Every week, Built. Not Born. explores timeless leadership principles and practical frameworks to help you build better teams, stronger organizations, and, most importantly, a life by design.

There's a conversation I'm having with managers more often than I used to, and it almost never starts with "I hate my job." Usually it's the opposite. These are people who care deeply about their teams, want them to win, and genuinely believe in what the company is trying to do.

What I hear instead is the particular kind of tired that comes from living in the middle. Managers are asked to absorb the priorities and pressure coming down from senior leadership while answering the needs and frustrations coming up from their teams. They own the results the business needs and, at the same time, they're supposed to build a place where their people can actually do good work.

Leadership changes direction, and the manager explains why. The budget tightens, and the manager finds a way to hold performance with less. Someone leaves and isn't replaced, so the manager absorbs part of the load and hands out the rest. People want more flexibility, development, feedback, recognition, and a clearer sense of their future—and the manager is expected to provide all of it. Then the engagement survey comes back below where leadership wanted it, and someone asks who's going to fix it.

The manager.

I've spent a lot of years around organizations—first leading inside them, now coaching the people who do—and I'm not sure we've fully reckoned with what we've asked managers to become. Coach, communicator, culture carrier, problem solver, performance manager, change agent, mentor, mediator, and increasingly the human translation layer between what leadership wants and what employees are actually living. Maybe it's time we asked a different question: who's taking care of the manager?

Recent Gallup research gives us a good reason to ask it. Global manager engagement has fallen from 31% in 2022 to just 22% in 2025, while individual-contributor engagement has stayed comparatively stable—which led Gallup to conclude that the drop in manager engagement accounts for much of the recent decline in employee engagement overall.

That's worth sitting with. Companies pour enormous time into employee engagement. We survey it, measure it, build programs around it, and increasingly hand managers the bill for it. Up to a point, that makes sense; a person's relationship with their manager shapes how they experience work more than almost anything else. But there's a contradiction underneath it we don't talk about enough. We're asking managers to manufacture engagement for everyone else while a growing number of them are losing their own.

You can't build an engaged organization on the backs of disengaged managers.

That doesn't let managers off the hook. When you accept responsibility for other people, real expectations come with it. But organizations carry responsibility too—and we may be asking managers to create conditions for their teams that we never bothered to create for the managers themselves.

Part of why managers matter so much is that they're the point where almost every corporate decision finally becomes a human experience. A restructuring can look clean in a slide deck, but the manager is the one who has to sit across from the people it affects and explain what it means. A new productivity target is just a number on a spreadsheet until a manager looks at an already-stretched team and has to figure out how they'll actually hit it. A new strategy sounds exciting at the all-hands, right up until an employee asks, "What does this actually mean for "me?"—and the manager has to answer.

That's the job. Managers have to make sense of both worlds at once: what the business is trying to accomplish and what it's like to be one of the people asked to accomplish it. When those two things line up, management is some of the most rewarding work there is. When they don't, the manager is the one caught in the squeeze—asked to carry decisions they didn't help make explain changes they don't fully understand, and hold their team's trust even when they don't have all the answers, while leadership still expects performance to hold and engagement to climb.

The problem was never that we ask managers to do hard things. Leadership has always been hard. The problem is that we keep stacking responsibilities onto the role without ever asking what should come off the plate to make room.

For years, organizations have been told that managers are one of the biggest drivers of employee engagement. Somewhere along the way, we turned that one insight into the answer for nearly every problem we've got. People aren't engaged? Train the managers. Turnover's climbing? Coach the managers. Nobody feels recognized, so managers need to recognize them more. People want career growth, so managers need better development conversations. Nobody understands the strategy, so managers need to communicate it better.

None of those asks is unreasonable on its own—good managers should be doing most of them. But pile them all together and something shifts: we start treating the manager as the fix for problems that were created somewhere else entirely. A manager can't build clarity around a strategy they were never let in on. It's awfully hard to sell trust in senior leadership when the manager doesn't trust leadership either. And we shouldn't be shocked when someone struggles to create ownership on their team after we handed them accountability without any real authority.

Managers have enormous influence over engagement, but they don't control the whole employee experience—and the difference matters. If we're serious about fixing engagement, we might spend a little less time asking, "What should managers do differently?" and a little more time asking, "What are we asking managers to work within?"

I wonder if part of this is simpler than we make it. We've put too much on the manager's plate. We've layered on meetings, reporting, administration, approvals, dashboards, compliance, new tools, and a never-ending stream of initiatives. Now AI is a whole new wave they're expected to understand, adopt, and help their teams navigate. Then, somewhere in the gaps between all of it, we expect them to find time to lead.

What if we've got that backwards? What if leadership isn't the thing managers get to after the "real" work is done—what if leadership is the work? Know your people. Set clear expectations. Tell them the truth. Coach them, challenge them, and develop them. Clear the obstacles you can. Give them room to make the call. Hold them to the standard when they miss it, and mean it when you recognize them for clearing it. None of that is revolutionary. It's also nearly impossible to do well when a manager's calendar leaves no actual room to manage.

And this is where the Gallup data gets interesting, because the decline isn't inevitable. In Gallup's best-practice organizations, 79% of managers were engaged in 2025, against just 22% globally. That's not a rounding error—that's a canyon. Which tells me management hasn't become an impossible job. Some organizations have just made it one.

At High Achiever, one of our foundational beliefs is that People Matter Most. When we say it, we tend to picture the people being led first—are we giving them room to grow? Are we developing them? Are we challenging them without tearing them down? Are we building places where people do meaningful work and come out better for having been there? Those questions matter deeply.

But managers are people too. They need clarity about where the organization is headed. They need coaching and development of their own. They need enough authority to carry the responsibility we've dropped on them. They need senior leaders willing to explain the why behind a decision instead of just handing down the next initiative. And every so often, they need someone to ask how they're doing before asking what they're doing about everyone else.

Supporting managers doesn't mean lowering the bar for them—I'd argue it means raising it. If managers really are as central to performance as we keep saying, then we ought to invest in developing and backing them as seriously as we measure the results we're demanding from them.

If you're a manager, I'd ask you to look at your week and consider one question:

Pay attention to the answer. You may discover that the things taking most of your time aren't necessarily the things creating the most value for the people you lead.

And if you lead managers, I'd ask a different and probably harder question:

Have we given our managers what they need to lead well, or have we simply made them responsible for everything we want fixed? Look at their calendars. Look at how many people they're responsible for. Look at the number of initiatives they're carrying. Consider how much authority they actually have compared with the accountability you've placed on them.

Then ask yourself honestly whether you've created the conditions for them to become the leaders you're expecting them to be.

This is exactly the kind of question we explore on On the Shoulders of Giants. We ask managers to create engaged, committed teams, but we rarely stop to consider whether we've created the conditions for managers themselves to feel that same commitment.

In Episode #13, Emotional Commitment: The Missing Link Between Leadership and High Performance, I explore what it takes to create an environment where people don't simply show up and do their jobs, but genuinely care about the work they're doing and the people they're doing it with. If we're asking managers to create that kind of commitment in their teams, we should first be asking whether we're creating it for them.

If this week's conversation about managers resonated with you, this is a good place to go deeper.

Whether you prefer to watch or listen, we'd love to have you join the conversation.

🎙️ Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you subscribe to podcasts.

📺 Watch on YouTube @HighAchieverLeadership.

If someone forwarded this newsletter to you, we'd love to welcome you to subscribe to the Built. Not Born. community. And if you know a manager who's caught in the middle right now, forward this newsletter to them. Better yet, if you lead that manager, don't just forward it. Ask them how they're doing—and give them enough time to actually answer.

For years I’ve said: Poor leaders hurt people. Great leaders change lives.

If we want more great leaders, though, we have to pay attention to the environment we're asking them to lead in.

Managers occupy one of the most important, and increasingly difficult, positions inside an organization. They're close enough to leadership to feel the pressure coming down and close enough to their people to feel the frustration coming up. We shouldn't expect them to absorb both indefinitely and somehow remain unaffected.

They're also the people closest to the work and closest to the people doing it. That makes them far too important to ignore.

Maybe it's time we stopped asking managers to fix employee engagement long enough to ask whether we've given them a workplace worth engaging in.

Until next week, keep building.

- Jeff Wells

Source: Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2025