When was the last time you asked one of your managers how they’re doing? Skip the department for a second and ask about them. If you can’t remember, you’re in good company, and the research says it’s costing more than most owners realize.
Gallup’s latest research on managers (opens in new tab) found that only 22% of managers worldwide were engaged at work in 2025. That’s down 9 percentage points since 2022, the steepest drop of any category of worker Gallup tracks, and 5 of those points came in just the last year. The engagement edge that managers once held over the people they supervise has essentially disappeared.
Now connect that to something else Gallup reports: managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement. Read those two numbers together. The people who set the tone for everyone else’s day are losing their own energy faster than anyone in the building. Disengagement travels down to every person on that manager’s team.
Usually, the organization’s culture is the culture of the leader, the owner.
— Gary Henson, Founder of Gary Henson Group
Where does it start? In my experience, it starts above the manager. After 35 years inside more than 500 organizations, I’ve learned that the culture of a business is usually the culture of the leader, the owner. If you haven’t defined what you expect and what you stand for, then by default the culture runs on your personality. Your managers live inside that culture every day, and they’re the ones asked to carry it to everyone else without much help.
Think of your managers as internal customers, the same way I tell owners to think of every employee. A customer who’s unhappy and unheard eventually stops buying. A manager who’s unhappy and unheard rarely quits on the spot. More often they go through the motions, stop pushing back, stop developing their people, and wait. Gallup’s numbers suggest that’s exactly what’s happening at scale.
What works is mentoring that starts at the top and works its way down. In my work, coaching begins with the owner and moves through the management team, because the hard conversations about expectations and accountability have to be modeled before anyone can be expected to have them. Teaching feedback skills usually takes about 60 days of weekly meetings, since these are learned behaviors, not instincts. And sometimes a manager has to open one of those conversations with an apology for having avoided it for so long. That apology is how trust gets rebuilt.
The owner’s side of this has a trap in it as well. Many micromanagers believe they have to be involved in every major decision, and that simply isn’t true. With a clear vision statement, mission statement, core values, job descriptions with standards of performance, regular monthly meetings, and quarterly reviews, those tools do the communicating for you. Managers who know the standards can make decisions without you in the room, and that’s how an owner moves from working in the business to working on it.
of managers worldwide were engaged at work in 2025, down 9 percentage points since 2022, the steepest decline of any worker category. Gallup, How Managers Impact Team Productivity →
So what do you do on Monday? Start with four things, and put each one in writing.
First, hold a one-to-one with each manager every month and ask three questions: what’s working, what’s not working, and what’s missing. Then stop talking and listen. Most managers have never been asked, so expect the first answer to be careful.
Second, write down what you expect. A manager with no job description that includes standards of performance is guessing at the job and being judged on the guess. Our job description template is built for exactly this. About 99% of my clients don’t use written tools like job descriptions, a vision and mission, core values, monthly meetings, and quarterly reviews to communicate with their people at any level. That’s a lot of managers working without a map.
Third, acknowledge them the way you ask them to acknowledge their teams. My rule is public praise and private correction, kept in roughly equal measure. If your managers only hear from you when something is wrong, you’ve told them what the job feels like, and it doesn’t feel like much.
Fourth, give them real preparation for the role. If you promoted someone because they were your best technician, the transition into managing people is probably where they’re struggling most. Gallup found that in best-practice organizations, 79% of managers were engaged in 2025, nearly four times the global average. Support is what those organizations are doing differently for the people in that chair.
Here’s the question I’d leave you with. Can you see your business being more productive if your managers felt more supported by you? If the answer is yes, the next conversation on your calendar should be with one of them. If you want help building that structure, our Inside-Out Method™ starts at exactly this point: with you, then with them.
