Andy Garcia · freelance dev
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Management & Teams

Managers' Engagement Fell From 31% to 22% in Three Years. Their Teams Barely Moved.

October 19, 2026 7 min read

On April 7, Gallup published its State of the Global Workplace 2026 report. The headline number travelled well: 20% of employees worldwide were engaged at work in 2025, the lowest level since 2020 and the first time global engagement has fallen two years in a row. Gallup puts the cost of low engagement at about $10 trillion in lost productivity, or 9% of global GDP.

The two charts I would put in front of any founder are further in. The first shows who drove the decline: managers. The second shows that the people at the top of the ladder rate their lives highest and report the worst days.

I am a CTO and I still build, so both charts describe my job. What follows draws on the report itself, including its methodology appendix, and the two Gallup articles that go with it. Here is what the data show, what they do not, and what I would change in a small team.

The engagement premium is almost gone

Gallup's chart "Global Engagement by Role" compares two groups. Managers: 31% engaged in 2022, 30% in 2023, 27% in 2024, 22% in 2025. Non-managers: 20%, 18%, 18%, 19%.

Subtract and you get the story. In 2022, managers were 11 points more engaged than the people they lead. In 2025, 3 points. The largest one-year drop came between 2024 and 2025: five points. Non-managers dipped, then ticked back up. In Gallup's words, managers "used to enjoy an 'engagement premium' at work, but they are increasingly only as engaged as those they lead," and lower manager engagement "accounts for most of the recent downturn."

Engagement is a high bar here. Gallup scores twelve statements, the Q12 (knowing what is expected of you, having the materials you need, someone at work who cares about you as a person, someone who has talked to you about your progress), with a proprietary formula. The other 80% split into 64% "not engaged", putting in time but not energy in Gallup's definition, and 16% "actively disengaged".

The steepest fall was in South Asia, mostly India, where manager engagement dropped eight points in 2025, the largest decline of any region. The share of workers who are managers there fell too. Gallup reads that as a sign that employers are cutting management roles. The decline is not uniform: on Gallup's chart, U.S. managers are at 36% in 2025, against 22% globally.

For readers on my side of the Atlantic: Europe has the lowest engagement of any region, 12% on a three-year average. Managers 16%, individual contributors 10%. France sits at 8% on the same basis.

What the flattening study adds

To back the flattening hypothesis, the report links to a Gallup study of U.S. managers published on January 13. For a small company, it is the more useful read. In Gallup's U.S. panel, the average number of direct reports rose from 10.9 in 2024 to 12.1 in 2025, while the median stayed around five to six. A few very large teams pull the average up.

Two findings stand out. First, 97% of managers also do individual contributor work, and the median manager spends 40% of their time on it. Managers below that threshold tend to stay more engaged than the study's average of 37%, whatever their team size. Those above it are less engaged, and the gap widens as the team grows. Second, employees who strongly agree they received meaningful feedback in the past week are engaged at about seven in ten, regardless of team size. Without it, one in four. Gallup says 15 to 30 minutes, done consistently, is enough.

That is the player-coach trap in numbers. A tech lead who still ships most of the code and inherits four more people is exactly the profile the data flag.

Leaders: better lives, worse days

The second chart splits the workforce into four levels: leaders (managers of managers, 9,880 of them in the 2025 data), managers, project managers and individual contributors.

On the reflective measures, rank pays. Engagement: 26% for leaders, 24% for managers, 19% for project managers and for individual contributors. Thriving, Gallup's life evaluation measure: 43%, 40%, 39% and 32%.

On the experienced measures, it reverses. Asked whether they felt each emotion during a lot of the previous day, leaders report stress at 46% against 39% for individual contributors, anger at 33% against 21%, sadness at 34% against 23%, and loneliness at 31% against 21%. Leaders are also less likely than individual contributors to say they smiled or laughed a lot, and less likely than managers to report enjoyment.

Look at the middle of the chart, though. Line managers look like individual contributors on sadness (22% against 23%) and loneliness (21% each), and their anger is only three points higher. The jump comes with the top level. Stress is the exception: it is already 45% for managers.

Gallup's own article adds a caveat that matters: in the U.S., leaders are less likely to report negative daily emotions than the people they manage. The global pattern is an average, not a law.

The hopeful line: engaged managers, leaders included, report every negative emotion at lower rates than individual contributors, and are 14 points more likely to be thriving than the average leader. Between engaged and non-engaged leaders, the loneliness gap is 21 points.

What the data do not show

This is a survey: self-reports, collected once a year, read as correlations. A few cautions follow.

"Engagement reduces the emotional burden of leading others" is Gallup's heading, but the data cannot say which way the arrow points. A leader who is less lonely may become engaged, rather than the reverse.

The flattening explanation is a hypothesis. Gallup's own verbs are "suggests" and "may be a factor". The span-of-control results come from another survey, in another country, mostly on 2022 to 2024 panel data.

The 79% figure, managers engaged in "best-practice organizations" in 2025, nearly four times the global average, is not a random sample. These are organizations that, in Gallup's words, prioritize engagement as part of their long-term business strategy. It shows what is possible, not what a given policy produces.

The $10 trillion is a model. Gallup applies standard utility analysis to estimate the output that would be gained if not-engaged and actively disengaged workers became engaged. It calls the estimate conservative. It is still an estimate.

The two charts also cut people differently. The two-group chart puts managers at 22% engaged; the four-level chart puts managers at 24% and leaders at 26%. The report does not say how the groups map onto each other. The figures fit if the two-group "manager" line also counts project managers (19%), since non-managers and individual contributors are both at 19%, but that is my reading, not Gallup's, so I would not mix figures across charts.

And Gallup sells engagement surveys and manager development. That does not make the numbers wrong. It explains why every chapter ends on managers.

Why it lands on AI rollouts

The report frames all of this around AI. In Gallup's Q1 2026 U.S. workforce survey, the top two drivers of frequent AI use are integration with existing systems and manager-led adoption. In U.S. organizations investing in AI, employees who strongly agree their manager actively supports the team's use of AI are 8.7 times as likely to strongly agree that AI has transformed how work gets done. Fewer than a third of U.S. employees in organizations implementing AI strongly agree their manager does that.

I build a product on Claude and orchestrate my own work with Claude Code. If the report is right, the license is the easy part of an AI rollout. The manager who makes room for it is the bottleneck, and globally, that manager is less engaged than at any point in the four years the chart shows.

What I would do in a small tech team

  1. Map spans and hands-on load. For each person who manages, write down their direct reports and the share of their week still spent on individual work. Above 40% with a growing team is the profile Gallup flags.
  2. Before removing a layer, name who absorbs the reports, and check that they have time to give each one feedback every week.
  3. Make the weekly conversation the default: 15 to 30 minutes per person, on recent work, current priorities and strengths.
  4. Ask managers the questions you ask their teams. Who tells the tech lead what is expected? Who talks to them about their progress?
  5. For founders and leaders: measure the day, not only the year. A good quarter and a lonely Tuesday can coexist. Build a peer group outside the company before you need one.
  6. When rolling out AI tools, give managers an explicit role: what the team uses, for what, and where human judgment stays.

The headline is 20%. The number I would watch is the three points left between managers and the people they lead. It is cheaper to check before the next reorganization than after.

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