Your Managers Are Disengaged. The Reason Starts Higher Than You Think.

Years ago, I led a team through a season of change. Or at least, that’s what I told myself I was doing.

What I was actually doing was proposing three major changes in a row, back to back, without stopping to ask whether anyone could absorb them. My team got overwhelmed. Then they got quiet. Then they started resisting everything, even the small stuff, even the good stuff.

And here’s the part I’m not proud of: when they resisted, I pushed harder.

I didn’t slow down. I didn’t get curious. I didn’t connect with them or adjust based on what they needed. I treated their resistance as the problem instead of as information. Looking back with what I know now, I can see exactly what was happening. My urgency was running the room. My team wasn’t resisting the changes. They were responding to me.

I think about that season every time a new engagement report comes out. And the newest one deserves our attention.

The numbers everyone is quoting

Gallup’s latest State of the Global Workplace study found that employee engagement has fallen to 20 percent worldwide, the lowest level since 2020, and the first back to back annual decline since tracking began. Gallup estimates the productivity cost at roughly 10 trillion dollars.

But the number hiding inside that number is the one that matters.

In 2022, managers reported engagement of 31 percent, well above the people they led. By 2025, manager engagement had collapsed to 22 percent. For the first time ever, managers are no more engaged than their teams.

This matters enormously, because Gallup’s own research shows that managers account for up to 70 percent of the variance in team engagement. Other research puts it even more starkly: a Workforce Institute survey across ten countries found that a person’s manager affects their mental health as much as their spouse does, and more than their doctor or therapist.

So the conclusion practically writes itself. Fix the managers. Train them, develop them, lighten their load, protect their one on ones.

I want to gently challenge that conclusion.

Management reflects senior leadership

Managers aren’t failing in a vacuum. They’re absorbing everything that flows down from above them: every reorganization, every new tool, every tightened target, and, most powerfully, every unexamined pattern in the senior leaders they report to.

Teams don’t just follow their leader’s decisions. They follow their leader’s state.

When a senior leader operates from chronic urgency, managers learn that slowing down is dangerous. When a senior leader gets defensive about mistakes, managers learn to hide theirs. When a senior leader pushes through resistance instead of listening to it, managers do the same thing one level down, and the whole system tightens.

This is how nervous systems work in organizations. We co-regulate, for better or worse. Safety flows downhill. So does the threat.

This means the engagement crisis isn’t primarily a management problem. Instead, it’s a mirror. Managers are showing senior leaders something true about how the top of the organization is functioning under pressure.

I know that’s uncomfortable to hear if you’re a senior leader. I’ve been on the receiving end of that mirror myself. But here’s the hopeful part: if the pattern starts at the top, so can the repair.

The apology that changed a team

I watched a senior leader do this once, and I’ve never forgotten it.

A COO made a bad call on a new technology. The biggest problem? She decided without asking the people who would be directly affected, and the implementation failed miserably. Resentment grew. People talked about the technology, and then they talked about her. Assumptions hardened. Factions formed. The organization was doing what dysregulated organizations do: protecting itself by dividing.

Then, in a management meeting, the leader did something no one expected.

She admitted the misstep. She apologized for the mess they were all living in. No spin, no justification, no quiet blame passed down the line.

That one admission changed the entire team. They saw her as a human being who could make a mistake and own it. They saw someone who was working for them, not against them. Months later, I heard managers defending her when staff tried to disparage her. The people who had been forming factions were now protecting the relationship.

Here’s what most accounts of a moment like that leave out: the apology wasn’t a communication technique. It was the visible result of invisible work.

Before that meeting, she had to face her own failure without collapsing into defensiveness. She had to grow the capacity to accept her mistake before she could ever reveal it. She had space to process it in a relationship where she felt accepted rather than judged, and that acceptance is what gave her the courage to face her team.

Her nervous system had to change before the room could.

That’s the piece the engagement conversation keeps missing. Her team had heard plenty about trust and transparency. Information didn’t change them. An experience did. In one meeting, she contradicted everything their systems had learned to predict about leaders and mistakes, and the prediction itself got rewritten.

Insight doesn’t automatically create transformation. Experience does.

What this means for senior leaders

If you lead an organization, the fastest lever on engagement probably isn’t another program for your managers. It’s your own capacity under pressure.

Not your strategy. Not your communication skills. You likely already know the right answers. The question is what happens to those answers when stress rises, because when it does, the nervous system overrides insight. Knowing how to stay calm is different than having the capacity to stay calm.

So the real questions become:

• What do I do when someone brings me bad news?
• What happens in my body when my decision gets challenged?
• Where does my urgency debilitate the people trying to keep up with me?
• What would my managers say flows downhill from me?

It took me years to answer those questions about my own season of pushing. Here’s what I eventually saw: I wasn’t moving fast because the work demanded it. I was dysregulated. I was trying to prove myself in the workplace because I hadn’t done the work of meeting my relational needs outside of it.

So my team ended up carrying the weight of a need they didn’t create and could never fill.

That’s what unexamined patterns do. They quietly recruit the people around us into resolving something that was never theirs to resolve. No amount of leadership training would have fixed that, because the pattern wasn’t a skills gap. It was a nervous system trying to get a need met in the wrong place.

The COO’s apology looked like one brave moment. It was actually the fruit of slow, relational work that most people never see.

If you recognized yourself anywhere in this article, in her story or in mine, I invite you to take one small step forward.

Start by taking the nervous system audit. It will show you the patterns you’re leading from before they show up in your engagement numbers.

It’s one small step that will multiply into the management you want.

Sources

Gallup. State of the Global Workplace: 2026 Report. Gallup, 2026. gallup.com

Gallup. State of the American Manager: Analytics and Advice for Leaders. Gallup, 2015.

The Workforce Institute at UKG. Mental Health at Work: Managers and Money. UKG, January 2023. ukg.com

UC Today. “Global Employee Engagement Drops to 20%, with New Research Pointing to a Deeper Problem.” UC Today, July 2026. uctoday.com