What Is the Manager's Work Becoming?

Manager engagement has fallen sharply in recent years. Before asking managers to do more to engage their teams, it may be worth looking at how the work of managing itself has changed.

Something interesting is happening with managers at work.

Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace report found that global manager engagement fell from 31 percent in 2022 to 22 percent in 2025. Over the same period, engagement among non-managers moved from 20 percent to 19 percent.

Gallup concludes that lower engagement among managers accounts for most of the recent downturn in employee engagement.

That's important because managers have an outsized influence on the experience of the people they lead. But before asking managers what they need to do differently, there may be another question worth considering.

What is the manager's work becoming?

Managing sits in the middle

Managers occupy an unusual position in an organization.

They are responsible for results while also helping other people produce results. They translate organizational priorities into day-to-day work. They deal with problems that move upward from their teams and expectations that move downward from the organization.

They hire, develop, communicate, coordinate, make decisions, manage performance and respond when something doesn't go according to plan.

Much of this has always been part of management.

But the context in which managers are doing it continues to change. Organizations restructure. Teams become leaner. Technology changes the work. Expectations around flexibility evolve. Priorities move quickly. Managers are often responsible for helping people make sense of those changes while making sense of them themselves.

More responsibility doesn't always look like more work

When a role becomes more demanding, we tend to think in terms of workload. More people. More meetings. More projects. Longer hours.

Those things matter, but they don't capture everything that can make management harder.

A manager may be spending more time resolving competing priorities, coordinating across functions, translating unclear direction, helping people through change or making decisions with incomplete information.

None of those necessarily appears as another item in a job description.

They show up in the experience of doing the job.

Managers can compensate for a long time

Capable managers often find ways to make things work.

They absorb another responsibility. Step into a gap. Have the extra conversation. Solve the problem themselves. Protect the team from confusion somewhere else in the organization.

The results may continue to look fine.

That makes it easy to conclude that the arrangement is working.

But continued performance doesn't necessarily tell us what producing that performance now requires from the manager.

A role can remain productive while becoming considerably harder to sustain.

There is also the question of learning

Management should provide considerable opportunity to build capability.

Managers encounter different people, difficult decisions, competing interests and situations for which there is rarely a perfect answer. Experience can develop judgment in ways that no management course can fully reproduce.

But experience doesn't automatically produce development.

If most of a manager's attention is spent responding, coordinating and resolving the next immediate issue, there may be less opportunity to step back, understand what happened and carry something useful into the next situation.

The manager may be accumulating experience without getting as much learning from that experience as they could.

What does managing give back?

There is another part of the job that may receive even less attention.

Many people move into management because there is something about the work they find worthwhile. They like developing people. Building a strong team. Solving problems together. Helping someone become more capable. Seeing what a group of people can accomplish.

Those experiences can make demanding work deeply satisfying.

But they have to remain present in the job.

If more of the manager's time is consumed by coordination, administration, organizational friction and constant response, the parts of managing that once gave something back can occupy less of the experience.

The job may still be the same on paper while feeling quite different to the person doing it.

Training may be part of the answer, but not the whole answer

When managers struggle, one common response is to give them more tools.

Teach better feedback. Better coaching. Better delegation. Better communication. Better performance conversations.

Those skills can be valuable.

But skills don't exist independently of the conditions in which people are expected to use them.

A manager can know how to have a thoughtful development conversation and still have too little time to have one. They can understand delegation while working in a system where responsibilities remain unclear. They can become better at prioritizing while receiving priorities that continually compete with one another.

Sometimes the person needs to develop. Sometimes the conditions surrounding the work deserve attention too.

Look at the manager's Work Frame

The decline in manager engagement doesn't tell us exactly why an individual manager's experience has changed. It does give us a reason to look more closely.

What is it taking for managers to produce the results expected of them?

Is the experience of managing continuing to build their capability?

And does the work still provide enough meaning, connection, satisfaction and sense of contribution to remain worthwhile?

Those are questions about Performance, Learning and Enjoyment, but they're also questions about the work itself.

Before asking managers to become better managers, it may be worth understanding what we're asking them to manage.