Organizations have spent years treating managers as the answer to employee engagement. Gallup’s research gives them good reason: managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement. But another Gallup number should make CHROs uncomfortable. Only 22% of managers globally are engaged themselves.

That raises a question we may have been too quick to overlook. What if some of what organizations diagnose as a management-development problem is actually a problem with the managerial job itself? If managers matter this much, we should be examining the conditions under which they manage with the same intensity that we examine the managers.

Employees with a strong sense of purpose are far more likely to be engaged. Yet only half of them are. That gap suggests an important management lesson: believing the work matters is not the same as experiencing an organization that makes meaningful contribution possible.

Managers may account for much of the variance in employee engagement, but that does not mean manager talent is the whole problem. In many organizations, inconsistent manager behavior is a symptom of a deeper CEO standard gap. When leaders fail to define and enforce a common management floor, every manager becomes a separate culture. Employee trust does not break because one manager is imperfect. It breaks when the organization allows standards to depend on who is enforcing them.