Summary: At the route of the manager engagement crisis is a role that nobody designed. Instead, the role accumulated everything organisations had nowhere else to put. AI now makes it possible to alleviate administrative weight and rebuild around what only humans can do. By redesigning the role, organisations can ensure it’s effective, sustainable and worth aspiring to.
Everyone is talking about re-engaging managers but this is the wrong conversation. The better question is one most organisations aren’t asking: what the manager role should actually contain. And why, for the first time, we have both the reason and the means to answer it.
Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report shows global employee engagement at 20 per cent, its lowest point since 2020. But the number that triggered me is this: manager engagement has dropped nine points since 2022. It’s a structural failure concentrated in one specific layer and it has a cause that wellbeing budgets can’t fix.
The reality organisations are not looking at squarely
I once heard a senior organisational leader refer to people and managers in the same breath, as two distinct categories. It wasn’t a slip. It was the assumption made visible: that managers operate outside the normal limits of human capacity. That they absorb, indefinitely, what the organisation refuses to fix. The burnout data suggests otherwise.
I’ve seen where that assumption leads. A senior audit director at a financial institution leading a global team of over 20 people was taken to the operating room following an accident during her lunch break. As the medical team waited for the elevator, her general manager ran down the corridor to ask whether she could review some urgent items once she came round from surgery.
That’s not an outlier. That is the logical endpoint. And when it happens, the standard response is equally predictable: acknowledge the pressure, deploy a wellbeing programme, grant a sabbatical in the most acute cases, then return the person to the exact conditions that broke them.
Wellbeing programme participation rarely exceeds 25 per cent of the workforce. The conditions that generate burnout remain intact for everyone who returns. Organisations are spending real money fixing people, then putting them back into a broken role.
The role accumulated everything that had nowhere else to go
Managers are now five-legged sheep
Here’s what the manager role actually contains in most organisations: back-to-back meetings, manual reporting, firefighting dysfunctional tools and covering operationally for absent team members, alongside the formal job description of coaching, developing and leading.
Nobody designed it this way deliberately. The role accumulated everything that had nowhere else to go. The result is what the French call a mouton à cinq pattes (a five-legged sheep) assembled from organisational leftovers.
Add impossible expectations to a poorly defined role, and you do not just create a hard job. You create an unjust one. That distinction matters because it explains the compensation trap underneath.
In most organisations, the only reliable path to higher pay runs through management. In 20 years of HR work across multiple industries and geographies, I have rarely seen a compensation architecture that offered a credible alternative.
The consequence is predictable: management layers inflated well beyond functional need, with ratios of 1:4 where research places effective spans between 1:8 and 1:12.
The pipeline consequence is already visible. Deloitte’s 2025 research shows only six per cent of Gen Z identify leadership as their primary career goal. Robert Walters calls it ‘conscious unbossing’: 52 per cent of young professionals say they do not want to manage. Ever.
This is framed as a values problem. But it’s not. Gen Z assessed the compensation premium against the personal cost and declined. That’s a rational response to an outdated job description.
What AI changes and why this moment is different
Frederick Winslow Taylor’s scientific management principles, introduced in the early 1900s, restructured work for the industrial age. The result was more productive, more scalable and it redefined what organisations needed from the people inside them.
AI is doing the same thing, faster. Reporting, dashboards, structured follow-ups, information relay, basic coordination – the tasks that consumed the majority of management time – are precisely what AI handles well.
Strip those out, and what remains is almost entirely human: coaching, judgment, context reading, team dynamics, development, the ability to make a call that no model can make for you. That’s not a diminished role. That’s the role re-engineered for what organisations actually need now.
The mouton à cinq pattes can now actually exist. Not as a superhuman absorbing endless organisational friction, but as a human powered by technology, freed to do the work that only a human can do.
This is not a threat to the manager role. It is the first real opportunity in decades to design it properly.
Gen Z assessed the compensation premium against the personal cost and declined
Gaining the advantage
The Gallup data is a warning. The Gen Z pipeline signal is a deadline. The AI shift is the unlock.
Organisations that respond by redesigning the role, auditing what it actually contains, deciding what AI absorbs and what stays human, developing managers for what remains, will build something the current system cannot produce: a management layer that is effective, sustainable, and worth aspiring to.
Those that respond with another wellbeing programme will run the same cycle again. Burnt-out managers. A thinner pipeline. And a Gallup report in 2028 with even lower engagement scores.
The question was never how to fix the manager. It was always how to fix the job.
Key takeaways
- Look at what managers actually do day to day: Not the job description, the calendar.
- Strip out the admin and coordination work before trying to ‘re-engage’.
- Question low manager-to-team ratios: They’re usually a design issue, not a need.
- Stop adding wellbeing fixes: Instead, start redefining what the manager role should be.
If you enjoyed this article, read: Stop asking why Gen Z are difficult and start asking what they are showing you
