What to Do When Your
Managers Are Running on Empty
Gallup’s newest data found something more useful than the headline number, and if you lead managers it is worth ten minutes of your attention.
The number everyone quoted from Gallup’s 2026 report was that global employee engagement fell to twenty percent, the lowest since 2020, costing an estimated ten trillion dollars in lost productivity.
That is a big number and it is almost useless to you on a Monday morning. Nobody can act on ten trillion dollars.
The finding underneath it is the one worth your time.
Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 report found manager engagement fell from thirty one percent in 2022 to twenty two percent in 2025, with the steepest single drop between 2024 and 2025. Managers used to enjoy what Gallup calls an engagement premium over the people they lead. That premium has largely closed. The report also found leaders are less likely than individual contributors to say they smiled or laughed a lot the previous day. See the report.
Read those three numbers together, because the third one changes what the first two mean.
Manager engagement collapsed by nine points in three years. And organizations that handle this well are running at seventy nine percent, close to four times the global average.
That gap is the whole story. If everyone were at twenty two percent you would be looking at a weather event, something happening to all of us that nobody controls. A four-fold spread between the average and the best means this is a design choice, and some organizations are simply making a different one.
Why the manager layer matters more than the average
Every change your organization is trying to make runs through managers. Every new system, every restructure, every efficiency push, every attempt to do more with the same headcount. They are the layer that turns a decision made in a room into something that actually happens on a Tuesday.
Which means a manager who is running on empty does not just have a personal problem. They become the point where change quietly stops moving, and nobody can see it happening from above.
When managers are as depleted as the people they lead, you do not just lose morale. You lose the organization’s ability to change anything.
If you think that might be happening in your organization, here is what to look for and what can help.
A four-fold gap
between the average and the best
is not weather. It is a choice.
How to tell if it is happening where you are
This does not show up on a dashboard, and it will not show up in an engagement survey either, because the people most likely to answer carefully are the ones with time to answer carefully.
It shows up in behavior. Five things worth looking for:
- Your managers have stopped bringing you problems. Not because there are fewer, but because raising one now costs more energy than absorbing it. This is the earliest signal and the easiest to misread as things going well.
- One to ones have become status updates. All reporting, no development, no honest conversation. When someone is depleted, the developmental part of the job is the first thing that quietly gets dropped.
- People are declining promotions into management. Your individual contributors can see what the job costs. If they are turning it down, they are telling you something about the role that no survey will.
- Your best manager sounds like your most tired employee. The engagement premium closing is not abstract. It sounds like a specific person you would once have described as your strongest leader.
- Nobody takes real time off. Or they take it and answer everything anyway, which is worse, because it teaches everyone below them that this is what the job requires.
What I would actually do about it
None of this is complicated. It is mostly a question of whether you are willing to do the unglamorous version rather than the announcement version.
What actually helps
- Ask them, then be quiet long enough to get a real answer. Not in a survey. In a conversation, one at a time, with the question asked plainly: what part of this job is costing you the most right now? Then do not defend anything. The first answer will be polite. The second one, if you wait, is the real one.
- Ask them what their purpose is. Not the company’s purpose, theirs. Then help them see how it connects to what the organization is trying to do. People can carry a great deal when they know why they are carrying it, and they run out fast when the work has become a list of tasks that could belong to anyone. This is how you leave people better rather than just retain them.
- Show real appreciation, specifically. Not a shout-out in a meeting and not a generic thank you. Name the thing they did, name what it made possible, and do it close enough to the moment that they know you were paying attention. Managers are usually the ones giving recognition and the last ones receiving it.
- Build the relationship before you need it. People want to feel seen and heard, and that is not built in the conversation where something is wrong. It is built in the twenty ordinary conversations before it. If the only time you go deep with a manager is when there is a problem, they will learn to bring you fewer problems.
- Look at accountability versus authority. Most depleted managers are not carrying too much work. They are carrying responsibility for outcomes they do not have the authority to change, which is exhausting in a way that volume alone is not. Find one decision you can give back this quarter.
- Give them room to grow, inside the walls and outside them. Managers spend their development budget and their time on the people below them and quietly stop growing themselves. Give them a stretch project internally, and back them going to the conference, joining the association, taking the certification. People who are growing do not burn out at the same rate, and the ones you invest in are rarely the ones who leave.
- Subtract before you add, and make the job survivable rather than heroic. The instinct is to add support, and adding a program to an overloaded person is another thing on the list. Remove something first, starting with reporting nobody reads. And if the role only works for someone answering email at ten at night, you have not built a role, you have built a filter that keeps selecting for people who burn out.
What you are really protecting
There is a bigger reason to take this seriously than any one manager’s week.
You have to protect the right of great people to work with great people. That is one of the real responsibilities of leading an organization, and it is easy to lose sight of when you are managing numbers. Your best people did not come for the compensation band. They came to work alongside people who are good at this and who care, and they will leave when that stops being true long before they complain about anything else.
Your managers are the ones holding that together. They set the standard on their team, they decide what gets tolerated, and they are the reason someone either stays or quietly starts looking. Which means a depleted manager is not just a person having a hard year. They are the point where the culture starts eroding, one team at a time, usually without anyone noticing until good people have already gone.
So making sure they feel valued and appreciated is not a soft item on a list. It is how you keep the thing that made your organization worth joining.
Culture is like hot clay. If you do not keep working with it, it begins to sag.
That is the part people underestimate. Culture is not something you set once, announce, and put on a wall. It stays in shape only while somebody keeps their hands on it, and the moment attention moves elsewhere it starts settling into whatever shape gravity gives it.
Your managers are the hands. If they are running on empty, nobody is working the clay.
The part that is actually within your control
You cannot fix global engagement, and you cannot do much about the economy your people are reading about. What you can do is decide which side of that four-fold gap your organization sits on, and that decision gets made in small unglamorous choices rather than in an announcement.
If you lead managers, the most useful thing you can do this week is have one honest conversation with one of them and actually listen to the answer. Not a program. A conversation.
And if you are the manager reading this, running on empty and wondering whether anyone above you has noticed: the same question works upward. Most people are waiting for someone else to raise it. Somebody has to go first, and going first is available to you today.
Gallup found manager engagement fell from thirty one percent to twenty two percent in three years, closing the premium managers once held over their teams. But best-practice organizations sit at seventy nine percent, which means this is a design choice rather than something happening to everyone. Watch for managers who stopped bringing you problems and people declining promotions. Then ask what is costing them most, ask what their purpose is and connect it to the mission, show real appreciation, give back authority, and give them room to grow. Subtract before you add.
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