According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2025 report, global employee engagement fell from 23% to 21% in 2024 — and the primary driver was not frontline burnout or economic uncertainty. It was a sharp drop in manager engagement, which fell from 30% to 27%. The cost to the global economy: an estimated $438 billion in lost productivity. If your employee engagement strategy isn’t producing the results you need, the problem probably isn’t your people, your perks, or your programs. It’s emotional commitment — the one form of commitment that makes everything else possible, and the one that most engagement strategies never actually reach.
Why Your Employee Engagement Strategy Is Treating the Symptom, Not the Cause
Most engagement strategies are built around behavior. They measure it, incentivize it, and try to manage it. Pulse surveys, recognition platforms, wellness benefits, hybrid work policies — all of these target what people do. And yet disengagement persists, often quietly, in companies that score well on every HR metric available.
The reason is straightforward: behavior follows commitment, not the other way around. You cannot reliably change what people do without first understanding what drives them to do it. When engagement programs skip this step — and most do — they are, in effect, ordering their employees to smile on Smile Day and hoping the revenue follows.
This is the core problem that Stan Slap has spent more than twenty-five years trying to solve. His management development program, manifested in his NYT best selling book Bury My Heart at Conference Room B, has been deployed in over 70 countries with tens of thousands of managers across many of the world’s most admired companies. The conclusions it has produced are both uncomfortable and actionable: companies are not failing to engage their employees because they lack the right tools. They are failing because they have never addressed the real source of a manager’s commitment.
What Emotional Commitment Actually Means — And Why It’s Different
There are four types of commitment a manager can bring to their work: financial, intellectual, physical, and emotional. Most organizations successfully secure the first three. Managers show up. They think hard. They earn their compensation and generally deliver on their responsibilities.
But emotional commitment is different in kind, not just degree. It is what drives a manager to solve problems that appear unsolvable, to generate energy when all the energy has been spent, and to inspire that same level of commitment in the people around them. According to Slap, a manager’s emotional commitment is worth more than their financial, intellectual, and physical commitment combined. It is the difference between a manager who does the job and a manager who owns the outcome like a personal crusade.
The neurobiological source of emotional commitment is not motivation, incentive, or inspiration. It is something more fundamental: the ability to live your own deepest personal values in the environment you spend your time in. When that alignment exists, people bring everything they have. When it doesn’t, they detach — not dramatically, not visibly, but consistently — and protect what matters most to them by withholding it from their work.
This is not a theory. It is what the data from tens of thousands of managers across more than 70 countries has shown, repeatedly and without exception. Understanding what it means for your company culture and leadership strategy is one of the most important moves a senior HR leader can make right now.
The Values Paradox at the Heart of Manager Disengagement
Here is where the data becomes impossible to ignore. When managers from across industries, seniority levels, and countries were asked to identify their deepest personal values — the things they care about most as human beings — the top two answers were consistent every single time: family and integrity.
Then those same managers were asked a second question: which personal values do you feel most pressured to compromise in order to do your job successfully?
Family. Integrity.
This is not a minor misalignment. It is a structural problem embedded in what it means to be a manager in most organizations. The job, by definition, requires managers to regularly subordinate their own priorities in favor of company priorities. In a poorly run company, managers consciously detach. But in a good company — one with genuine intentions and real investment in its people — the detachment is more dangerous precisely because it is harder to see. Intellectual, physical, and financial commitment continue to masquerade as the full picture, while emotional commitment quietly drains away.
The result is a manager culture running on fumes. And there is no engagement strategy, however well designed, that can be reliably supported by that kind of energy.
For a deeper look at how manager culture drives or undermines organizational performance, the research is unambiguous: fix the source, not the symptom.
Why This Is More Urgent in 2026 Than Ever Before
The conditions of work in in recent years have made this problem significantly worse. AI adoption is reshaping roles and responsibilities faster than most organizations can manage. Hybrid and remote work have thinned the connective tissue between managers and their teams.
Against this backdrop, the management messages that have historically driven engagement are losing their grip. Slap draws a sharp distinction between management messages and leadership messages. A management message, however it is delivered, ultimately ends in one place: work harder. A leadership message ends somewhere different: live better. And managers will not inspire the second in their teams if they cannot access it themselves.
The companies winning on engagement in 2026 are not the ones with the most sophisticated HR technology. They are the ones that have figured out how to make their manager culture self-sustaining — by giving managers a reason to protect the company’s success that goes beyond their job description.
Stan Slap at HR World Summit 2026: What to Expect
On May 26, 2026, Stan Slap will deliver the opening keynote at the HR World Summit in Porto, Portugal — bringing Bury My Heart at Conference Room B directly to an audience of CHROs, CPOs, and senior people leaders from across EMEA and beyond.
The session will address how to build and sustain emotional commitment across your manager culture, how to make the business case for a manager’s humanity, and how to translate values-based leadership into measurable organizational performance. For HR leaders who have been wrestling with engagement numbers that refuse to move, this is the session that reframes the entire problem.