The second-shift supervisor is the last one out of the building again. She covered a line for an hour because someone didn't show, answered four texts about next week's schedule, and still has the safety report to finish before she drives home.
Her team's engagement scores dipped this quarter, and HR flagged it. Her own engagement dipped too, though nobody asked her about that.
That second number is the one most organizations miss, and it's the one that's moving fastest.
Managers are less engaged than they were a year ago, and the drop is sharper than for their teams
Gallup's latest global workplace data shows manager engagement fell from 27% in 2024 to 22% in 2025. Engagement among individual contributors actually ticked up a point over the same period, from 18% to 19%.
That matters because managers set the temperature for everyone else. When the person running the shift is checked out, the team usually follows, and most engagement programs are aimed at the team.
Next time your engagement survey comes back, pull the manager scores out separately. That's usually where the story starts.
Short staffing usually lands on the manager's desk first
When a team says it's stretched thin, the fix everyone reaches for is another hire. The better first step is to diagnose whether the real problem is delegation, process, or actual capacity before posting the job, and to make sure managers know what each person on their team can realistically carry.
That's a management skill, and most frontline supervisors were never taught it. A supervisor who never learned to delegate absorbs the extra work personally, and that is a fast route from engaged to exhausted.
A burned-out manager can't carry a team through change
Every plant is changing something right now: new equipment and systems, plus new expectations around AI. Managers keep teams engaged during change by connecting daily work to its impact, sharing customer feedback, and explaining why a process changed. That takes energy a depleted manager doesn't have.
Leadership development has to cover emotional sustainability and boundary management alongside the usual competencies, because the people-side of the job is what wears leaders down over time. A manager who hasn't been given the tools to set limits on their own availability can't sustain the consistency their team needs.
How Groveland gives managers somewhere to put the weight down
A lot of manager burnout comes from isolation. The supervisor is the only one at their level on the shift, and they don't want to admit to their boss that they're struggling. Groveland's peer groups of three or four managers, guided by a trained Groveland Lead Coach, give them a standing hour each week with people facing the same things.
Hearing another manager describe the same problem takes a lot of the weight off, because it stops feeling like a personal failure. From there the group works the actual situation: how to hand off work without dropping it, how to push back on an unrealistic schedule, how to talk to a team about a change nobody wanted. Managers try it that week and report back.
The one-hour format matters here too. An exhausted manager won't make time for a two-day offsite. One hour a week is small enough to protect, and cohorts run for three months at a time so the support doesn't disappear after one session. That's the structure behind what we call the Leadership Habit Tax: the ongoing cost an organization pays when managers are left to absorb pressure alone instead of being built up to distribute it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Managers are absorbing staffing gaps, constant change, and pressure from above and below, often without the skills or support to handle it. Gallup's data shows managers' engagement falling faster than the people they manage.
Managers shape the daily experience of their teams, so a disengaged manager tends to produce a disengaged team. Improving the team's engagement without addressing the manager usually doesn't hold.
Start by teaching the skills that reduce load, like delegation and setting realistic capacity. Then give managers regular, ongoing support from peers and a coach, instead of a single training event.
They work well when the groups are small, meet on a regular schedule, and focus on real situations from each manager's team. The regular rhythm is what turns advice into habits.
Sources: Gallup State of the Global Workplace | HR Dive | ATD: Change-Ready Engagement Playbook | ATD: Preparing Leaders for the Realities of Leadership