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Manager Engagement is the Key to a Company’s Future

Manager Engagement is the Key to a Company’s Future

2025 Trends Part 1

Tim Hagen
September 01, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes

In this issue…

Manager Engagement is the Key to a Company’s Future: 2025 Trends Part 1 - by Tim Hagen
Extra Insights: A New Operating Model for People Management: More Personal, More Tech, More Human (McKinsey)
Weekly Motivation Boost: Live By Truth, Aim for Good - Discipline Your Thoughts, Absolute Motivation (YouTube)
Action for the Week: Stop Waiting
Together with the Coaching Circle: Shape the future of business leadership to be a force for good

🎯 EXPERT OF THE WEEK

Manager Engagement is the Key to a Company’s Future: 2025 Trends Part 1

By Tim Hagen

As a C-suite executive, you hold the power to shape your company’s culture, performance and long-term success. But even with the best business strategies and visionary goals, you may be overlooking one critical factor—manager engagement.

Gallup’s 2025 State of the Global Workplace report reveals alarming trends that highlight a major challenge in the workplace: disengaged managers are holding back company performance.

When managers are disengaged, it affects their teams, which ultimately impacts the bottom line. These strategies can help re-engage your leaders to drive performance, retain top talent and build a positive culture. We break down the analysis and suggestions to address manager engagement into five parts. In today’s issue, we’ll discuss the first part, Organizational Strategy.

Manager Engagement in Organizational Success

It’s a common understanding that employees don’t leave companies—they leave managers. Manager engagement directly impacts team performance, productivity and morale. Disengaged managers have teams more likely to follow the behavior, leading to decreased engagement and performance.

Statistic: Gallup’s findings reveal that 70% of team engagement is influenced by the manager. If your managers are disengaged, their teams are more likely to be disengaged as well, resulting in a vicious cycle that affects every level of your organization. The disengagement of managers has been linked to higher absenteeism, turnover and lower productivity across teams.

Action 1: Prioritize Manager Development Programs

Invest in manager training and development to re-motivate the leadership team. Equip them with the tools, knowledge and support they need to lead effectively and engage their teams.

What to do: Create formal leadership development programs that focus on coaching, emotional intelligence, conflict management and performance leadership. This investment will empower managers to take ownership of their teams’ engagement levels and drive better performance.
How: Consider integrating regular leadership assessments to identify managers who may need additional support or training, ensuring that everyone receives tailored development based on their unique needs and challenges. Consider bringing in an executive leadership coach that can work with the whole management team.

Action 2: Offer Regular Leadership Check-ins

Recognize disengagement to start to understand the why behind it. Establish a system where senior leaders check in regularly with managers to discuss challenges, provide feedback and offer support.

What to do: Implement quarterly one-on-one meetings between managers and their senior leaders to discuss workload, stress and team dynamics. Consider using a structured feedback system, like EAT Feedback from Progress Coaching, and even using a feedback survey system such as Jotforms, etc.
How: Use these sessions to assess how managers are performing, offer constructive feedback, and provide solutions to alleviate their challenges, ultimately improving their engagement levels and job satisfaction.

Engaged managers create a positive and successful organization. Next time, we’ll look at manager well-being, a vital component of engagement and the criticality to an organization’s overall health.

TIM HAGEN is a renowned workplace leadership coach and CEO/Founder of Progress Coaching, a pioneer in the workplace coaching movement with over 30 years of experience helping organizations increase engagement, develop and retain top talent, and create strong workplace cultures by developing managers into coaches.