As published on Medium.com
I ran a supermarket for over a decade. As a manager, I recognized my people constantly — employee of the month, spot awards, a word on the floor when someone stayed late to clean up a mess. However, it was rare that anyone at my level ever got recognized. In fact, we didn’t expect to — managers were supposed to keep the store running and the team happy.
That is not a complaint. It is the job as it was designed, and most managers would tell you the same thing. But new data suggests that design has started to fail in a way that shows up on the P&L.
Manager Engagement Down Significantly
Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 found that global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, its lowest level since 2020, at an estimated cost of $10 trillion in lost productivity. The striking part is not the headline number, but rather where the decline came from. Manager engagement dropped from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025 — a nine-point collapse, with the steepest fall coming last year. Over that same stretch, non-manager engagement barely moved, from 20% to 19%.
The report’s conclusion is blunt: managers used to enjoy an engagement premium at work, but it has essentially vanished. They are now about as engaged as the people they lead.
This should concern anyone running an operation, because managers are not simply another employee segment. One of the most durable findings in engagement research is that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in team engagement. When the layer that drives team engagement disengages, the effect does not stay contained. It runs downhill.
Manager’s Workload Up Significantly
And the root causes are not mysterious. Organizations have spent three years flattening. Research on span of control finds the average U.S. manager now has 12.1 direct reports, up from 8.2 in 2013 — a nearly 50% increase. Meanwhile, 97% of managers still carry individual contributor work alongside leading people, spending a median 40% of their time on it. We have asked managers both to do more managing and more of their old job at the same time in a misguided attempt at “efficiency.”
What we have not done is recognize them for it.
Here is the part that should stop executives cold. The the most widely used engagement instrument in the world, Gallups’ Q12 survey, has participants respond to this question: “In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise for doing good work.” Managers are trained to regularly recognize their teams. After all, they are measured on whether their people can answer yes to this question. However, virtually no recognition program in corporate America is built to make sure the manager can answer yes, too. This is the manager recognition blind spot.
Companies recognize the frontline, sometimes. They reward executives, always. The layer in between gives recognition and receives none.
And the human cost is measurable. The same research also found that compared with individual contributors, leaders are more likely to report experiencing stress (+7 points), anger (+12), sadness (+11), and loneliness (+10). Leadership offers little upside in positive emotion either: leaders are less likely than individual contributors to smiling or laughing at work — increasingly, promotions are adding responsibility and stripping away the parts of work employees enjoy.
Recognition is the Key
The encouraging news is that the fix is neither expensive nor complicated. In the same span-of-control research, employees who strongly agreed they had received meaningful feedback in the past week were engaged at a rate of roughly seven in ten, compared with one in four among those who did not. And this held regardless of team size. The conversations do not need to be long — 15 to 30 minutes, done consistently, is enough. And when employees describe what makes feedback meaningful, recognition and appreciation for recent work sits at the top of the list.
If that works for employees, it works for managers. The difference is that for employees, we build systems to make sure it happens. For managers, we leave it to chance.
Practically, closing the gap means three things. Recognition programs need to name managers as a recipient population, not just an administrative one. Recognition of managers should reward coaching and team outcomes rather than only their individual numbers — otherwise we are still paying them to be individual contributors who happen to have direct reports. And someone above them has to be accountable for the weekly conversation, in the same way managers are held accountable for having it with their own teams.
Addressing the Problem
None of this is theoretical. Within the best-practice organizations Gallup studied, 79% of managers were engaged in 2025 — nearly four times the global average. So, the collapse isn’t something happening to these companies. On the contrary, it’s something they’re choosing, quietly, by not addressing this issue at all. Companies will keep flattening. AI will keep compressing layers. But this makes the managers who remain more consequential, not less. The organizations that come through the next few years with their execution intact will be the ones that noticed, well before the resignation letter landed, that the person holding everything together had not heard a word of thanks in a year.
