Short answer
Gallup’s 2026 report found that global manager engagement fell from 27% in 2024 to 22% in 2025. This makes manager support a timely leadership issue. Within your own business, explore workload, role clarity, competing priorities and development needs before deciding what is causing disengagement.
The longer answer
Several pressures land on managers at once. Restructures remove layers and widen spans. Change programs arrive from above and have to be explained to teams below. And many managers were never trained for the job in the first place: in a 2024 UK survey of 2,000 professionals by Robert Walters, 66% of managers said they’d had no formal training.
Manager engagement deserves attention alongside the experience of their teams. Gallup attributes at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units to managers.
The fix starts with treating managers as a group worth developing, not just a layer that passes messages along.