Managers Are Quiet Cracking Too: What the 2026 Gallup Data Means for HR

If you read my recent post on the five signs of quiet cracking on your team, here's the part I intentionally set aside for this post. The people responsible for noticing quiet cracking are cracking themselves.

Gallup just released its 2026 State of the Global Workplace report, and the headline isn't the 20% engagement number or the $10 trillion productivity loss. The headline tells us how managers are quiet cracking too.

Manager engagement has fallen from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025. That is a nine-point drop in three years, and the biggest single-year fall happened between 2024 and 2025. Individual contributor engagement has stayed roughly flat. Managers have lost what Gallup used to call the "engagement premium." They are now about as engaged as the people they lead, and they report higher stress, more sadness, and more loneliness than anyone else in the org chart.

If your strategy for the next twelve months doesn't have managers at the center of it, you're missing the actual story.

The Data: What the 2026 Gallup Report Shows

Gallup's research shows four findings that matter most for HR:

1. Global engagement is at 20%, the lowest level since the 2020 pandemic year. This is the first time Gallup has ever recorded two consecutive years of declining engagement.

2. Manager engagement is at 22%, down from 31% in 2022. The biggest single-year drop, five points, occurred between 2024 and 2025.

3. 70% of the variance in team engagement comes from the manager. This is the most important number in the entire body of Gallup research. Team engagement is not a culture problem. It is a manager problem.

4. Only 44% of managers have ever received any formal management training. 

   Among managers who do receive training, active disengagement is cut in half.

Translation: the lever you have the most control over, whether your managers are equipped, is the lever almost no one is pulling.

Why Managers Are Quietly Cracking Faster Than Their Teams

Talk to managers right now and you'll hear the same things I hear in my coaching practice.

They are being asked to lead through more change, more uncertainty, and more emotional weight than at any point in their careers. They are managing AI-driven restructuring, hybrid team dynamics, and the residue of pandemic-era disruption, often without any new tools to do it. They are absorbing the team's anxiety on top of their own. They are caught between executive demands and team realities, and they were never trained for the translation work. They feel personally responsible for retention, performance, and morale, and personally exposed when any of those slip.

Most managers were promoted because they were excellent individual contributors. That is a completely different skill set from leading other humans through high-stakes change. And the assumption that they will pick it up on the job has stopped working.

The Engagement Premium

For most of the last decade, managers were measurably more engaged than the people they led. They had more autonomy, more visibility, more reason to be invested. That gap, the "engagement premium," is essentially gone.

The implications are bigger than the number itself. When managers were more engaged than their teams, they could carry the team through hard stretches. They modeled commitment. They absorbed difficulty without passing it down. Now, increasingly, managers are passing their own disengagement down, not because they're bad managers, but because they're depleted.

This is what I see in coaching engagements again and again. The manager isn't failing. The manager is under supported.

What Managers Say They Need

In my work with managers and leadership teams, the unmet needs are remarkably consistent across industries.

First, practical language for the conversations they've been avoiding. Most managers know there's tension on the team. They just don't know how to name it without making it worse.

Second, permission to step out of the "fixer" role and into the role of facilitator.

Third, a space to practice the hard moments before they happen. Managers need to rehearse delivering bad news, addressing a performance issue, or responding to an emotional reaction. They don't get this in a once-a-year leadership offsite.

And fourth, a way to develop their own self-awareness as leaders. This is the work most under-invested in across HR. Self-awareness is the foundation of every other leadership skill.

Two of these deserve a closer look.

The Shift from Fixer to Facilitator

The most damaging assumption in management culture is that a good manager solves the problem in front of them. Real leadership is the opposite. It is empowering the people in conflict to find their own way forward.

Watch what happens when a manager or HR rep steps in to "solve" a team conflict. The conversation almost immediately defaults to who's right, who's wrong, who's to blame. That framing is poison for a team. Even the person declared "right" usually loses, because everyone learns that disagreement gets resolved through judgment from above rather than through honest conversation between the people involved.

The deeper problem is that the right-versus-wrong frame is almost always false. In conflict, there is rarely one truth. There is the reality each person is experiencing from where they stand, shaped by their own story and their own perspective. Mediators call this "two truths, at least." Blame collapses both truths into one verdict, and in doing so, it denies the actual conflict instead of resolving it.

The shift managers need to learn is from blame to curiosity. From verdict to solutions. From "I'll figure out what to do" to "what do you both want, and what is getting in the way?" That is the work of a mediator, and it is a skill set every manager can learn.

There is another discipline managers need to learn from this practice: mediators don't give advice. Their work is to ask better questions, to reflect what they hear, to hold space without filling it. For managers whose entire training and instinct is to fix, this is the harder retraining. A practical first move is to start any difficult conversation with one question: "Do you want me to listen, or do you want me to give advice?" Most of the time the answer is listening, because most of the time people need to vent before they can think clearly. Venting is not wasted time. It is how people move from feeling to figuring out. Managers who jump to advice cut that process off before it can happen. The mismatch is exhausting for everyone.

It also includes neutrality, which is an easy concept to misunderstand. Neutral does not mean detached, and it does not mean fence-sitting. A manager can be for one person without being against another. They can advocate for one team member's growth and accountability while holding the same space for the colleague that person is in conflict with. They can be fully present for both without taking sides.

Especially for HR, there is a practical reminder built into this. When someone comes to you with a conflict, you are only ever hearing one side. Their experience is real, and their feelings are legitimate, but their account is one truth out of at least two. Forming an opinion before the other person has been heard is one of the easiest ways to make a conflict worse. Neutrality starts with discipline about how much you actually know yet.

Influence Is the Real Job

Most managers think their job is decisions. It isn', always. Their job is influence. They are the people who make other people willing to bring their best work, raise concerns early, and stay through hard stretches.

But influence doesn't get handed out with a title. It gets built, in a specific order.

Self-awareness builds credibility. Credibility builds trust. Trust builds influence.

If a manager doesn't know their own patterns, triggers, and blind spots, their behavior will be inconsistent. Inconsistent behavior erodes credibility. Eroded credibility kills trust. And without trust, the manager has no influence, no matter how good their strategy is. The team will nod in the meeting and disengage afterward.

Here is an interesting truth in my work with organizations around conflict management:  I often get called in to work with teams who are struggling.  Yet team problems almost always mirror the same problems in management and leadership. People will never do what we say. They'll model what we do. We can be so busy evaluating other people that we spend very little time, or energy, looking at what we're bringing to the table.  And quite honestly, we all have our blind spots.  It’s part of being human.

This is why coaching that develops self-awareness in managers is not a soft investment. It is the most direct path to the influence those managers need to do their job. And it is the lever the 2026 Gallup data is begging HR to pull.

What Brené Brown's Research Says About Manager Development

I'm not the only person making this case. Brené Brown has spent the better part of two decades studying what makes leaders effective in difficult environments, and her conclusions track closely with what I see in coaching practice.

In her 2018 book Dare to Lead, drawn from a seven-year study including interviews with 150 global C-suite executives, Brown identified what top leaders said they need most for the future. The answer that emerged again and again was the same: braver leaders who can have hard conversations. She separated leaders into two camps. Armored leaders tap out of hard conversations, manage through compliance and control, and lead with certainty rather than curiosity. Daring leaders skill up for the hard conversations, lead with empathy and accountability, and stay open to learning instead of defaulting to being right.

Brown's newest book, Strong Ground (Random House, 2025), draws on six years of working with more than 150,000 leaders in 45 countries through her Dare to Lead programs. The argument she lands on is one I find deeply aligned with the 2026 Gallup data and with my own work. Leadership in volatile environments depends on a foundation of personal stability rooted in self-awareness, vulnerability, and connection. Leaders without that ground beneath them cannot offer steadiness to anyone else. They cannot lean into a hard conversation. They cannot influence. They cannot consistently show up.

The pattern across Brown's research and mine is the same. Courage in leadership isn't a personality trait. Stability isn't either. They are learned competencies. And the skill set that lets a manager rumble with a hard conversation instead of tapping out is the skill set conflict coaching is designed to build.

There aren't people problems. There are skills gaps. And the gap at the manager level, the gap that determines whether your manager leans in or pulls back, is what we close in coaching.

Why Conflict Coaching Is the Highest-Leverage Investment You Can Make Right Now

When I talk with HR leaders about coaching for their managers, the most common pushback is some version of "we can't afford to invest at that scale." The honest math says you can't afford not to.

Consider what the data shows. 70% of team engagement variance is driven by the manager. Best-practice organizations have 79% manager engagement, nearly four times the global average. That difference is built through training and support, not talent acquisition. Active disengagement is cut in half among managers who receive training.

You are already paying for disengagement. You are paying for it in turnover, in absenteeism, in the slow erosion of your best people's confidence. Conflict coaching for managers is one of the few interventions where the return is both measurable and fast.

What HR Pros Will Learn at SHRM26

This is the conversation I'll be having at the SHRM Annual Conference in Orlando on Monday, June 15, in a preconference workshop called From Fixer to Facilitator: Mediation Skills Every HR Professional Can Use.

The premise of the workshop: HR pros are constantly being pulled into manager-level conflicts they shouldn't be solving themselves. They need the same mediation and coaching skills I teach to managers, both to support the managers they coach and to know when to step back and let the manager handle it.

If you're attending SHRM26, the workshop runs Monday, June 15, from 1:00 to 5:00 PM. I'll also be doing a card-signing in the SHRM bookstore after the presentation. If you're not attending, the data and frameworks behind it are the same ones I bring to organizations every week.

The Path Forward: Stop Treating Manager Support as Optional

I help people resolve conflict. I do not resolve conflict. They do. What I can teach is the skill set that gives managers the language, the self-awareness, and the practical tools to do their actual job: build the trust that produces influence that produces engagement that produces results.

The 2026 Gallup data is a call to action for HR. The cost of waiting is no longer theoretical. The data has named it. The question is what your organization will do about it.

If your managers are showing the signs I described in Quiet Cracking: 5 Warning Signs and What to Do, the next step is a 30-minute discovery call. I will tell you honestly whether coaching is the right investment for your situation, and if it is, what the engagement would look like.

Ready to invest in your managers before they're gone? 

A 30-minute discovery call is the fastest way to see what coaching at your organization would actually look like. No pitch. Just clarity.

Schedule your free discovery call | Meet me at SHRM26 in Orlando

Learn better communication skills and conflict management skills with your teams, one skill at a time.

Best Conflict Conversation Cards: Workplace Edition

Bio

Kimberly Best, RN, MA, is a court-listed mediator in Missouri and Tennessee, FINRA Arbitrator, and founder of Best Conflict Solutions, based in St. Louis and serving clients nationwide. She is adjunct faculty at the Lipscomb University Institute for Conflict Management and the creator of the Best Conflict Conversation Cards. She will be leading a workshop at the SHRM Annual Conference in Orlando on Monday, June 15, 2026.

Sources

• Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2026 (released April 2026)

• Gallup, State of the American Manager: Analytics and Advice for Leaders (2015)

• UNLEASH, Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2026 Report: Three Essential Actions for HR Leaders (April 2026)

• Brown, Brené. Strong Ground: The Lessons of Daring Leadership, the Tenacity of Paradox, and the Wisdom of the Human Spirit (Random House, 2025)

• Brown, Brené. Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts. (Random House, 2018)