Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report contains a number that should stop every executive cold. Within best-practice organizations, 79% of managers are engaged at work. The global average is 22%. That 57-point gap is not explained by industry, geography, or company size. It is explained by how organizations select, develop, and support the people who lead their teams.
The data that got my attention
The 79% figure comes from Gallup’s analysis of world-class workplaces spanning every region and industry. These organizations share a common trait: they treat management as a discipline worth investing in, not a promotion to hand out by default. The contrast with the global average is stark. Manager engagement fell from 27% in 2024 to 22% in 2025, the sharpest single-year decline on record. Non-manager engagement sits at 19%. The people responsible for team performance are now nearly as disengaged as the people they lead.
That collapse matters because managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement, according to Gallup’s Q12 meta-analysis covering 2.7 million employees across 112,000 business units. A single manager’s engagement level ripples outward. When the manager checks out, the team follows.
Why this matters now
The engagement drop is happening at the worst possible moment. AI is reshaping every job description, and employees are looking to their managers for clarity. Only 25% of employees say their organization has communicated a clear AI plan. Less than a third say their manager actively supports their team’s use of AI. When managers are themselves disengaged, they cannot provide the coaching, context, and confidence that teams need during a technological shift.
The cost is already visible. Low engagement drained an estimated $10 trillion from the global economy in 2025, equal to 9% of GDP. For a 1,000-employee company, disengagement costs roughly $3.4 million per year in lost productivity. Those numbers will climb if the manager engagement slide continues unchecked.
What the research actually shows
The best-practice gap reveals something important: engagement is not a culture problem. It is a management problem. The 79% organizations do not have better markets or luckier employees. They invest in the specific practices that drive human-centered leadership: selecting managers for talent rather than tenure, providing structured coaching development, and holding managers accountable for team engagement as a business metric.
Gallup’s data shows that only 1 in 3 managers naturally have the talent to manage. The rest are promoted into roles that require skills they were never selected for or trained in. The result is a workforce led by people who are improvising. When employees who strongly agree their manager supports AI use are 8.7 times more likely to say AI has transformed how work gets done, the manager’s role is not diminishing. It is becoming more consequential.
The table below shows the engagement gap that separates world-class organizations from the global average.
| Group | Engagement rate | Gap vs. best practice |
|---|---|---|
| Best-practice managers | 79% | Baseline |
| Global manager average | 22% | -57 points |
| Global non-manager average | 19% | -60 points |
| Global leader average | 26% | -53 points |
Even senior leaders trail the best-practice manager benchmark by 53 points. The data says the top of the org chart is not immune. Leaders report higher stress (46%), anger (33%), and loneliness (31%) than any other role. Human-centered leadership is not just about how leaders treat their teams. It is about how organizations treat their leaders.
A practical framework for leaders
Closing the 57-point gap requires shifting from treating management as a title to treating it as a discipline. Here is a four-step framework drawn from the best-practice data.
- Select for talent, not tenure. Stop promoting top performers into management by default. Gallup finds only 1 in 3 people have the natural talent to manage. Use structured assessments to identify who can actually lead before handing them a team.
- Invest in coaching skills. The best-practice organizations do not assume managers know how to coach. They train it, measure it, and reward it. A manager who cannot hold a development conversation will default to task assignment, which is where engagement goes to die.
- Make engagement a business metric. If you measure revenue per team but not engagement per team, you are flying blind on the leading indicator. Track team engagement quarterly and tie manager performance reviews to it.
- Support the supporters. Leaders are the most stressed, angry, and lonely group in the workforce. You cannot expect disengaged, burned-out leaders to produce engaged teams. Invest in executive coaching and wellbeing as infrastructure, not perks.
Start by auditing your current management selection process. If your last five manager promotions were based on individual contributor performance, you have a structural problem. Fix the selection criteria before anything else.
The bottom line
The 79% versus 22% gap is the clearest proof yet that human-centered leadership is a hard business lever, not a soft skill. The organizations closing that gap are not spending more on perks. They are spending more on the disciplined work of selecting, training, and supporting the people who lead their teams. The data says this works. The question is whether your organization is willing to do the work.
Where to go from here
Closing the leadership engagement gap starts with understanding where your managers stand today. A structured assessment can identify which of your leaders have the talent to manage, which need development, and which are in the wrong role entirely. leadership workshops →
