If your engagement surveys haven’t told you, your organizational performance probably has. Manager engagement has fallen. In fact, the data show that your managers are in crisis.
Overall global employee engagement may be down three percentage points since 2022,1 but the manager engagement numbers are even more concerning. Global manager engagement, which was 31% in 2022, fell to 22% in 2025.1 That’s nine percentage points in four years. Manager engagement has never dropped so much so fast.
Declining manager engagement is the primary driver of the broader downturn in employee engagement, which cost the world economy an estimated $10 trillion in lost productivity last year.1 The steep downward trajectory of manager engagement also bodes ill for many other crucial organizational outcomes: the well-being of employees, team effectiveness, and leadership pipelines.
How should organizations respond? First, understand why manager engagement is declining. Then, implement a data-driven talent management strategy to identify and support managers.
Why Is Manager Engagement Declining?
The role of manager is under stress from all sides. Executives expect managers to carry out strategic vision with fewer resources, smaller staff, and less operational support. Teams expect managers to show both technical expertise and leadership skills, even when no management training is provided. Externally, the rise of an AI-driven workplace creates uncertainty about job transformation. Internally, millennials—now the greatest share of managers in the workforce—are struggling to balance caring for their children and their parents while earning less, paying more, and maintaining mental well-being in an uncertain global economy and job market.2
Disproportionately, the managers whose engagement seems to be affected most are women.3 Not only is management challenging, but systemic issues seem to impede women at work generally. Nearly half a million women left the US workforce in 2025, 58% of which were voluntary exits.4 Why would so many women leave? Hogan research proves women leaders do not lack ambition. But the gender pay gap widened for the second consecutive year in the US.5 And the US does not have a national paid parental leave law. And the cost of childcare has increased faster than inflation since 2024.6 And while more women work from home than men,7 companies are shifting back to fully in-office jobs.8
Organizations cannot control economic uncertainty, AI disruption, or the caregiving pressures reshaping the workforce. But they can control one critical variable: who they put in management roles and whether those people have the capability to lead effectively under pressure. Without objective assessment of personality and leadership capability, organizations risk promoting high performers who succeeded as individual contributors but lack the resilience and interpersonal skills to lead teams through ambiguity, conflict, and stress.
Understanding Manager Personality
Leadership, which is the ability to build and maintain a high-performing team, requires organizations to redefine how they identify effective managers. All too often, managers are high-performing individual contributors who were promoted as a reward. However, the skills of a technical expert are not necessarily those of an effective manager. Managers accomplish work by means of their teams, so how they lead is integral to how successful they are in management.
The capability to lead an engaged, driven team has more to do with how someone tolerates pressure, makes decisions, and fosters trust than how charismatic they seem. A manager needs to show integrity, accountability, teamwork, and resilience. Organizations must focus on objective qualifications such as personality when selecting managers.
Personality Predicts Performance
Data from personality assessments can predict how an individual is likely to perform in a management role. For instance, measuring someone’s degree of resilience shows how they will likely handle stress, manage conflict, and deal with ambiguity as a manager.
Of course, resilience isn’t the only characteristic of a good manager. Organizations should assess managers for adaptability, emotional intelligence, learning mindset, influence, and other key capabilities. Workplace context, from company size and culture to team dynamics, also influences which competencies are essential at different managerial levels. A more equitable selection process based on personality and skills may reduce similarity bias, benefit women by increasing representation in the manager role, and mitigate future disengagement. Consider this: women comprise only 42% of US managers and 39% of senior managers.9
By selecting managers based on personality characteristics that predict performance in the role—rather than past individual achievement—organizations are more likely to identify people who can actually succeed in management. This reduces the likelihood of placing someone in a role where they’re likely to struggle. Yet selecting the right person is only the starting point. Even managers wi
