TL;DR: Gallup’s 2025 data shows manager engagement declining at a notable rate. The behavior producing that number is senior leaders who are not treating their managers as the strategic asset they actually are, and the cost is showing up in every team those managers lead.
Gallup has been tracking employee and manager engagement for decades, and their 2025 State of the Global Workplace data surfaced something that should stop senior leaders cold: manager engagement is dropping. Not employee engagement broadly. Manager engagement specifically.
That matters because managers are the transmission layer of an organization. They translate senior leadership direction into team execution, develop individual contributors, and handle the daily friction that either builds or erodes team performance. When managers disengage, the signal does not stay with them. It travels directly to every person they lead.
The question Gallup’s number should be prompting in every senior leader is not what is wrong with managers. It is what has senior leadership built around them that is making disengagement the rational response.
What the Number Is Actually Measuring
Manager disengagement is not a personality or motivation problem. It is an accumulated load problem.
A senior director described her situation to me in a coaching session in terms I hear constantly. She had more direct reports than she could develop meaningfully. She was carrying administrative work that had no strategic value. She was absorbing decision ambiguity from above because her leadership would not make calls clearly. And she was being measured on team performance outcomes while having less and less actual authority over the conditions that produced them.
She was not disengaged because she had stopped caring. She was disengaged because the conditions she was operating in had made caring feel futile. That is a different problem with a different solution.
The Senior Leadership Behaviors Driving Manager Disengagement
The behaviors that show up most consistently in organizations where manager engagement is declining:
- Pushing decision ambiguity downward instead of making calls and communicating them clearly
- Adding administrative requirements without removing old ones, so managers absorb increasing overhead with no reduction elsewhere
- Expanding spans without increasing support, development investment, or decision authority
- Measuring managers on outcomes they do not control while limiting their authority over inputs
- Treating manager development as a lower priority than senior leadership development
None of these behaviors is usually intentional. They accumulate through a series of reasonable-seeming decisions that collectively create an unreasonable set of conditions. The problem is that the manager absorbs the accumulation and senior leadership rarely sees it.
What Senior Leaders Need to Change
The fix is not a manager engagement program. It is senior leadership behavior change. That means making decisions clearly and on time rather than distributing ambiguity. Auditing what is being asked of managers and cutting what does not serve execution. Giving managers the authority their accountability requires.
It also means treating manager development as a serious investment. The managers who are most engaged almost always have a clear sense of where they are going, feel their development is being invested in intentionally, and have a direct relationship with a senior leader who is paying attention to them. Gallup’s number is a leadership report card. The organizations that read it as a signal to look up, not down, are the ones that will close the gap.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is manager engagement declining according to Gallup?
Because the manager role has expanded significantly while support, authority, and development investment have not kept pace. Managers are absorbing decision ambiguity from above, administrative overhead from organizational complexity, and wider spans from restructuring. The decline reflects the accumulated weight of those conditions, not a shift in individual motivation.
How does manager disengagement affect team performance?
Directly and significantly. Gallup’s research consistently shows managers account for a large share of the variance in employee engagement. When managers disengage, they stop coaching and developing their people with the same quality. The team feels it whether or not the manager is visibly checked out.
What can senior leaders do to improve manager engagement?
Make decisions clearly and communicate them directly. Audit and reduce administrative overhead landing on managers. Align authority with accountability. And invest in manager development with the same seriousness applied to senior leadership development. Manager engagement is a senior leadership responsibility. The organizations that treat it as one produce meaningfully better outcomes.
