Your Managers Are Now the Least Engaged People in Your Company

Nearly every public strategy written in the last two decades rests on an assumption that is no longer valid. The perception is that managers are engaged – that they arrive at a team meeting with more conviction than the people sitting across from them, and so strategy, culture and change travel outward and downward through them. The latest global data from Gallup shows that perception has quietly dissipated. The first link of the cascade is now the weakest.

Nine point decline in three years

Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace: 2026 report tracks engagement separately for managers and individual contributors. Between 2022 and 2025, manager participation will fall from 31% to 22% — a nine-point decline, with five points falling in a single year between 2024 and 2025 (Harter & Pendel, Gallup, April 7, 2026). Over the same period, individual contributors rose from 20% to 19%, falling to 18% in 2023 and 2024 before regaining that mark in 2025.

Read those two lines against each other. A population lost almost a third of its population in three years. The second was almost flat. Overall global participation fell from 23% to 20%, its lowest level since 2020, and Gallup attributes much of that decline to managers in particular. Each percentage point represents approximately 21 million less engaged employees worldwide. The global economy lost nearly $10 trillion in productivity last year due to low participation – about 9% of GDP (Gallup, 2026).

premium has expired

Name the change clearly: Manager Engagement Premium is gone. In 2022, managers outpaced individual contributors by 11 percentage points. In 2025 they are ahead by three. Gallup explains the mechanism directly – managers “generally experience an ‘engagement premium’ of consistently higher levels of engagement than individual contributors. But increasingly, managers’ levels of engagement are coming very close to those of their leadership.”

Accuracy matters, so be precise: Managers are still no less busy than their teams. Three points still separate them. But the three-point premium is not a premium the strategy can sustain – it sits just inside the range where the difference ceases to be operationally meaningful. The trend line, not the current level, is the planning input. Treating managers as repositories of surplus discretionary effort is now a bet against the direction of the data rather than reading it.

Every cascade now has a broken first link

Consider what a standard people strategy actually asks managers to do. Cascade strategy. Distribute engagement survey details. Model the values. Be the master of the change conversation. Champion the new tool. Each of these is a transfer of energy, and each assumes that the manager has excess energy to transfer. At 22% participation, roughly four out of five managers do not.

This is not a matter of abstract concern. Gallup’s Q1 2026 US Workforce Survey found that, apart from technology integration, the strongest predictor of whether an employee uses AI is whether their direct manager actively supports it. Organizations are driving the biggest technology transformation in a generation through a population whose engagement is falling the fastest. The same structural dependencies apply to every culture initiative, every retention effort, and every restructuring on the current roadmap.

A second dataset, coming independently

Gallup measures an outcome. McKinsey used the measuring mechanism – a different instrument, a different sample and a different set of questions, taken from a global survey of 706 middle managers.

Middle managers spend less than 25% of their time actually managing people and nurturing talent, and 43% say they are burned out (McKinsey, 2023). When asked what most negatively impacted their experience in the role, 44% named organizational bureaucracy – the most cited factor in every area surveyed (Field, Hancock & Quintero, McKinsey, 2024). Only 20% strongly agreed that their organizations help them succeed as people managers; 42% either disagreed or were unsure.

He tells only the last cluster. Bureaucracy, time allocation and role design are not personal qualities. They are characteristics of the system within which the individual is working.

Two sources, one structural diagnosis

State this clearly, because it determines what you do next: Two independent research programs, using different instruments on different populations in different years, converge on the same diagnosis – and that diagnosis is structural, not personal.

An individual explanation would predict variation. With some managers succeeding, others struggling, selection is sorted based on quality, ability or personal flexibility. This pattern is not in the data. The decline is visible across all regions, with participation increasing in no region of the world over the past year and bureaucracy being the top-cited complaint in all locations surveyed by McKinsey. Gallup links the steepest regional decline – an eight-point decline in South Asia – to organizational flatness: fewer management roles, broader spans of control and similar underlying responsibilities.

The historical record makes this clear. Gallup found in 2018 that managers already reported frequent or persistent burnout at a slightly higher rate than individual contributors – 26% vs. 24% – during a period when managers still had a double-digit engagement premium (Wiegert and Agarwal, Gallup, 2018). This role was being demanded for a long time. What changed between 2022 and 2025 is not demand. It is that the conditions of compensation—autonomy, time to do real work for management, and organizational support—were destroyed until premiums could no longer be sustained.

What’s the first thing a CHRO should stop doing

The trend is to introduce a manager development programme. resist it. Training a manager to be more flexible inside a role that structurally allocates less than a quarter of their time to management is a category error – it treats a design flaw as a skills gap, and it adds another obligation to the calendar that created the problem. The first move is subtraction, not addition.

• Stop treating manager engagement as a lagging indicator. Most engagement reporting either lumps managers into groups or reads their scores as a by-product of team health. Break down the population, trend them separately, and report to the board on your line. Deviation you don’t measure is deviation you can’t manage.
• Stop adding without subtracting from the manager role. Every initiative launched this year by HR, Finance, Legal and IT is based on the same calendar. Establish a subtraction requirement: No new manager takes over without explaining what it replaces.
• Stop flattening the role without redesigning it. Removing a layer redistributes its work rather than eliminating it. Gallup’s own analysis links wide span of control to low manager engagement. If the structure changes, role definitions and decision rights should change with it – in the same project, not later.
• Stop routing every program through managers by default. Some communication, some compliance and a lot of administration may be straightforward. For each planned cascade, ask if the manager is actually the correct channel or the only one available.

The gap is design, not people

None of this is destiny. Gallup says some organizations hire their managers at salaries four times the global average. McKinsey’s analysis of Organizational Health Index data found that organizations whose managers exhibit strong managerial behaviors had three to 21 times higher total shareholder returns over five years—a correlation drawn from a sample of 50 companies rather than a causal claim, but a substantial indication (Field, Hancock, Smollets, & Weddle, McKinsey, 2023).

The gap between those organizations and the global average cannot be explained by better people. This is explained by better designed roles. The CHROs who make the first move will be the ones who stop asking their managers to carry more stuff and start asking what their role was created for.

sources say

1. Harter, J., and Pendel, R. (2026, April 7). “Global employee engagement continues to decline.” Gallup. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/708071/global-employee-engagement-connectues-decline.aspx
2. Gallup. (2026). “State of the Global Workplace: 2026 Report.” https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx
3. Gallup. (2026, January 13). “Span of Control: What is the Optimal Team Size for Managers?”. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/700718/span-control-optimal-team-size-managers.aspx
4. Wiegert, B., and Aggarwal, S. (2018, July 16). “Employee Burnout, Part 2: What Managers Can Do.” Gallup. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/237119/employee-burnout-part-2-managers.aspx
5. Field, E., Hancock, B., Mugyar-Baldocchi, M., and Schaninger, B. (2023, March 10). “Stop Wasting Your Most Precious Resource: The Middle Manager.” McKinsey & Company. https://www.mckinsey.com/capability/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/stop-wasting-your-most-precious-resource-middle-managers
6. McKinsey & Company. (2023, July). “Unleashing the Power of the Middle Manager” (drawing on the McKinsey Live webinar, Power to the Middle). Source of the “less than 25% time” and “43% burned” figures. https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/mckinsey-live/webinars/unleashing-the-power-of-the-middle-manager
7. Field, E., Hancock, B., and Quintero, E. (2024, March 20). “Middle managers can succeed by simplifying the role.” McKinsey & Company. Source of the “44% bureaucracy” figure. https://www.mckinsey.com/capability/people-and-organization/our-insights/the-organization-blog/middle-managers-can-succeed-by-simplifying-the-role
8. Field, E., Hancock, B., Smollets, S., and Weddle, B. (2023, June 26). “Investing in middle managers really pays off.” McKinsey & Company. https://www.mckinsey.com/capability/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/investing-in-middle-managers-pays-off-literally