The Missing Middle

Seventy-seven percent of mid-career creatives told Creative Boom they had experienced burnout in the past year. The survey, published in June, collected responses from 882 creative professionals, weighted toward the UK and the US, and 43 percent of them had more than a decade in the business. Across the whole sample the figure was 69 percent. Early-career respondents came in at 74. Founders and studio leaders, the people we tend to picture pacing the kitchen at 3 a.m. over payroll, came in lowest, at 59.

We have spent a lot of Ding! newsletter editions focusing on the bottom of the ladder, on disappearing junior seats, and on art schools closing their doors. We stand by all of it. This number points somewhere we haven't looked hard enough, though, which is one rung up.

Everyone is counting who can't get onto the ladder. Far fewer people are checking on the ones holding it.

Tom May, who wrote up the findings, offered an explanation and was candid enough to call it his best guess. Founders, whatever else they carry, get to shape their workload and choose their clients. The mid-career cohort runs the projects and manages the juniors, all while fielding client demands "without the authority to say no." They own the outcome and almost none of the levers.

It's a guess, but an educated one, and the same squeeze shows up well beyond our corner of the economy. Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2026 report found that manager engagement worldwide fell from 27 percent to 22 percent between 2024 and 2025, the biggest single-year drop in a slide that has taken nine points off since 2022. Gallup suggests organizational flattening may be part of the story. A company removes a layer, the managers who remain inherit bigger teams, and in Gallup's research wider spans of control go with lower engagement.

We should be honest about our own biases here, because Ding! is created and written by a small studio. In an earlier edition, we called middle management a roadblock, and we still run lean on purpose. We haven't fallen in love with bureaucracy since. But flat comes with a bill too; no one system is perfect.

Delete a layer of management and the work it did goes somewhere. Usually it goes to the person with the most context and the least say.

Now add the machines (trust us, we know how ominous that sounds). In the same Creative Boom survey, 86 percent of respondents use AI tools in their work, and only 10 percent think AI's overall effect on the industry is positive. A OnePoll survey of UK agency staff, commissioned by Resource Guru last year, found one in five said AI had increased their workload. Anyone who has lived through a rollout can tell you why. Somebody has to build the templates, check the output, fix what the model got confidently wrong, and explain to a client why "we used AI" doesn't mean half the invoice. In our experience, that somebody in most larger organizations is rarely the founder, and it is never the intern.

Then there's the work that used to roll downhill. With fewer juniors coming in, the resizing and first passes still have to land on someone, and our read is that they mostly land on the people a few years above the seat that was cut. The senior designer is now also the junior designer, with a side job as the client's AI help desk.

Which makes the junior crisis and this one the same problem seen from opposite ends. In School is Closed, we asked who teaches the class after this one. The honest answer is the mid-career creative, in the crit and in the redlines at 6 p.m. That's the cohort sitting at 77 percent. Every time we asked studios to open a junior seat, we were also asking an exhausted group of people to do the teaching, and we never said so out loud.

There's a detail in the survey that’s quite insightful. When asked what would genuinely improve their working lives, respondents put networking and community first, at 57.5 percent, and mentorship close behind, at 53 percent. New tools trailed at 31.

The people we expect to do the mentoring are asking to be mentored, and nobody has been assigned to them.

They aren't storming out, for what it's worth. Only 7.5 percent plan to leave creative work altogether. But 38 percent are weighing a job change, and May makes a point worth taping to the monitor of anyone who runs a team. A wave of resignations is easy to see. A slow sideways drift of undervalued people usually isn't, until it's too late to do much about it.

So what changes on Monday, whether you run the team or you are the middle?

Hand over the "no." If your mid-level people are absorbing scope creep without the power to refuse it, you have a governance problem. Agency consultant Rob Sayles put it plainly in the Resource Guru report: "Don't make your people fight battles you failed to prevent contractually."

Write the scope tighter, then give the person on the client call the authority to hold it.

Stop booking people to 100 percent. Designer and author Emmi Salonen has argued for planning to 80 percent capacity, so there's room to think and recover. In a studio where reviewing and teaching now eat real hours, that spare fifth is where the work you never billed for actually gets done.

Put the invisible hours somewhere visible. Reviewing AI output and sitting in a crit are work. If they never show up on a timesheet or in a performance review, they will be the first things to slip when a deadline lands.

Find the mentor a mentor. Someone a few years further along, ideally outside the reporting line, whose whole job in the relationship is looking after the person who looks after everyone else. It costs a lunch a month.

And if you are the middle, reading this between a client call and a feedback round, take some comfort in the arithmetic. When more than three in four of your peers report the same thing, it says more about the structure than about you. Asking for the "no" and for a mentor are reasonable requests in a year like this.

Every studio has a person who knows where everything is, who answers the junior's question and the client's email in the same breath. Ask them how they're doing this week. Then ask what you'd have to take off their plate for the answer to change.