By Jonathan Justus | jonnynow.com | 11 May 2026
Manager engagement worldwide has fallen to its lowest level in five years, according to Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2026 report, with the steepest annual decline recorded between 2024 and 2025. The slump is dragging team performance down with it and costs the global economy an estimated $10 trillion in lost productivity.
Only 20% of employees reported being engaged at work in 2025, Gallup found. Among managers, engagement dropped from 30% to 27% in a single year, with the sharpest declines among managers under 35 and female managers. Leaders and managers also reported worse daily emotional experiences than individual contributors — higher levels of stress, anger and loneliness — suggesting the demands of frontline leadership are outpacing the support structures organisations provide.
The Demotivation Cascade
When managers disengage, the effect rarely stops at their desk. Gallup's research describes a downward cascade that flows through reporting lines, eroding feedback quality, slowing decision-making and weakening team trust. Best-practice organisations, by contrast, recorded manager engagement of 79% — nearly four times the global average — and reported markedly stronger retention.
Google's Project Aristotle, which studied more than 180 internal teams, identified psychological safety as the single most important predictor of team effectiveness. Yet McKinsey research indicates just 43% of employees say their team operates in a positive climate, the strongest precursor to psychological safety. The gap between knowing what makes teams perform and building the conditions to deliver it remains stubbornly wide.
Why Training Alone No Longer Suffices
The DDI Global Leadership Forecast 2025 found that only 40% of leaders rate their organisation's leadership development programmes as high quality, and leadership bench strength sits at its lowest point in a decade. Gallup's data indicates that manager training in isolation raises "manager thriving" from 28% to 34% — a meaningful but limited gain. The improvement is significantly larger when managers have a coach or mentor encouraging continued development.
In short, modern leadership development requires a system, not a single workshop. Organisations getting this right pair structured learning with ongoing coaching, peer accountability and clear behavioural expectations tied to business outcomes.
KEY INSIGHT
Manager engagement fell from 30% to 27% globally between 2024 and 2025 — the steepest annual decline in five years. Source: Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2026.
Three Shifts Defining High-Engagement Leaders
Three patterns now distinguish the highest-performing managers in 2026. First, they prioritise clarity over control, translating strategy into concrete weekly outcomes their teams can act on. Second, they treat feedback as a daily practice rather than a quarterly event, separating performance conversations from career conversations. Third, they protect cognitive bandwidth by reducing low-value meetings, defending focus time, and modelling the recovery they expect from their teams.
Gallup's Q1 2026 U.S. workforce survey reinforces the pattern in the context of artificial intelligence. Employees who strongly agree their manager supports AI adoption are 8.7 times more likely to say AI has transformed how work gets done in their organisation. The manager, in effect, remains the operating system through which strategic change either succeeds or stalls.
Watch: Simon Sinek on Trust and Team Safety
Simon Sinek explains why the leader's first job is to make people feel safe.
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The data points to a simple conclusion. Organisations that invest in the manager layer — through coaching, clear expectations and protected development time — outperform those that treat leadership as an inherited skill. Those that do not risk seeing engagement, retention and execution decline at once.
The manager is the workplace. Until organisations treat that role as the strategic asset it is, engagement reports will keep telling the same story.
Sources: Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2026; McKinsey & Company, Psychological Safety and Leadership Development; DDI Global Leadership Forecast 2025.