Here’s the stat that stopped me mid-meeting last week. According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 report, manager engagement has dropped from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025. That’s a nine-point slide in three years, and Gallup attributes most of the wider engagement decline (which now sits at a five-year low of 20%) to exactly this group.

For years, managers enjoyed what Gallup calls an “engagement premium.” They were more bought in than their teams, more connected to the mission, more willing to carry the load. That premium has effectively disappeared. Managers are now only as engaged as the people they lead, which is a quiet but seismic shift.

In my work with executive teams, I see this show up in ways that don’t always make it into the engagement survey. The director who used to light up in strategy conversations is now just trying to get through her calendar. The VP who once mentored three rising stars is ghosting his own 1:1s. These aren’t lazy people. They’re people running on fumes, and the organization often doesn’t realize it until someone quits.

The manager squeeze is structural, not personal

It’s tempting to treat manager disengagement as a character flaw or a training gap. “We need to build more resilient managers.” I’d push back on that framing. The data suggests managers aren’t broken. The job is.

McKinsey’s recent work on burnout is instructive here. Their researchers argue that cognitive strain, not hours worked, is now the primary driver of workplace burnout. Employees at every level spend more than 60 percent of their working time navigating fragmented systems, unclear responsibilities, and high-friction workflows. Managers absorb that friction on behalf of everyone above and below them. They are the human shock absorbers of your operating model.

Add in the rapid push to adopt AI tooling (which Gallup identifies as a major 2026 pressure point), and you have a middle layer being asked to coach their teams through change while simultaneously re-learning their own jobs. Of course engagement is dropping.

Stop asking managers to absorb more

When senior leaders see disengagement numbers, the instinct is often to roll out a new wellbeing initiative. Meditation app licenses. Mental health days. A resilience workshop. These aren’t bad things. But they put the repair work back on the exhausted person.

The leaders I’ve seen move the needle are doing something harder. They’re auditing the role itself. They’re asking: How many direct reports is reasonable? How many simultaneous change initiatives is a manager expected to run? Where in our process is the manager the default escalation point for things that shouldn’t require escalation?

One operations leader I coached recently discovered his managers were sitting in an average of 28 meetings a week, leaving almost no time for the thinking work leadership actually requires. He cut that number in half. Within a quarter, retention in his group improved and so did his team’s psychological safety scores. The managers didn’t need more resilience. They needed fewer meetings.

Best-practice organizations do one thing consistently

Here’s the most interesting finding in the Gallup 2026 report, and the one I keep coming back to. Inside best-practice organizations, 79% of managers are engaged at work. That’s nearly quadruple the global average. These organizations aren’t magical. They’ve just made a deliberate choice: engagement isn’t an HR program, it’s a strategic input.

What does that look like in practice? It looks like leadership development that runs year-round instead of as a one-time offsite. It looks like real feedback loops where managers can say “this isn’t working” without career risk. It looks like senior leaders who actually model the behavior (boundaries, recovery, focus) instead of just recommending it.

Three questions to take into your next leadership meeting

If you’re a senior leader reading this, I’d offer three questions as a starting point.

First, when did we last audit the manager role itself, not just manager performance? If it’s been more than eighteen months, start there.

Second, what would it take for a manager in your organization to say “I’m overloaded” without it being read as weakness? If you can’t answer that, your engagement data is going to keep telling you an uncomfortable story.

Third, are your own calendar and behavior consistent with what you’re asking your managers to do? People don’t absorb what leaders say. They absorb what leaders model.

The manager engagement crisis isn’t a people problem. It’s a leadership design problem, and it deserves the same strategic attention you’d give any other business-critical system.

If you’re rethinking how your organization develops and supports its leaders, I’d love to talk. You can learn more about working together at drtessbreen.com/work-with-me.