Manager Engagement Is Declining and Why This Is a Critical Risk for Organisations

Why the gap between what leaders say and what managers experience is becoming impossible to ignore

You can’t light a fire with a wet match.

That was my first thought when reading the latest findings from Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report.

Manager engagement has dropped significantly in recent years and is now almost at the same level as that of individual contributors. At the same time, global employee engagement has fallen again, from 23% in 2022 to 20% in 2025. According to Gallup, the decline among managers accounts for most of that downturn.

This is not just another data point. It exposes a gap many organisations still underestimate.

Leaders know managers matter. The system often says otherwise.

Most executive teams do not need another reminder that managers are critical. They already know that.

The more uncomfortable truth is that the lived experience inside many organisations still contradicts what leadership says it believes.

Organisations say managers are essential, yet they continue to widen spans of control.
They say clarity matters, yet they keep adding layers of priorities, reporting and change initiatives.
They say people are central to transformation, yet they overload the very group expected to make that transformation real.

This is why the issue is not a lack of awareness, but a lack of consistency.

Managers are the system -and the system is under pressure

Managers are often described as “the middle,” but that framing is misleading, because it suggests a layer rather than a point of convergence. In reality, they are where everything comes together: they translate strategy into daily reality, absorb pressure from above while navigating the expectations from below, and continuously define what “good work” actually looks like in practice.

When their energy starts to drop, it rarely stays contained or isolated within their own role. It gradually affects how decisions are made, how priorities are communicated, and how teams experience their day-to-day work. That is exactly why the decline in manager engagement is so concerning.

The pressure is increasing, but the role is not evolving

The pressure on managers is increasing, but the role itself is not evolving at the same pace. In many organisations, this creates a growing imbalance.

Expectations keep rising, with more change, more complexity and a heavier emotional load, while very little is done to rethink what the role now requires to be done well. Managers are expected to lead transformation, maintain performance, support their teams and navigate uncertainty, often without additional space, clarity or support.

Most of them continue to deliver, but with less margin, less clarity and less energy. That is where things start to shift.

AI is making the gap even more visible

AI is making this gap even more visible. The latest findings from Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report show that one of the strongest drivers of AI adoption is manager-led behaviour, yet fewer than a third of employees in organisations that have implemented AI strongly agree that their manager actively supports their team’s use of it. In other words, while the ambition around AI may be clear at the top, the translation into day-to-day reality is often breaking down in the middle.

Engagement reveals whether strategy is real

This is precisely why engagement should never be treated as a side topic for HR alone, because it reveals whether leadership has built an organisation that can turn strategy into a credible daily experience.

When the narrative from the top speaks about trust, focus and transformation, but the experienced reality of work is defined by overload, fragmentation and managerial exhaustion, employees notice that gap immediately.

The organisations that will move ahead

The organisations that will move ahead in the coming years will not be the ones with the most polished language around culture, but those that bring far more discipline to organisational design, reduce unnecessary complexity, and treat managers as a serious business lever rather than a layer that can absorb everything.

If managers, and especially middle managers, are the lifeline of an organisation, then their level of engagement is not a side metric, but one of the clearest leading indicators of what will happen next across the business.

Source: Gallup, State of the Global Workplace Report

These are themes I have been working on for years, and I go deeper into them in my book Employee Engagement, What Else?, because engagement does not live in strategy decks or statements, but in the daily reality of work — and right now, that reality is under pressure exactly where it matters most.