In the past five years, the number of job seekers has steadily increased, while both employee engagement and employees’ confidence that their organizations genuinely value their well-being, provide meaningful support, and foster a positive workplace culture have consistently declined. Notably, increased negativity among mid-level managers has risen, characterized by higher levels of stress, sadness, and loneliness, which can negatively impact their teams and leadership effectiveness. According to Gallup’s meta-analysis, 70% of the variance in team engagement is attributed to the manager, illustrating how disengaged managers can create a downward spiral that diminishes overall employee morale.
So, what’s driving this distress? Why is this so crucial to fix?
Mid-level managers typically manage people and often toe the line between individuals doing the work and reporting results to executive leadership. They wear many hats as they carry forward company culture, drive performance and serve as ‘emotional shock absorbers’ for their team, all while executing their own tasks. Often, they are thrown into the proverbial pool and simply told to swim. Negativity should not be a surprise.
Herein lies the problem. Traditional leadership development focuses heavily on the skill sets of ‘doing’ but doesn’t address the actual emotional challenges managers face today. Disengaged managers won’t develop into strong future leaders, which is a missed opportunity with expensive consequences. In other words, as this Forbes article states, ‘today’s disengaged managers are tomorrow’s missing leaders.’
“Managers aren’t just the middle. They are the infrastructure. The memory. The movement. If you want culture, strategy and performance to last, invest in them deeply.”
Vibhas Ratanjee Forbes, 2025
So, what can companies do to support current and future mid managers and prevent this negative trend? At Conversant, we’ve worked with thousands of clients and have seen massive improvements in team performance, employee engagement, and leadership development when organizations adhere to the following:
- Develop leaders early, and personally. Don’t wait until their title is in place before enabling individuals with the right training and skills, including emotional support. Investing in future leaders should start well before individuals become managers. Early leadership training can elevate the engagement of future leaders and be designed to immediately contribute to organizational culture and specific goals. By starting early, you will get both immediate benefit of engaged performance and leadership development that lasts a lifetime.
- Think of leadership development as a journey. And one that never ends. Educating individuals to be managers, middle managers, senior managers, and then executives should be an on-going thread that binds teams together towards a common success goal. Create leadership programs for every level of your organization that help them win now and prepare confidently for the future.
- Focus on the human elements. This is especially important with the onset of AI. AI buffers tactical, operational busy work, and gives room for managers to grow and evolve as humans. It clears the space for increased connections and conversations, which are not only necessary, but critical for difficult dialogues and conflict resolution. Here at Conversant, we feature leadership development designs that help clients resolve conflict, connect with one another and improve performance as a team:
- Sensemaking in the fog. Uncertainty is a given when it comes to changing organizational goals and priorities. There are ways of listening and speaking that allow teams to turn their separate perspectives into collective intelligence, clearing the way for confident, effective action.
- Low friction feedback. Well-designed, emotionally intelligent conversations make challenging interactions easier. When skillful leaders deliver difficult truths with clarity and care, friction fuels growth.
- Conflict as an asset. Conflicts do not have to become contests. Healthy disagreements can refine goals, strengthen plans, and deepen trust. Investing in the development of emotionally astute leaders can make this equation come true: differences + trust = brilliance.
Humane leadership development at all levels of a company is a well-made investment. Each moment of human connection can help or hurt engagement, emotional well-being, and performance; in our AI era those moments matter even more. Give current and future middle managers the development that has them enjoy being the leaders guaranteeing culture, strategy and performance and two great things follow: fulfilling careers and successful organizations.
If you want to talk about high return-on-investment leadership development, let’s connect. In case you are interested, here is a link to one of our many tools that help leaders make the human elements of organizational life successful and satisfying is key to restore team performance and reinvigorate organizations.
