The Manager Isn’t the Engagement Problem. The Manager’s Job May Be.

For years, one Gallup finding has shaped how organizations think about managers: managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement.

It is difficult to overstate the influence of that number. If employees are disengaged, organizations naturally look toward the person closest to them. The manager becomes the obvious point of intervention, and manager development becomes an obvious response.

There is considerable evidence behind that thinking. Managers matter enormously. What employees experience as “the organization” is often experienced through the person who assigns their work, responds to problems, evaluates performance and decides what will be tolerated.

But Gallup’s more recent numbers complicate that familiar story.

In 2025, only 22% of managers globally were engaged at work. Manager engagement had fallen substantially from where it stood only a few years earlier. Individual contributors were at 19%. The engagement advantage managers once held over the people they lead had nearly disappeared.

That creates an uncomfortable contradiction.

The people organizations depend upon to create engagement increasingly do not experience much of it themselves.

Perhaps the question is no longer simply how to develop better managers. Perhaps we also need to ask whether organizations have designed a managerial job that makes good management unnecessarily difficult.

We Made the Manager the Answer

The logic behind concentrating on managers is compelling. Gallup continues to find that managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement. If one person exerts that much influence over whether employees feel connected to their work, it makes sense to invest heavily in that person.

Over time, however, something else happened. The manager became the place where an extraordinary number of organizational expectations converged. Employees needed clearer expectations, so managers were expected to provide them. Engagement weakened, so managers were expected to rebuild it. Retention became a concern, and managers were expected to strengthen relationships with employees. Organizations wanted greater accountability, more coaching, better communication and stronger employee development, and each expectation eventually found its way into the managerial role.

More recently, the same pattern has appeared around technological change. Gallup reports that employees whose managers actively support AI use are 2.1 times as likely to use AI frequently. Once again, a transformation conceived at the organizational level depends heavily on what happens between an employee and a manager.

There is nothing inherently unreasonable about this. Managers occupy the point where organizational intentions become everyday experience.

But that explanation contains an assumption that deserves considerably more scrutiny. It assumes the organization has created a managerial job capable of carrying everything it continues to place upon it.

Gallup’s own research gives us reason to question whether that assumption still holds.

The Managerial Job Has Become Something Else

Gallup found in a U.S. study that 97% of managers have individual-contributor responsibilities in addition to managing people. The median manager spends 40% of working time on individual-contributor work.

Consider what that means alongside the 70% engagement finding.

Organizations have identified managers as extraordinarily important to employee engagement while constructing managerial jobs in which roughly two days of a five-day working week may be devoted to work other than managing.

Gallup found something else. Managers spending less than 40% of their time on individual-contributor work tended to maintain higher engagement. As individual work consumed more of the manager’s time, engagement tended to decline, particularly when managers were also responsible for larger teams.

That does not prove that individual-contributor work causes manager disengagement. The relationship is more complicated than that. But it raises a question that is easily missed when the conversation begins and ends with managerial capability.

What if at least some of what organizations identify as a manager problem is actually a problem with the job the manager has been given?

Another Gallup number makes that question harder to dismiss. Globally, manager engagement stood at 22% in 2025. In Gallup’s best-practice organizations, manager engagement was 79%.

The difference is enormous.

Managers have not somehow become fundamentally different human beings when they enter those organizations. The more plausible lesson is that organizational conditions matter greatly to whether managers themselves become engaged and remain capable of engaging others.

That shifts the problem from the individual to the relationship between the individual and the system in which the individual is expected to perform.

We May Be Blaming the Most Visible Person

When a team begins to struggle, the manager is difficult to ignore.

Employees know who their manager is. HR knows who the manager is. Senior leadership knows who owns the team. Engagement scores can be connected to that manager, as can turnover, performance problems and employee complaints.

Organizational conditions are less visible.

A manager may be trying to maintain engagement after staffing has been reduced elsewhere in the organization. Employees may be frustrated by compensation decisions the manager did not make, policies the manager cannot change or priorities that were established several levels above them. The manager nevertheless remains the person who has to explain those decisions on Monday morning.

This is one of the peculiarities of the managerial role. Decisions move downward through organizations, but their human consequences often stop at the manager.

The manager becomes the face of decisions the manager may not have made.

That creates the possibility of an attribution error. We observe what is happening inside a team and attribute the outcome primarily to the person managing it because that person is visible and accountable. What is harder to see is how much of the manager’s behavior is being shaped by workload, authority, organizational systems and decisions made elsewhere.

When the manager is accountable for the employee experience, almost every organizational failure can eventually arrive at the manager’s desk disguised as a management problem.

That does not absolve managers of responsibility. Poor management remains poor management. Some managers avoid difficult conversations, tolerate weak performance or fail to give employees the direction they need. Organizations have every reason to expect more.

But accountability becomes less meaningful when we fail to distinguish between what a manager could reasonably have changed and what the manager was expected merely to absorb.

Training Works. That Is Not the Same as Diagnosing the Problem.

Manager development plainly matters. Gallup has produced evidence that developing managers improves outcomes, and organizations routinely promote technically capable people into management without adequately preparing them for an entirely different kind of work.

The problem arises when development becomes the default explanation for managerial difficulty.

Teaching a manager to coach more effectively has limited value if the structure of the job leaves little time for coaching. Training someone to address performance problems does not resolve an organizational system that makes those problems difficult to act upon. A manager may become more capable while remaining constrained by the same conditions that contributed to the problem in the first place.

That distinction is easy to overlook because training provides an identifiable intervention. The organization can select a program, enroll managers and measure participation. It can demonstrate that something has been done.

Redesigning the managerial job is harder.

It can force an organization to examine how much work managers carry, how much authority accompanies their accountability and whether managerial responsibilities have continued to expand without anything else being removed. Eventually, the examination may reach decisions made by HR and senior leadership themselves.

Development asks what the manager needs to do differently.

Job design asks what the organization may need to do differently.

Those questions are not competitors. A serious approach to management requires both.

The 70% Number May Be Telling Us More Than We Thought

This brings us back to Gallup’s familiar finding.

If managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement, the obvious conclusion is that organizations need capable managers.

That conclusion remains sound.

But there is another implication hidden inside the same number. If managers really exert that much influence over the experience of employees, then the conditions under which managers work should be an organizational concern of comparable importance.

Gallup’s other findings make that difficult to ignore. Manager engagement globally has fallen to 22%. Nearly every manager in its U.S. study also carries individual-contributor responsibilities, consuming a median 40% of working time. Yet some organizations achieve manager engagement approaching four times the global level.

Those findings do not prove that organizations have designed the managerial role badly. They do something more useful: they give us reason to stop assuming that disappointing management outcomes originate primarily in the manager.

For years, organizations have invested heavily in answering one question:

How do we get managers to create a better workplace for employees?

It remains an important question.

But if managers really matter as much as Gallup’s research tells us they do, then CHROs and senior leaders should be equally interested in another:

What kind of workplace have we created for the people we expect to manage it?