The Middle Manager's Impossible Job
What a heart attack taught a CEO about the real source of stress
I asked David Stålberg, CEO of Kvadrat and former Google executive, what he thought about middle managers. His answer floored me.This is what fascinated me about my conversation with Johan Skarborg, founder of Academic Work (now part of Akind Group). Twenty-five years ago, he started a recruiting company when he was still a law student. Today, he's running what he describes as "a tech company that happens to be in the recruitment business."
He'd run a simple test: asked ChatGPT whether "middle manager" was positive or negative. The AI's verdict? Overwhelmingly negative. Stressed, controlling, bureaucratic, career-obsessed, incompetent.
But here's the kicker – it's not that middle managers suck. It's that we've designed an impossible job and then act shocked when people break under the pressure.
The football coach fallacy
"A football coach has very low complexity in their leadership," David explained. "Everyone knows what the game is about. Everyone understands the rules. You can pick the eleven best players. And everyone wins individually when the team succeeds."
Now picture being a middle manager:
Strategy changes quarterly (and contradicts last quarter's strategy)
Multiple bosses want different things
You can't fire terrible employees
You have responsibility but no real authority
Everyone expects you to be a "spiritual leader" while hitting impossible metrics
It's like coaching football where half the team thinks they're playing basketball, the rules change mid-game, and the owners scream conflicting instructions from the sidelines.
No wonder 89% of people report mental health issues. The system is designed to break you.
When optimization becomes the enemy
This brings us to David's personal wake-up call. Here's a guy who did everything right – worked out five times a week, ate perfectly, monitored his sleep and blood sugar. He had seven different life areas mapped out in spreadsheets. Annual reflection exercises. The full optimization playbook.
Then he had a massive heart attack at 48.
"I was used to feeling strong, young, and healthy," he told me. "But there I was in a hospital ward where I was by far the youngest."
All that control? All that optimization? Didn't matter. His body said "fuck your spreadsheets" and nearly killed him anyway.
The control delusion we all live with
Here's what broke David's brain (in a good way): realizing how little we actually control.
"I can do certain things, but if it's hereditary, which it seems to be, then it's not up to me. One day you die and you won't be able to decide when it happens."
Most of us spend our lives in denial about this. We create elaborate systems to manage the unmanageable. We optimize our way toward the illusion of certainty, burning ourselves out trying to control things that were never in our control anyway.
The friends David knows who sold companies and thought they'd relax? They all got depressed within months. Because humans don't need freedom from stress – we need meaningful stress. We need something worth struggling for.
Existential maximum vs. existential minimum
Existential minimum is survival mode – just having enough to get by.
But existential maximum isn't having unlimited money. It's living the life you actually want to live.
That distinction changes everything. Because most of us are optimizing for the wrong thing. We're trying to accumulate enough resources to avoid all discomfort, when what we really need is the right kind of discomfort – challenges that connect us to something bigger than ourselves.
I think most people are left exhausted pretending that we can engineer our way to safety and meaning.
The middle managers burning out? They're not failing. They're responding normally to an abnormal situation. The system broke them, not the other way around.
The optimization addicts tracking every metric? They're not getting healthier. They're getting more anxious about things they can't control anyway.
The uncomfortable truth
What struck me most about our conversation was how unprepared most leaders are for this new reality. When I asked Johan about how his leadership has evolved over 25 years, he was refreshingly honest:
"I don't know if I'm a good leader, actually. But I think I've been able to recruit good leaders, and I've been able to step away and not ruin things for them."
There's a humility there that I find increasingly valuable in a world where the pace of change keeps accelerating. The old model of leadership — where the leader knows best because they've done it before — is rapidly becoming obsolete.
Johan told me about his tech team challenging long-established processes. "They ask, 'but why?' And we need to do that much more," he said.
In a world where the rules are constantly being rewritten, the most valuable leadership quality may well be openness — the willingness to question, explore, and adapt.
"If you ask me in five years, I'll have data to show you which roles need high levels of openness," Johan said.
I suspect the data will show that virtually all leadership roles in the AI era will require higher levels of openness than we've traditionally selected for. The ability to embrace change, to question assumptions, to think along new lines — these traits, which have always been valuable, will soon become essential.
The lingering question
Maybe the real problem isn't that we're not optimized enough. Maybe it's that we're optimizing for the wrong things while ignoring what actually matters.
Connection over control. Meaning over metrics. The right struggles over the absence of struggle.
Maybe the most revolutionary thing you can do is accept that most of life is completely outside your control. And that's not a bug – it's the whole point.
