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

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.