When employee engagement declines, attention often turns immediately to managers.
Are they communicating enough? Are they recognizing employees? Are they providing effective coaching? Are they building strong relationships with their teams?
Those are important questions. Managers have an enormous influence on the employee experience. But there is another question organizations should be asking:
Are leaders creating an environment where managers can actually do those things well?
Employee engagement may happen through everyday interactions between employees and managers, but the conditions that make those interactions possible are established much higher in the organization.
Engagement Has to Be More Than a Talking Point
Most organizations would say employee engagement matters. The real test is whether their actions demonstrate it.
Dale Carnegie research found a significant gap between leadership intentions and employee perceptions. While engagement may appear on a list of organizational priorities, only 31% of front-line managers and employees reported seeing evidence that their organizations actually prioritize it.
Employees and managers notice what receives attention, resources, and accountability.
If revenue goals are discussed every week but engagement is mentioned once a year when survey results arrive, the message is clear. If managers are expected to develop their people but are given little time or training to do so, engagement becomes another responsibility competing with everything else.
Senior leaders set the tone by treating engagement as an ongoing business priority rather than an HR initiative.
Give Managers the Skills to Lead People
Being promoted into management does not automatically make someone great at managing people.
Managers need to know how to build relationships, have authentic conversations, recognize individual strengths, communicate appreciation, and create an environment where employees feel comfortable contributing.
Those are leadership skills, and like any other professional skill, they require development.
Organizations should consider whether managers have received meaningful coaching and leadership training or whether they have simply been expected to figure it out along the way.
Supporting managers also means removing barriers. Leaders should regularly ask what is making it difficult for managers to lead effectively. Too many competing priorities, unnecessary administrative work, unclear expectations, or a lack of resources can quickly push employee development to the bottom of the list.
Engage the People Responsible for Engagement
There is an important piece of the engagement conversation that organizations sometimes overlook: managers are employees, too.
They also need recognition. They need coaching. They need clarity about expectations and opportunities to develop.
Dale Carnegie research found that managers who believe their supervisors make an effort to engage them are three times more likely to make employee engagement a daily priority themselves.
That creates a powerful ripple effect.
When senior leaders model the behaviors they expect from managers, managers have a blueprint for how to lead their own teams. When they experience meaningful feedback, appreciation, trust, and support themselves, those behaviors are more likely to continue throughout the organization.
Make Engagement Part of Everyday Leadership
Employee engagement cannot be delegated to one department or addressed through a single annual initiative.
It has to show up in how leaders set priorities, develop managers, allocate resources, communicate expectations, and recognize performance.
That does not mean senior leaders are personally responsible for every employee interaction. It means they are responsible for creating the environment in which those interactions happen.
If organizations want managers to build engaged teams, they first have to equip, support, and engage those managers.
Because engagement may come to life at the team level, but the example always starts at the top.