Addressing Manager Disengagement Through Manager Training

Is this escalating crisis undermining your organizational goals?

As an organizational leader, you may be wrestling with a critical issue that's silently eroding performance across your teams: manager disengagement. Gallup's recent 2025 State of the Global Workplace report revealed that a decline in manager engagement was primarily responsible for 2024's drop in global workplace engagement. 

Disengaged managers don’t just struggle themselves—they actively pull their teams down with them.  

Gallup suggests 3 things leaders can do to reverse this trend:

1. Ensure all managers are trained
2. Develop managers' coaching skills
3. Provide managers with ongoing professional development

In this post, we explore #1: Manager Training.

The Costly Manager Training Gap

If you haven't prioritized manager training, you're not alone—but you're at significant risk. According to the same Gallup report, less than half (44%) of managers worldwide say they've received management training—and untrained managers are twice as likely to be "actively disengaged" compared to their trained counterparts.

• These actively disengaged managers aren't just unhappy, they're working against your organizational goals
• Their negative influence spreads, creating ripple effects of disengagement

Untrained managers are twice as likely to be "actively disengaged."

Beyond the Basics: Your Managers Are Facing Modern Workplace Complexities

Today’s managers have a lot that can keep them up at night and diminish their engagement in the process. In addition to the day-to-day responsibilities of ensuring their team completes its tasks and meets its goals, managers can face complex situations they may not be equipped to handle:

• Setting expectations for professional conduct to prevent harassment even when standards for professional boundaries are not always supported by leaders or employees
• Being mindful of the potential legal and financial liabilities associated with mishandling harassment or discrimination complaints
• Navigating performance conversations with defensive or manipulative employees
• Responding appropriately to concerning behaviors that might indicate workplace violence risks
• Creating a work environment in which employees can speak up, share concerns, contribute ideas and admit mistakes
  
  

The Solution: Behavior-Based Training That Creates Real Results

The nuances of each example above make the case for a management training approach that:

1. Transforms knowledge into action. Theory alone won't solve your engagement crisis. Your managers need training that builds confidence and the ability to apply skills in real situations.
2. Provides proactive preparation. Training should allow managers to engage in "what if" scenarios where they relate to the characters and envision themselves in the same situation, taking the desired actions. Behavior-based training accomplishes this while providing moments of self-reflection related to learning application.
3. Adds accountability. Without structured follow-through, even the best training becomes another forgotten initiative. Behavior-based training, like Atana’s approach, embeds in-context assessments throughout the learning process. These assessments gather real-time data that reveals where training has successfully taken root and where managers may still hesitate to apply their skills, providing helpful insights for targeted follow-up.
4. Delivers measurable outcomes. Your investment should demonstrate a clear impact on managers’ behavior and team engagement. Aggregated data gathered through a behavioral approach can be linked directly to the organization’s strategic initiatives, providing critical ROI information, and highlighting organizational strengths and opportunities for improvement.

Measurable Results: The Atana Approach

Using one of the managerial situations from the list above—setting expectations for professional conduct—it’s easy to see how the insights gained through behavioral learning and analytics can help ensure learning application.

Atana’s Once & For All, Manager course emphasizes reinforcing professional boundaries as a deterrent to sexual harassment in the workplace and includes in-context assessments to measure attitudes toward this desired behavior. Aggregated Atana Trend data shows that, following training with the course: 

92% of managers had positive attitudes toward reinforcing professional boundaries, yet only 83% indicated a strong likelihood to do so.

What might be driving down managers’ intention to act? Even after the training:

• 23% agreed that it is better to let comments or jokes of a sexual nature slide
• 13% feel it would be awkward to reinforce professional boundaries
• 11% agreed it could hurt team dynamics to reinforce professional boundaries

The course’s realistic scenarios enabled the managers to see the potential difficulty in calling out inappropriate behavior or remarks, and their answers to the in-context assessments reflected that. From this post-training data, Atana gleaned critical insights that informed organizations on the need to address the reasons managers are unlikely to apply what they had learned. To help ensure organizations are equipped to address the perceptions negatively impacting managers' likelihood to act, Atana provides leadership guidance, resources for managers, and mini courses that enable organizations to follow-up on their training, focus on improving identified insights, and achieve their change goals.

How Manager Training Amplifies Organizational Performance

Through comprehensive, behavior-focused manager training, you are able to address a root cause of widespread disengagement. Consider the costs of your current situation:

• Disengaged teams consistently underperform, directly impacting your bottom line
• Poor management decisions and conflict resolution multiply over time
• The cost of replacing a manager who’s burned out or disengaged can run 100-200% of annual salary

If the world’s workplace was fully engaged, $9.6 trillion in productivity could be added to the global economy, the equivalent of 9% in global GDP.

Gallup, 2025