Gallup released their State of the Global Workplace report for 2026. Global employee engagement is at 20 percent, a five-year low. The cost: an estimated $10 trillion in lost productivity. That’s staggering, and the leadership feeds I follow have been circulating it all week.
But the number I keep coming back to is the nine point drop in manager engagement, from 31 percent in 2022 to 22 percent in 2025. Nine points. In three years. While individual contributor engagement stayed essentially flat.
I don’t believe this is a morale story, but instead a structural story.
Here’s what I’ve been reflecting on: In every organization I work with, managers are the connective tissue. They are the people who own the critical priorities, run the weekly team meetings, hold accountability up and down the ladder. And they transmit the story; the meaning and purpose of the organizations work beyond the leadership team. That is a critical role, no?
When managers are disengaged, the whole operating rhythm dissipates instead of cascading throughout the organization. As a result, employees disconnect, and teams drift. Issues go unresolved. The organization keeps moving, but it moves more slowly. And it moves with more friction and more indifference.
And what is the usual response? More oversight. More pressure. Coaching programs hurriedly added. The implicit message is you need to do better. That is not where the problem lies.
My observation? Where managers are thriving, in best-practice organizations, manager engagement reaches 79 percent, nearly four times the global average. The difference between those organizations and lower performing ones is not talent, or attitude. It is clarity. It is whether managers have a clear understanding of where an organization is going and how it’s going to get there, clear priorities, a consistent operating rhythm, and genuine authority to solve the problems they can see directly in front of them.
Engaged managers are almost always a downstream result of a healthy leadership team, not a coaching project you add when morale is low.
For much of my career I’ve participated in and worked alongside complex organizations where I’ve watched smart, committed managers take on demands that the organizations had nowhere else to put. Unclear decision rights. Competing priorities. Meetings with no structure and often little follow-through. They absorbed so much, indefinitely, because that is what the role required. And then the act of surprise when these managers burn out or checked out.
If you are a CEO or a senior leader reading this, I want to ask you a direct question: when is the last time you looked at what your managers are being asked to do? Not what is on their job description. What is on their plate, week after week, meeting after meeting? The manager role, in most organizations, is an accumulation of stuff – at best. Rarely is there actual design behind the function and responsibilities.
In the operating system I teach, EOS, the question is very clear: do your managers have well defined priorities (Rocks)? Do they run a consistent Level 10 Meeting with their teams? Do they have a real seat at the table when priorities are set, or are these priorities handed down from above with the expectation that they will simply execute?
If the answer to any of those questions is no, the engagement problem you are seeing is not about who is managing. It is about the system that managers are functioning in.
The Gallup data tells us something important about a root cause. The question is whether we treat it as an indictment of a generation of managers, or as an honest look at what we have built for them.
I am curious what you are noticing in your own organization. Is the weight of your organization distributed well, or is the managerial layer carrying more than anyone has formally acknowledged?
Read the full article: https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx