Coaching for Managers: Can Your Leaders Coach the People They Lead?

In 2025, 79% of managers in Gallup’s best-practice organizations were engaged at work. Globally, just 22% of managers were engaged.

The role is the same. The market pressures are similar. The outcome is dramatically different.

That gap points to something worth examining: manager engagement measures more than manager motivation. It is also an output of the leadership system around them.

Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace: 2026 Report found manager engagement had fallen nine percentage points since 2022, with a five-point drop between 2024 and 2025 alone. Gallup also found that manager engagement declines as spans of control grow, although strong manager talent and training can offset some of that effect.

The pattern suggests a design problem. Here is why.

When management roles are reduced and teams grow larger, managers are expected to lead more people with the same limited capacity. Coaching conversations compete with deadlines, operational demands, and competing priorities. Development is often the first commitment to yield because everything else arrives with an external deadline attached.

Manager engagement responds to the conditions of the role. Spans of control, capacity, and expectations are all design decisions.

What do best-practice organizations do differently?

Gallup found that 79% of managers in best-practice organizations were engaged in 2025, nearly four times the global average. These organizations operate across regions and industries, and they face the same labor market, cost pressures, and technology disruption as everyone else. The difference is how leadership operates.

In these organizations, coaching is built into the way managers work each week. It survives the quarter when everything else is competing for the same hours.

In MPact’s client work, coaching for managers holds when four systems are in place:

• Protected one-on-one conversations. Recurring one-on-ones are treated as standing commitments, so they survive a busy quarter instead of becoming the first hour reclaimed by competing priorities.
• Coaching around live decisions. Development happens while a decision is still open and the stakes are real, rather than through feedback after the outcome is already known.
• Workloads with room to develop people. Manager capacity allows developing people to fit within the role rather than sitting alongside an already full portfolio of supervisory responsibilities.
• Leadership behaviors measured like business results. Leaders have explicit expectations for how they lead, reviewed with the same cadence and specificity applied to revenue, margin, and delivery targets.

Reminders rarely make managers better coaches. The system around them does.

How is coaching for managers different from manager training?

Manager training transfers knowledge inside a defined window. Coaching for managers builds capability inside live work over time. Training answers what a leader should know. Coaching addresses how a leader applies it under pressure, with a real team and real consequences.

Both belong in a mature leadership development program. Training builds shared language and baseline skill, particularly in new manager training, where the shift from doing the work to leading the work is steepest. Performance coaching converts that knowledge into behavior.

Durable change happens when training, coaching, and the operating cadence are designed as one system.

Three questions that reveal how your system treats coaching

You can answer these questions using evidence your organization already has:

1. Review last quarter’s calendars. Of the one-on-ones that were scheduled, how many happened as planned and how many were reclaimed by other priorities?
2. Examine your spans of control. Which managers carry teams large enough that meaningful coaching conversations with every person are difficult to sustain?
3. Read your performance review template. Do leadership behaviors appear with the same specificity as financial targets, or only as a summary rating at the end?

The pattern across those three answers may tell you more about your leadership system than an engagement survey.

What should leaders ask about coaching for managers?

Ask whether the system makes coaching possible before asking whether managers value it. Gallup’s nine-point decline and its 79% figure for best-practice organizations come from the same report, measuring one role under comparable market conditions. The distance between those numbers is a matter of design, and design is something leaders can control.

The question isn’t whether your managers value coaching. It’s whether your leadership system makes coaching possible.