Who’s Looking After the Leaders?
Manager Engagement Just Hit a Three-Year Low.
The people responsible for building your team's culture are quietly disengaging. And almost nobody is talking about it.
Gallup's State of the Global Workplace: 2025 Report found that manager engagement dropped from 30% to 27% globally in 2024. Three percentage points might not sound dramatic. But consider who is affected: the people responsible for setting the emotional tone of their teams. The people who decide whether it feels safe to speak up, to disagree, to raise a concern. The people who hold the space.
Managers under 35 saw a five-point decline. Female managers saw a seven-point drop. No other group of workers experienced anything close.
Gallup's research suggests that managers account for roughly 70% of the variance in team engagement. That figure is worth pausing on. It means the single largest influence on whether a team member feels engaged, committed, and psychologically safe is the person directly leading them. And that person is increasingly running on empty.
When the weather changes
We spend a great deal of time in leadership development talking about culture. About building environments where people feel safe enough to be honest, to take smart risks, to have the conversations that actually matter. Psychological safety has become, rightly, a central concern for organisations that care about retention, innovation, and team performance.
But there is a question that tends to get missed in those conversations: who is building that environment for the managers themselves?
When a manager disengages, the effects do not stay contained. Psychological safety erodes. Team members stop raising concerns. Retention suffers. The person who used to notice that someone on the team had gone quiet, who used to create the conditions for difficult conversations, who used to model vulnerability by asking for help, gradually stops doing those things. Not because they have stopped caring. Because caring has become unsustainable without anyone caring back.
The wrong answer
The instinctive organisational response to manager disengagement tends to look like more: more targets, more oversight, more "resilience training" that quietly places the burden of recovery back on the individual. As though the problem were a deficit of toughness, rather than a deficit of support.
This framing is worth questioning. When someone is burning out, asking them to be more resilient is a bit like asking someone with a broken leg to walk it off. The issue is not their capacity. It is the conditions they are working in.
The braver answer starts somewhere different. It starts with giving managers explicit permission to be human. To say "I'm struggling" without that statement becoming a performance concern. To ask for help without it being read as a lack of capability. To sit in a room with their own manager and admit that they do not, in fact, have all the answers.
These are smart risks. They require exactly the kind of courage that most organisations say they value but rarely make safe to practise.
A practical question
If you manage people, try this. Ask yourself, honestly: when did someone last ask how you are doing, and then wait, properly wait, for the answer?
If you cannot remember, that tells you something important.
And if you are someone who manages managers, consider putting that question into your next conversation. Not as an item on a checklist. Not as a thirty-second opener before getting to the agenda. As a real, unhurried enquiry into how someone is actually doing. The kind of question where silence afterwards is not awkward but is, in fact, the point.
The quiet withdrawal
Disengagement rarely announces itself. People do not tend to disengage loudly, or all at once. What happens is subtler and harder to catch. A leader who used to challenge decisions stops raising concerns. A manager who once brought energy to team meetings starts going through the motions. A person who cared deeply about their work, about their people, gradually learns to care less, because the caring itself started to feel like something nobody noticed.
This is not laziness. It is a rational response to an irrational situation: being expected to create the conditions for everyone else's wellbeing, while no one creates those conditions for you.
Gallup's data makes the cost of this visible at a global scale. But most of us do not need a report to recognise it. We have seen it. Perhaps we have been it.
The good news is that this pattern is reversible. Organisations that invest in developing and supporting their managers, not just training them but genuinely attending to their wellbeing and growth, see the effects across their teams. Gallup's research is clear on this: when managers thrive, their teams thrive with them.
But it requires a shift in how we think about managers. Away from seeing them purely as a delivery mechanism for organisational strategy. Towards recognising them as people who need, and deserve, the same quality of human attention they are expected to give everyone else.
This is one of the reasons we built Braver than Before®. Our leadership programme gives managers the tools to lead with courage, have brave conversations, and build cultures where people feel safe to speak up.
91% of graduates report being more likely to speak up, and 62% are more likely to stay at their organisation.
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