According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report, 80% of your people are either not fully engaged or actively disengaged from their work. Budgets are tight, pressure is up, and the next 12 months will be challenging for most organisations. I find that genuinely sad – not just because of what disengagement costs commercially, but because there is nothing worse than being miserable at work. I’ve seen enough employee surveys to know that the Gallup data isn’t an exaggeration. How great would it be to see the 80:20 the other way?

What Does Disengagement Look Like?

The measurables are familiar: high sickness, high turnover, low productivity, poor safety performance. But the real issue is what it feels like – people trudging around rather than excitedly contributing, the good people quietly carrying everyone else, the ones who’ve physically left and the ones still there but mentally checked out.

Every vacancy means the work spreads to whoever’s left. They burn out. They leave. And then you spend a year’s salary on recruitment fees to replace them with someone from outside who, in truth, is no better than the person who was already there.

In the most serious cases I’ve seen, the consequences have been regulatory fines running into millions of pounds, not because of a bad strategy, but because the culture had broken down from the inside. This is not just a people-and-culture issue. It’s a commercial one.

Why Most Managers Stop Developing – And Don’t Even Notice

Early in a career, training is structured and expected. But once someone settles, once they’re performing, that structure quietly disappears – especially the leadership and management development. It gets assumed. You’re assumed to know what you’re doing. Too many people aren’t looking after their own development, and don’t realise it.

It’s the case of the boiling frog. Nothing dramatic changes day to day. Then ten years pass. And if they think about it at all, most people say: I’m doing okay. I’m good enough.

It’s only a few who say, “I need to be better.” I could be better. I’m going to be better. Those are the people we mostly work with.

The Question Every Manager Needs To Answer Honestly

Is your job to get things out of your people, or to give to them?

Traditional management thinking is built on extraction. Drive output. Demand results. We argue it’s the opposite. Your job is to give to your team – invest in them, make them as capable as they can be, not as a technique to get more back, but as a genuine commitment.

This is a leap of faith, and it’s genuinely difficult when the popular expectation around you is inviting you to do the opposite. But when you commit to making your people as good as they can be, very capable people deliver extraordinary results – not because it was extracted from them, but because they chose to give it.

There’s a hard edge to this. Making people as good as they can be means having conversations they don’t want to have, stretching them beyond their comfort zone, and holding them to account. But it’s the job of leading.

Why Knowledge On Its Own Isn’t Enough

There’s a formula worth keeping:

S = K + P + F

Skill equals Knowledge plus Practice plus Feedback. Knowledge in your head doesn’t earn anyone anything – you only create value when you deploy it, and it develops when someone is watching your performance and giving you honest feedback on what to do differently.

This is also why a single training event rarely changes behaviour. If you don’t apply what you’ve learned within a month, you retain roughly 30% of it. Please apply it month after month and get real feedback on how it’s landing. That’s the only way knowledge becomes skill.

Three Things You Can Start Doing This Week

Here are three things grounded in the Legitimate Leadership framework that any manager can act on right now – no programme required.

1. Ask your team what they need from you and mean it. Don’t do this in a survey. Do it in a conversation – a one-to-one. The question is simple: what could I give you that would make your work easier, better, or faster? Then listen. Don’t defend. Most managers never ask. The ones who do are often surprised by how straightforward the answers are.

2. Audit where your time actually goes. Most managers are serving upwards—through meetings, reporting, and covering their own backs—rather than spending time with the people they lead. One manager I worked with realised that the majority of his working week was spent in meetings, many of which were double-booked. He reclaimed six hours a week and spent them with his team. The improvement in KPIs was significant. Not because he’d learned something new – because he’d redirected his attention to where it mattered.

3. Find one person on your team to invest in this month. Every person, whether they are on, above or below standard, should get an equal amount of your time, as even the best performers can get better. Find the person who has more in them than they’re currently giving. Have one honest conversation about where they could go and what’s getting in the way. It might be uncomfortable, but that is what courageous giving is.

These three things above cost nothing other than your time. But knowing what to do and doing it consistently under real pressure over months are two very different things. Most managers make progress for a few weeks, then the day job takes over. Old habits return. The gap between knowing and doing stays open.

A Practical Way To Keep Moving Forward – Even When Budgets Are Tight

Many organisations can’t commit to a full leadership intervention right now. What they can do is invest in the one or two people for whom this would genuinely accelerate their effectiveness, and keep momentum going rather than waiting for better times.

That’s exactly what the Legitimate Leadership 10-month Leadership Excellence Open Programme is designed for:

1. The 2-Day In-Person Group Workshop – the foundation and framework for healthy leadership. Plus meeting your cohort: managers from different organisations, facing the same pressures.
2. The Leadership Profile – the only people who truly know how good you are as a leader are the people you lead. We ask them and identify how you stack up against our definition of healthy leadership.
3. Monthly Online Group Sessions – one topic per month, twenty days to apply it, then a review to extract what worked and what didn’t. It’s additive by design: an integrated set of tools built block by block across the year.
4. A Second Leadership Profile At The End – you won’t be perfect, but you’ll know exactly where your next level of improvement lies.

It delivers the same quality of development as a full in-house programme, at a fraction of the cost. For organisations navigating a difficult period, it’s a way of saying: we’re still investing in our people, even now. That matters more than most leaders realise.