More of your team is struggling than thriving.

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Hey Spark Family,

I want to talk about the people in the middle.

Not the executives setting direction. Not the individual contributors doing the day-to-day work.

The managers. Team leads. Frontline leaders. The layer of leadership most responsible for turning executive priorities into daily reality.

The people who translate strategy into real conversations and turn priorities into action. The ones catching issues early and holding standards steady.

The people supporting people through uncertainty while still delivering results.

In many organizations, they have become the shock absorbers for everything.

Pressure from above. Stress from below. Constant change from every side.

And right now, many of them are quietly running out of runway.

Not always in dramatic ways.Sometimes it looks like less patience. Less creativity. Fewer proactive ideas. More transactional conversations. A strong leader slowly becoming a smaller version of themselves.

That is the part many organizations miss.

The Research Is Clear

Gallup released findings from its 2026 State of the Global Workplace report that should have every senior leader paying attention.

What the data shows:

➡ Global employee engagement fell to 20%, the second straight annual decline.

➡ Low engagement cost the global economy approximately $10 trillion in lost productivity last year.

➡ Manager engagement has declined since 2022, and that decline is a major driver of the broader engagement drop.

➡ 70% of the variance in team engagement is driven by the manager.

That means when managers are energized, teams tend to rise.

When managers are depleted, teams often feel it quickly.

The middle layer is not a middle priority. It is where strategy succeeds or stalls.

What I'm Seeing In The Field

The managers struggling most are rarely the ones who do not care.

They are usually the ones who care so deeply that they keep compensating long after the system stopped being sustainable.

I see the manager who absorbed another team after a restructure and said yes because that is who she has always been.

I see the manager expected to drive performance, coach people, manage change, protect morale, and hit numbers with no additional capacity.

I see the manager still producing results while quietly losing the time needed for real leadership.

The organization often sees output. It does not see the cost of producing it.

Until that person leaves, burns out, or disengages emotionally while still doing the job

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What We Teach Leaders Inside Spark Brilliance

When I work with senior leaders on this, I ask one question first:

Who on your team is carrying the most right now?

Not who is performing best.
Not who complains loudest.
​Who is carrying the most.

Because high-capacity managers often hide strain well.

The strongest organizations do three things:

1. They protect manager capacity
Reasonable spans of control. Clear priorities. Fewer unnecessary meetings. Realistic workloads.

2. They develop managers continuously
Not just performance management training. Real support in communication, coaching, decision-making, resilience, and leadership presence.

3. They humanize support
Leaders above them ask how they are doing, not only how things are going.

Support should not begin at burnout.

🌟 Your Challenge This Week

Before your week gets moving, think of one manager by name.

Then ask yourself:

➡ What are they carrying right now that others may not see?

➡ When did I last check on them as a person, not just a performer?

➡ What could I remove, clarify, or support this month?

And the hardest one:

If they were struggling, would they feel safe telling me?

The strength of your organization runs through the leaders in the middle.

Take care of them early.

That is how healthy performance scales.

With gratitude,
​Jackie

P.S. – P.S. If you are a manager reading this and feeling seen, trust that signal. Carrying a lot does not mean carrying it alone.✨

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