,” Daniel adds.

Why Structural Change Is the Most Important Fix

Rather than focusing on manager development and support alone, experts argue the priority should shift to changing the conditions of the role and redesigning the system it operates within. That starts with examining what the organisation actually signals to its managers, and whether those signals allow them to lead in a sustainable, meaningful way.

“Organisations need to examine what the role currently enables and disables,” says Daniel. “It also means clarifying the purpose of people leadership, reducing competing pressures, aligning performance with the behaviours the organisation says it values, and creating realistic space for leadership to happen in practice – rather than expecting it to exist alongside constant operational overload.”

The gap between what organisations say they value and what they actually reward is where the problem arises. Many claim to want strong people leadership while continuing to incentivise the very conditions – always-on availability, short-term delivery, firefighting – that make genuine leadership close to impossible.

“The most successful organisations are increasingly moving towards an approach that treats management as a designed role within a system, not a promotion reward,” says Shaun Smyth, report analyst at Ipsos.

The most effective redesigns, Smyth notes, focus on three core areas. They narrow and clarify what managers are accountable for; surround them with support, not just training; and preserve career flexibility.

What Needs to Change

The fixes Ipsos identifies are predominantly structural. Redefining the role is the logical starting point. This entails clarifying a manageable set of core accountabilities and separating people leadership from technical delivery where organisations can. Beyond that, the focus shifts to the environment managers operate in: realistic spans of control, peer support structures, and real-time people data, rather than another training programme.

Incentives matter too. Where performance metrics reward delivery but not people development, the signal to managers – and to those watching them – is clear. Changing what gets measured and recognised is one of the more direct levers available.

Finally, there is the question of flexibility. The perception that management is a one-way door deters many from stepping through it. Organisations that create genuine reversibility – allowing people to move in and out of management without career penalty – report a meaningfully different relationship between employees and the role.

None of this is straightforward, and the right starting point will vary by organisation. But the common thread is that management needs to be a designed role within a system, not a reward for individual performance.

Until organisations address the system rather than the individual, the signals they send will keep repeating the same cycle. In CX-intensive industries, where the frontline manager is often the single most important variable in customer experience delivery, a weak pipeline doesn’t stay an HR problem for long. It shows up in customer satisfaction scores, in attrition, and ultimately in revenue.