Gallup just released its 2026 State of the Global Workplace report, and the headline number should alarm every organization investing in leadership development: global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, its lowest level since the pandemic costing the world economy an estimated $10 trillion in lost productivity.
But the real story isn’t about employees. It’s about managers.
Manager engagement crashed from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025; a nine-point freefall that Gallup calls the loss of the engagement premium. Managers used to be more engaged than the people they led. That’s no longer true. And since manager engagement directly drives team engagement, which drives productivity, which drives revenue, this isn’t just an HR problem. It’s a business performance crisis.
The good news? Gallup’s own data points to a clear, proven solution: coaching.
The Manager Engagement Freefall
The numbers are stark. While individual contributor engagement has remained relatively flat over the past three years, hovering around 18 to 19%, manager engagement has been in continuous decline. Young managers under 35 saw a five-point drop. Female managers saw a seven-point decline, the steepest of any group.
Gallup’s researchers attribute this to cumulative pressure. Since the pandemic, managers have been absorbing executive demands that often conflict with employee expectations. They’re navigating restructuring, budget constraints, AI adoption, hybrid work logistics, and shifting cultural expectations, often without the tools, training, or support they need.
The result is a management layer that’s burning out faster than organizations can replenish it. And when managers disengage, the effects cascade across their teams, their departments, and ultimately the organization’s bottom line.
Only 44% of Managers Have Ever Received Training
Here’s the most staggering finding in the report: less than half of all managers globally. Just 44% have ever received any formal management training.
That means more than half of the world’s managers are leading teams, coaching direct reports, managing conflict, driving performance, and navigating organizational change with no structured preparation whatsoever.
Gallup found that simply providing basic management training can cut active disengagement in half. That’s not a marginal improvement, it’s a fundamental shift in how managers show up at work.
But training alone isn’t enough. The report makes a clear distinction between one-time training events and ongoing coaching-based development, and the data heavily favors the latter.
Why Coaching Works: The Data
This is where the Gallup data gets especially relevant for anyone building or managing coaching programs.
Gallup found that teaching managers effective coaching techniques improved their performance by 20 to 28%. When managers received both role-specific training and ongoing development support, their well-being jumped from 28% to 50%, nearly doubling. And their teams saw engagement improvements of up to 18%.
Within best-practice organizations, the ones that prioritize coaching and development as a strategic function, 79% of managers were engaged. That’s nearly four times the global average of 22%.
These aren’t theoretical benefits. They’re measured outcomes from organizations that made deliberate investments in manager coaching programs. And they show that the gap between best-practice organizations and everyone else isn’t luck or culture type. It comes down to whether you invest in your managers or leave them to figure it out alone.
What This Means for Coaching Operations
For coaching operations leaders, this Gallup report is the strongest business case for coaching programs you’ve had in years. Here’s what it means in practice.
The demand for manager coaching is about to surge. Organizations that read this report will be looking for solutions fast. Coaching programs designed specifically for managers and team leads will see increased demand, particularly in companies that have never formally invested in manager development. If you’re running a coaching operation, prepare for growth in this segment.
Coaching needs to be ongoing, not episodic. Gallup’s data is clear: one-time training events don’t produce lasting change. The organizations seeing real results are the ones providing continuous coaching and development. For ops teams, this means building programs with sustained engagement: regular sessions, between-session support, progress tracking, and long-term outcome measurement. Your coaching platform needs to support that continuity.
Outcome tracking is your best friend. The Gallup data gives you specific metrics to tie coaching to: manager engagement scores, team engagement improvements, well-being indicators, retention rates, and productivity measures. If your coaching program can demonstrate a 20 to 28% improvement in manager performance, that’s a budget conversation no CFO will ignore. Build your outcome tracking infrastructure now.
Scale is the challenge. If only 44% of managers have ever received training, the addressable market for manager coaching is enormous. But serving that market requires operational infrastructure that can handle high-volume onboarding, scalable matching, group and cohort-based delivery, and reporting across hundreds or thousands of engagements. Coaching marketplaces and networks that can scale without sacrificing quality will have a significant advantage.
The AI coaching opportunity is real. Gallup also found that managers play a pivotal role in AI adoption. Employees whose managers actively champion AI are 8.7 times more likely to see AI as transformative. This creates a dual opportunity: use AI-powered tools to scale coaching delivery to more managers, and use coaching programs to help managers become better champions of AI adoption within their teams.
The $10 Trillion Opportunity
Gallup estimates that if every organization reached the engagement levels of today’s best-practice companies (around 70% engagement) the global economy would gain $9.6 trillion in productivity. That’s a 9% boost to global GDP.
That number sounds abstract until you bring it down to the organizational level. For any single company, the math is simple: disengaged managers lead disengaged teams, and disengaged teams underperform. The coaching programs that reverse that cycle don’t just improve culture, they improve revenue, retention, and competitive position. As we covered in our analysis of employer-sponsored coaching, organizations are already shifting toward coaching as a strategic investment. The Gallup report adds urgency to that shift by quantifying what’s at stake when they don’t.
The coaching industry has spent years building the case that coaching works. Gallup’s 2026 report just handed us the data to prove that not coaching is what’s actually costing organizations to the tune of $10 trillion globally.
For coaching operations leaders, the opportunity has never been clearer: build programs that reach managers at scale, track the outcomes that matter, and deliver the sustained development that turns disengaged managers into engaged leaders.
At Vibly, we work with organizations implementing coaching programs for managers and leaders at scale. If you’re looking to build or expand a coaching program in response to the engagement crisis Gallup identified, we’d love to talk. Request a demo to see how Vibly can support your coaching operations.
Coaching is one of the few engagement levers with clinical evidence behind it. For the full business case, costs, and rollout playbook, see Corporate Wellness Coaching: The Employer’s Guide.
