Originally published August 26, 2025 · Edited February 23, 2026 · About our editorial process
Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace: 2025 delivers a stark warning. Global engagement fell to 21% in 2024, matching the lowest levels since the pandemic. The cost: $438 billion in lost productivity.
For local government, this isn’t just a workplace issue. It’s a community issue.
Managers Are the Lever
Managers drive culture. They translate policy into practice. They connect strategic goals with human needs.
When they thrive, teams thrive. When they burn out, entire departments falter.
Gallup’s data shows the slide:
- Global manager engagement dropped from 30% to 27%
- Engagement among managers under 35 fell five points
- Engagement among female managers dropped seven points
Meanwhile, front-line staff stayed flat at 18%. The gap is telling. Manager health is the lever.
Why Manager Engagement Matters in Local Government
Local government managers carry a unique weight. They balance council directives with resident expectations. They hold shrinking budgets against rising needs. They face rapid technology shifts, often without the clarity or tools they need.
Gallup found that 70% of the variance in team engagement is explained directly by the manager. That isn’t a footnote. It’s the system.
Higher manager engagement means fewer errors in service delivery, lower turnover and burnout, and stronger public trust. The effect doesn’t stop at work. In 2024, only 33% of global workers said they were “thriving.” In the U.S. and Canada, the number was higher at 52%, but slipping. Disengagement shows up in stress, health, and family life.
What Creates the Conditions
The typical response to manager burnout is to offer wellness programming or time management training. But the conditions that produce disengaged managers are rarely about individual skill gaps. They’re about organizational decisions.
Someone chose which positions got training budgets and which didn’t. Someone promoted technical performers into management roles without preparing them for what the role actually requires. Someone decided that “manager development” was the line item that could wait until next fiscal year.
These aren’t failures of individual managers. They’re leadership decisions about what the organization actually protects when resources get tight. And they compound. When a manager is promoted without preparation, then held accountable for team performance they weren’t equipped to influence, the message is clear: this organization says managers matter, but protects something else when it costs something to prove it.
That pattern has a name. Simon Sinek calls it the Circle of Safety, the boundary leaders create where people can focus on the work without spending energy protecting themselves from internal threats. When managers feel unsupported, underprepared, or set up to fail, the Circle of Safety contracts. People stop raising problems. They stop proposing changes. They manage down, not up.
Gallup’s 70% variance finding captures the downstream effect. But the upstream cause is the set of decisions that determined whether managers had the conditions to succeed in the first place.
What Organizations That Sustain Engagement Tend to Do Differently
Gallup estimates that if organizations reached best-practice engagement levels, around 70%, the global economy would grow by $9.6 trillion, nearly 9% of GDP. The report identifies patterns among organizations that reach those levels.
Only 44% of managers worldwide have received formal management training. Organizations that close that gap tend to treat preparation as a leadership commitment, not a compliance requirement. They invest before the need becomes visible, not after performance reviews flag the damage.
These organizations also tend to shift the management model from oversight to coaching. Coaching-based leadership boosts engagement for both managers and teams by double digits. For public service, that translates into better outcomes for residents. But the shift requires more than training a skill. It requires leaders who chose to hire for control to examine that choice.
Most critically, organizations that sustain engagement treat development as ongoing, not episodic. Peer circles, facilitated discussions, and coaching help managers stay resilient as conditions shift. A single training event creates temporary awareness. Sustained development creates capacity.
The Question Underneath the Data
The manager engagement pattern Gallup describes maps to something practitioners in local government already sense: the conditions around managers changed faster than the systems supporting them adapted.
But the deeper question isn’t about conditions. It’s about choices. What does your organization actually protect when the budget gets tight? When a council member pushes back on a development line item, what survives and what gets cut? When a department head retires and the replacement is promoted from within, what preparation accompanies that transition?
These are Define What Matters questions. They require leaders to examine the gap between what they say about manager development and what they actually fund, build, and sustain. That examination is where The Shift That Sticks methodology begins.
Face the Truth creates the space to see the gap clearly, without blame or defensiveness. Define What Matters pressure-tests whether the organization’s stated commitment to managers holds up when protecting it costs something. Make It Real turns that clarity into systems: peer circles, coaching structures, development pathways that don’t depend on any single champion. And Reinforce the Change builds the rhythms that prevent drift, so manager development doesn’t become another initiative that fades after the first quarter.
For local governments, the payoff is clear. When managers thrive, community connection and public trust follow.
Related Reading
Research Foundation:
- The Expectation Gap: Understanding the disconnect between what employees need and what organizations provide
- Political Dynamics: How governance pressures shape the environment managers navigate daily
Related Articles:
About Rob Duncan
Rob Duncan spent two decades watching what happens when leaders say one thing and protect another. As founder of Imagine That Performance, he works with city managers, county administrators, and government leaders through Think Tanks, workshops, and executive coaching to close the gap between intention and experience.
The Question Worth Asking
If 70% of your team’s engagement depends on the manager, what did your organization do this year to prepare the people in those roles? That question is harder to answer honestly than it sounds. In the Think Tank, government leaders examine it together, with peers who understand the constraints.
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