You know your team. That is the problem.

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Hey Spark Family,

I asked a leader recently to tell me about one of his direct reports. He was good at it. Fluent, even. What drives her, what she is working toward, where she tends to get stuck.

Then I asked when he had last checked any of it.

He thought about it. Really thought about it. Two years ago, he said. Maybe three.

He was describing a person who no longer exists. Not because she left, but because she changed and his picture of her did not.

Here is the part that stayed with me. He was not careless, and he was not coasting. He was fluent. And fluency is the trap. The better you believe you know someone, the less necessary the questions start to feel.

The Research Is Clear

Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2026 surveyed more than 260,000 people across 160 countries.

What the data shows:

➡ Global engagement fell to 20%, the lowest since 2020 and the second straight annual decline.

➡ Among non-managers, it barely moved. 20% in 2022. 19% in 2025.

➡ Among managers, it collapsed. 31% down to 22%.

The engagement decline is not spread evenly across the workforce. It is concentrated almost entirely in the people in the middle.

DDI's Global Leadership Forecast shows what that has cost, and then names what rebuilds it:

➡ Trust in immediate managers fell from 46% to 29%. A 37% drop in two years.

➡ Employees whose managers actively support their development are 11X more likely to trust them.

➡ Employees who receive real feedback are 9X more likely to trust them.

➡ Employees whose managers coach them well are 9X more likely to trust them.

Look at what all three of those actually require. You cannot develop someone you stopped learning about. You cannot give useful feedback on a person you are picturing from two years ago. You cannot coach a reality you are only guessing at.

Every one of those multipliers runs through a question.

What I'm Seeing In The Field

The leaders who stopped asking are almost never the ones who stopped caring.

Look at that manager engagement number again. Twenty-two percent. Most of them are running close to empty themselves, and curiosity is one of the first things to go when you are depleted. Asking takes capacity, because it opens something you then have to hold.

But the cost is real, and I see it constantly.

I see the leader who runs efficient one-on-ones, covers the agenda, and leaves confident his team is aligned. They are giving him exactly what the structure of that meeting invites, which is updates, not truth.

I see the leader who stopped asking about a year ago because the answers started to repeat. She read the repetition as nothing new. It was a signal, and the real conversation was the one happening after she left the room.

I see the leader who is excellent at giving feedback and direction but almost never turns it around. Who rarely says: help me understand what this is like from where you sit. Not to fix it, just to understand it.

That inversion, from telling to genuinely asking, is one of the most powerful moves available to a leader. And it is quietly disappearing.

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What We Teach Leaders Inside Spark Brilliance

When we raise this with a leadership team, we make one distinction that tends to land hard.

There is the information you have about your people, and there is the information that is currently true about them. Those are not the same thing.

What you have was built from observation and past conversations, and it was accurate once. But people are not static. Their motivation shifts, their capacity shifts, what they need from you shifts. If you stopped asking, you stopped updating.

Three things change this:

1. Ask to understand, not to confirm
​ The leader who is already composing a response is not actually asking. Try this one instead: what is something about your work right now that I probably do not fully understand?

2. Follow the energy, not the script
​ There is the surface answer, and there is what sits underneath it. Notice the pause, the hesitation, the sentence that trails off. Then gently follow it rather than moving on.

3. Close the loop
​ Asking is only half of curiosity. What makes someone willing to be honest a second time is seeing that the first time mattered. The leader who asks, listens, and then never visibly does anything with it has taught her team that honesty is not worth the risk.

⭐ Leadership Challenge

Before your week gets moving, think of the person you believe you know best on your team.

Then ask yourself:

➡ When did I last ask them something I genuinely did not know the answer to?

➡ Whose situation have I been reading from a distance instead of asking about directly?

➡ What did someone tell me recently that I never circled back on?

And the hardest one:

If they described how curious I am about them as a person, not as a contributor, what would they say?

The best leaders are not the ones with all the answers. They are the ones still willing to be surprised by people they already know well.

That is not a technique. It is a posture, and it starts with one question you do not already know the answer to.

With gratitude,
​Jackie

P.S. – If this is sitting with you, hit reply and tell me the question you have been avoiding. I read every response.✨

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