The manager problem is not a manager problem

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Hey Spark Family,

We sat with an executive team recently who wanted to talk about their managers.

Engagement was slipping in the middle. Good people looking tired. They were ready to fund a manager development program, and they meant it. There was real care in that room.

Then someone asked a question that changed the conversation.

“Before we build something for them, what signal are we currently sending down?”

Nobody answered right away. Because the honest answer was that the managers were absorbing a strategy that had shifted three times, priorities nobody had reconciled, and a pace set by people who had never said out loud what it would cost.

The managers were not the problem. They were the readout.

What the data actually says

Gallup’s newest global research found that manager engagement has fallen to 22%, down nine points since 2022. That number is getting quoted everywhere right now, usually as evidence that the middle is collapsing.

But the same report contains a second number that almost nobody mentioned.

Inside what Gallup calls best-practice organizations, 79% of managers are engaged. Nearly four times the global average.

Same economy. Same AI disruption. Same relentless pace. Nearly four times.

So the collapse is clearly not inevitable. And when Gallup looked at what those organizations have in common, the answer was not a better training catalog. It was that engagement is treated as part of the business strategy, not as a program running somewhere off to the side.

That is not a decision managers can make. It gets made at the top, or it does not get made at all.

DDI’s newest forecast points to the same place from a different direction. Only 31% of leaders trust senior leadership, and trust runs lowest among the people closest to actually executing. Which matters enormously, because leaders who do trust their senior leaders are nearly six times more likely to say that leadership decisions actually turn into action.

Your strategy does not fail in the middle. It arrives there already carrying whatever the top sent with it.

What We’re Seeing in the Field

We see the executive team that funds a manager program while the strategy keeps moving underneath it. The program is genuinely good. Six months later nothing has changed, and everyone concludes the training did not work. The training was fine. It was asked to absorb a problem it was never designed to solve.

We see the senior leader who cannot understand why his managers are not energized by the new direction. He announced it beautifully. He has not noticed that it is the fourth direction in two years, and that his managers are the ones who had to explain the first three.

And we see the executive team that genuinely wants to help, so they add resources, add support, add another initiative. Every single one lands on the same layer. Nobody has added them up.

None of these leaders are careless. They are moving fast, and the cost of that speed lands one level down where it is hardest to see.

What We Teach Inside Spark Brilliance

This is the work we spend most of our time on, and it starts from one principle.

If you want to change what your managers are experiencing, change the signal your executive team is sending.

Alignment at the top is not a nice-to-have that follows the real work. It is the thing that determines whether everything downstream lands or scatters.

Three things make the difference:

1. Reconcile the top before you cascade. Most misalignment does not look like disagreement. It looks like five executives describing the same priority in five slightly different ways, and a manager layer trying to serve all five.

2. Name the cumulative load before you add to it. Every initiative is justified on its own. Nobody totals them. The executive team that totals them makes better decisions and immediately looks more credible to the people carrying the weight.

3. Build the capability at the top first. Leaders cannot transmit clarity they do not have, or steadiness they were never given. The 79% organizations did not start in the middle.

⭐ Leadership Challenge

Before your week gets moving, sit with these honestly.

➡ What is my team currently sending down that we have never actually said out loud?

➡ If I asked five of my peers to name our top priority, how many answers would I get?

➡ Where have I been reading a manager problem that is actually an alignment problem?

And the one worth sitting with longest:

If my managers are a readout of this executive team, what are they telling us right now?

Here is the good news, and it is genuinely good.

Twenty-two percent is the global average. Seventy-nine percent is what happens when a leadership team decides this matters and leads like it. The gap between those numbers is not budget or industry or luck.

It is a decision. And it gets made in a room you are already sitting in.

With gratitude,
​Jackie

P.S. – If you are setting next year’s budget and want to pressure-test where the leverage actually sits, hit reply. These conversations are a lot more useful now than they are in March.✨

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