Probable circular dependency, but query still runs I built this ER diagram in MySQL Workbench and it will run and generate the database.  My concern is that the relationship between the employees, departments, positions, and employment_statuses is a circular relationship.

Because I know people will ask, this is something I was working on in a class.  I'm not asking for help with homework; this is something we were working on in class and I took a different route than the professor.  I'm asking for clarification about database modelling theory.
There's nothing wrong with your model. Au contraire - it's pretty advanced!

employment_statuses provide data in a time-lined, historical, fashion, whilst departments identifies the actual manager.

These entities are very different both in purpose and use (queries on employment_statuses will serve different scenarios than those on manager).

I have to congratulate you, as I repeatedly work with peers that just can’t abstract this kind of scenario (the majority just see the now, or, at maximum, a single then - not the natural sequence of thens leading to the as today).

A remark: you should move high/low_salary from positions to another time-lined entity.