Engaged managers leading employees
Ian Foley - Iantoons.com
Only 20% of employees worldwide are engaged at work. So, four out of five employees are spending roughly a third of their lives without any meaningful connection to what they do (and another third of their lives sleeping). Leaving aside the philosophical question of what is the purpose of our lives, disengagement also has a real business impact.
Compared with disengaged teams, engaged teams show 10% higher customer ratings, 21% greater profitability, 17% higher productivity and 41% less absenteeism. To understand employee disengagement we need to focus on managers.
Managers account for at least 70% of the variance in team engagement scores — more than pay, perks or company culture programs. The single biggest predictor of whether an employee is engaged is who manages them.
That makes the manager the highest-leverage variable in the engagement equation. So what is happening to manager engagement?
According to Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2026 report, global employee engagement has dropped for two consecutive years — the first time since Gallup began measuring in 2009. However, individual employee engagement has remained broadly flat. The decline is being driven almost entirely by managers. Since 2022, manager engagement has fallen nine points, five of them in the last year alone.
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There is also a correlation between stress and engagement. Gallup finds that higher seniority correlates with higher engagement but also with significantly higher levels of daily stress, anger, loneliness and sadness. As manager engagement falls, some of that stress will fall with it. Does this reflect a healthier workforce or higher disengagement?
Globally, 22% of managers self-report as engaged. In best-practice organizations, where managers actively support employees, that figure reaches 79%. The difference is not sector, geography or company size — it is organizational choices.
One pattern that our company consistently sees when analyzing how organizations actually operate — their internal dynamics — is a gap between the formal and informal. The formal structure managers are expected to work within and the informal dynamics that actually drive performance.
The relationships, communication flows and unwritten hierarchies that determine how work gets done frequently sit outside the org chart, unmeasured and unsupported.
This results in managers navigating two parallel realities. Most organizations neither acknowledge that gap nor support managers in bridging it — producing either disengaged teams, burnt-out managers, or both.
Much effort is being spent on using AI to improve engagement in the workforce. But with or without AI, the fundamentals of ensuring an engaged workforce still land on managers.
Engaging managers by creating organizational structures that support, not hinder, is a first step towards this.
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