Gallup’s 2025 State of the Global Workplace report measured engagement across every category of worker it tracks. Manager engagement was the only one that moved backward. It fell from 30% to 27%, marking only the second time in 12 years the number has declined, and the damage landed on two groups in particular: managers under 35, who lost five points, and female managers, who lost seven.
Individual contributor engagement held flat at 18%. No other worker category moved. The headline number was bad. The breakdown was worse.
The Numbers Gallup Buried in the Fine Print
These are not random fluctuations. The groups absorbing the sharpest drops are the ones organizations have been betting on to carry the next decade of leadership. Younger managers are the people being developed for senior roles. Female managers represent years of DEI investment. Neither group became less capable in 2024. Something in the conditions they’re working in changed.
The economic math is stark. Gallup puts the productivity cost of disengaged workers at $438 billion globally in 2024. But the secondary cost, the one that doesn’t show up in a single quarter, is what happens when managers disengage before their teams do. Managers account for 70% of the variance in team-level engagement. A disengaged manager is not just one disengaged employee. It is a multiplier.
What Is Actually Squeezing the Manager Layer
The pressures converging on middle managers in 2024 and 2025 were not subtle. U.S. employers were advertising 42% fewer middle management positions at the end of 2024 than they did in spring 2022, according to workforce analytics data tracked by multiple labor market firms. The message this sends to every manager still in their seat is unambiguous: your role may not exist in two years.
At the same time, those same managers were being asked to implement AI tools they hadn’t been trained on, enforce return-to-office mandates many privately disagreed with, and maintain team performance through organizational restructures that eliminated the people they used to rely on. A November 2024 report from digital coaching platform meQuilibrium predicted a “manager crash” was coming in 2025. It was right: 82% of managers now report experiencing burnout, compared to 73% of individual contributors.
Almost 40% of a manager’s workday is spent on administrative tasks and last-minute problem resolution rather than the people leadership and strategic work that make the role meaningful. The job description says “lead.” The calendar says “coordinate, escalate, and explain.”
Harvard Business Review’s February 2026 analysis found that AI, rather than reducing workload as promised, is intensifying it for many managers. They are now expected to supervise both human and AI outputs without additional time, training or clarity on accountability. The workload isn’t lighter. It’s just differently distributed.
Why the Under-35 and Female Manager Declines Deserve Separate Attention
The five-point drop among managers under 35 is not a general disillusionment story. It reflects a specific misalignment between what younger managers were told the role would look like and what they are actually experiencing.
Younger workers, across multiple studies, report placing higher value on clarity, development support and meaningful work than prior generations did at the same career stage. The manager role, as currently designed in most organizations, delivers the opposite: ambiguity about authority, limited development investment, and work that is overwhelmingly reactive. This is not a generational values problem. It is a job design problem.
The seven-point drop among female managers tells a related but distinct story. Research on decision load and burnout has consistently shown that female managers carry disproportionate informal workloads, including emotional labor, conflict mediation and mentoring requests that fall outside formal job descriptions. When engagement drops as steeply as Gallup measured, it typically signals that the informal tax has become unsustainable.
Both groups share one characteristic: they are the managers most likely to leave. The people companies most need to retain are the ones the data says are most at risk.
The Cascade Problem
The 70% figure is the one executive teams should be paying the most attention to, and are largely ignoring. Gallup has published this finding for years: managers account for 70% of team engagement variance. A three-point drop in manager engagement at scale does not stay contained. It moves downstream.
Look at the downstream numbers in Gallup’s same report. Global employee engagement fell two points to 21% in 2024. The timing is not coincidental. Teams don’t disengage in isolation. They disengage in response to what they observe in their managers.
This is also why traditional engagement interventions, employee surveys, perks programs, communication campaigns, rarely move the needle. They target individual contributors without addressing the layer that determines how those contributors experience the organization day to day. The early warning signs of team burnout almost always show up in the manager first.
What the Organizations Reversing This Trend Are Doing
Gallup’s own data contains the clearest answer. Managers who receive structured training are half as likely to be actively disengaged as those without it. That is not a marginal improvement. It is a 50% reduction in the most costly form of disengagement. Participants in training focused on management best practices showed up to 22% higher personal engagement, and teams led by those participants saw engagement rise by up to 18%.
Combine training with active development support and manager thriving increases from 28% to 34% with training alone, then to 50% when development support is added. The organizations building manager development systems that work are not doing anything exotic. They are doing the basic development work that most companies claim to prioritize and don’t actually fund.
The other intervention Gallup flags is structural: review the job design itself. If 40% of a manager’s time is consumed by administrative work, no amount of training will fix the engagement problem. The work itself has to change. This means fewer direct reports in some cases, clearer decision rights and active protection of the time managers need to actually lead their people.
Gallup’s data also reinforces that annual feedback cycles are too slow to address a problem moving this fast. Managers need real-time clarity, not year-end appraisals. Organizations still running annual performance reviews as their primary feedback mechanism are structurally behind.
My Perspective
The 12-year framing matters more than the three-point drop. Gallup has been measuring this since before the financial crisis, and manager engagement has historically absorbed downturns without breaking. The fact that it dropped twice in 12 years, with the second drop landing hardest on under-35 and female managers specifically, suggests something structural is changing, not just cyclical. Companies treating this as a temporary dip are making a category error. The manager layer is being asked to absorb every major organizational transition simultaneously, from AI implementation to RTO enforcement to headcount reduction, without the structural support that would make any single one of those asks reasonable. The organizations that reverse this trend will not do it with an engagement survey. They will do it by redesigning what the manager job actually is.