If your engagement surveys haven’t told you, your organizational performance probably has. Manager engagement has fallen. In fact, the data show that your managers are in crisis.
Overall global employee engagement may be down three percentage points since 2022,1 but the manager engagement numbers are even more concerning. Global manager engagement, which was 31% in 2022, fell to 22% in 2025.1 That’s nine percentage points in four years. Manager engagement has never dropped so much so fast.
Declining manager engagement is the primary driver of the broader downturn in employee engagement, which cost the world economy an estimated $10 trillion in lost productivity last year.1 The steep downward trajectory of manager engagement also bodes ill for many other crucial organizational outcomes: the well-being of employees, team effectiveness, and leadership pipelines.
How should organizations respond? First, understand why manager engagement is declining. Then, implement a data-driven talent management strategy to identify and support managers.
Why Is Manager Engagement Declining?
The role of manager is under stress from all sides. Executives expect managers to carry out strategic vision with fewer resources, smaller staff, and less operational support. Teams expect managers to show both technical expertise and leadership skills, even when no management training is provided. Externally, the rise of an AI-driven workplace creates uncertainty about job transformation. Internally, millennials—now the greatest share of managers in the workforce—are struggling to balance caring for their children and their parents while earning less, paying more, and maintaining mental well-being in an uncertain global economy and job market.2
Disproportionately, the managers whose engagement seems to be affected most are women.3 Not only is management challenging, but systemic issues seem to impede women at work generally. Nearly half a million women left the US workforce in 2025, 58% of which were voluntary exits.4 Why would so many women leave? Hogan research proves women leaders do not lack ambition. But the gender pay gap widened for the second consecutive year in the US.5 And the US does not have a national paid parental leave law. And the cost of childcare has increased faster than inflation since 2024.6 And while more women work from home than men,7 companies are shifting back to fully in-office jobs.8
Organizations cannot control economic uncertainty, AI disruption, or the caregiving pressures reshaping the workforce. But they can control one critical variable: who they put in management roles and whether those people have the capability to lead effectively under pressure. Without objective assessment of personality and leadership capability, organizations risk promoting high performers who succeeded as individual contributors but lack the resilience and interpersonal skills to lead teams through ambiguity, conflict, and stress.
Understanding Manager Personality
Leadership, which is the ability to build and maintain a high-performing team, requires organizations to redefine how they identify effective managers. All too often, managers are high-performing individual contributors who were promoted as a reward. However, the skills of a technical expert are not necessarily those of an effective manager. Managers accomplish work by means of their teams, so how they lead is integral to how successful they are in management.
The capability to lead an engaged, driven team has more to do with how someone tolerates pressure, makes decisions, and fosters trust than how charismatic they seem. A manager needs to show integrity, accountability, teamwork, and resilience. Organizations must focus on objective qualifications such as personality when selecting managers.
Personality Predicts Performance
Data from personality assessments can predict how an individual is likely to perform in a management role. For instance, measuring someone’s degree of resilience shows how they will likely handle stress, manage conflict, and deal with ambiguity as a manager.
Of course, resilience isn’t the only characteristic of a good manager. Organizations should assess managers for adaptability, emotional intelligence, learning mindset, influence, and other key capabilities. Workplace context, from company size and culture to team dynamics, also influences which competencies are essential at different managerial levels. A more equitable selection process based on personality and skills may reduce similarity bias, benefit women by increasing representation in the manager role, and mitigate future disengagement. Consider this: women comprise only 42% of US managers and 39% of senior managers.9
By selecting managers based on personality characteristics that predict performance in the role—rather than past individual achievement—organizations are more likely to identify people who can actually succeed in management. This reduces the likelihood of placing someone in a role where they're likely to struggle. Yet selecting the right person is only the starting point. Even managers with the right personality characteristics need support. This includes training and development opportunities, clarity about expectations, and policies that signal the organization values their well-being. These investments work together to cultivate manager engagement.
Improving Manager Engagement
Organizations can improve manager engagement through targeted development. People with strong support are more likely to succeed in a role than those without. But as of 2024, 56% of global managers had received no formal training or development support at all.3 This gap harms revenue, increases stress and inefficiency, and drives turnover.
Manager development includes training, coaching, and support informed by talent insights. Training might look like a virtual seminar about conflict resolution or a framework for performance reviews. But data-driven talent insights make development more strategic and targeted. Knowing that delivering results is an essential competency for managers in finance, a savvy investment company could design development that addresses this specific need.
The ROI on Manager Development
Development initiatives are worth it. Organizations that provide management training and development see a rise in manager engagement and performance, as well as team engagement and performance.3 The outcomes of such training and development (increased retention, increased productivity, and lower HR costs) could readily yield an ROI of 500% or even greater.10
Supporting Managers Benefits Everyone
In addition to development, organizations can also improve manager engagement by implementing policies and practices to support occupational well-being. For example, conducting a pay equity analysis signals a commitment to fairness for all employees. These supports help everyone, but especially women, who had the steepest engagement decline. Even if paid parental leave is not legally required, an organization can still create policies to support new parents. Investing in the people who lead teams improves team engagement too.
Improving Team Engagement
Manager influence accounts for 70% of team engagement, meaning that manager engagement has a multiplier effect on everyone they lead.3 The relationship people have with their manager ranks among the top factors in overall job satisfaction, second only to relationships with coworkers.11 Strengthening the manager-team relationship may be one of the most impactful ways for organizations to improve engagement.
Our definition of effective leadership focuses not on the leader’s performance but on the performance of their team. This positions managers as a resource for their teams. Refining talent strategy around management therefore yields downstream dividends for team productivity. In fact, one study showed team engagement rose by 18% when leaders received best practice training.3
Simply put, engaged teams result from engaged managers.
The manager engagement crisis signals a pivotal moment for organizations ready to rethink their talent strategies. Organizations must objectively select effective managers using personality assessment. They should equip managers with opportunities for training and development and build supportive policies. They must cultivate manager engagement since motivated managers inspire high-performing teams. These strategic efforts will pay dividends across every level of the organization.
References
- Gallup. (2026). State of the Global Workplace: 2026 Report. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx
- Lichtenberg, N. (2025, July 23). Millennials Are Officially the Majority of Managers—So Get Ready for a Combination of Burnout, Buddy Vibes, and Boundary Issues. Fortune. https://fortune.com/2025/07/23/millennial-managers-burnout-cool-boss-boundary-issues-glassdoor-worklife-trends-daniel-zhao/
- Gallup. (2025). State of the Global Workplace: 2025 Report.
- Travis, M. (2026, January 29). Women Exiting Workforce at Record Pace, New Catalyst Data Reveals Why. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/michelletravis/2026/01/29/women-exiting-workforce-at-record-pace-new-catalyst-data-reveals-why/
- US Census Bureau. (2025, September 9). Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2024. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025/income-poverty-health-insurance-coverage.html
- Elkeurti, A., & Miller, C. C. (2026, March 5). Why Does Child Care Seem Less Affordable Than Ever? The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/05/upshot/child-care-expensive-prices.html
- US Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2025, June 6). Telework or Work at Home for Pay. https://www.bls.gov/cps/telework.htm
- Merritt, K. (2026, April 23). Remote Work Statistics and Trends for 2026. Robert Half. https://www.roberthalf.com/us/en/insights/research/remote-work-statistics-and-trends
- Krivkovich, A., Goldstein, D., & McConnell, M. (2025, December 9). Women in the Workplace 2025. McKinsey & Company. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/women-in-the-workplace/
- SHRM Labs. (n.d.). Measuring the ROI of Your Training Initiatives: Unlocking Insights into the Effectiveness of Your Employee Development Programs. SHRM Labs. https://www.shrm.org/labs/resources/measuring-the-roi-of-your-training-initiatives
- Lin, L., Horowitz, J., & Fry, R. (2024, December 10). Most Americans Feel Good About Their Job Security But Not Their Pay. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/12/10/job-satisfaction/