Why Your Sales Managers Are Disengaging and What to Do About It

The Data Is Worse Than the Headlines Suggest

Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report landed last week, and the numbers should alarm every sales leader. Why? Because global manager engagement has collapsed from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025—a nine-point drop in three years, with the steepest single-year fall between 2024 and 2025. The “engagement premium” that managers once enjoyed over individual contributors has all but disappeared. They are now only as engaged as the people they lead.

That’s the macro picture. Now let’s look elsewhere (not all from the Gallup report) at what’s happening in sales, specifically.

  • Only 25% of B2B sales reps hit quota in 2024—down from the traditional 70% attainment benchmark. One quarter.
  • 70% of sales leaders identify burnout as the primary barrier to sales team engagement.
  • Gallup finds that managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement. Disengaged managers produce disengaged teams, and disengaged teams miss quota.
  • Best-practice organizations achieve 79% manager engagement—nearly four times the global average. They are not outliers or lucky. They have built something intentional.

If you’re a CRO or Head of Sales of any title and are wondering why your team is underperforming, the Gallup data is telling you something worth taking seriously.

The Wrong Response—And Why It Won’t Work

Most organizations will respond to data like this the same way they always have: an engagement survey, a town hall, maybe a recognition program, a leadership offsite, or some management training. None of that is wrong. It’s just not enough—and it doesn’t get to the root cause.

I’ve used a diagnostic tool in my coaching work for years called the Solutions Chart, that I adapted from the work of Ferdinand Fournies. It maps the root causes of why people don’t do what we want them to do—and in some cases, what they know they’re supposed to do. The top conditions are: they don’t know what, why, or how; their thinking is incorrect; there are obstacles beyond their control; there are personal limits; or there’s fear. Engagement surveys don’t fix any of those. Neither do tasty snacks and motivational speakers.

The root cause of the manager engagement crisis is two-fold, and both sides require deliberate, systemic intervention. Kurt Lewin, one of the pioneers of applied psychology, captured it elegantly decades ago:

B = f(P, E): Behavior is a function of the Person & the Environment

If you want to change manager behavior and engagement, you have to work both sides of that equation. To do that, you must equip the person (P) with the operating system, skills, and tools to do the job well. And you must design the environment (E) so that equipped managers can actually succeed. Most organizations address one or neither. The ones achieving 79% manager engagement address both.

The Person Side: Equip Your Managers With a Real Operating System

Here’s an uncomfortable truth that the Gallup data reinforces: most frontline sales managers (FSMs) are set up to fail before they manage their first team meeting. The typical path is to find the best salesperson, promote them, hand them a team, and wish them luck. No management system. No structured development. Just seller instincts applied to a fundamentally different job.

Is it any wonder they disengage?

When people don’t know how to do a job well—when success feels elusive or arbitrary—they disengage. The fix isn’t inspiration. It’s capability. And capability requires a system.

The Sales Management System

The Sales Management System provides the complete architecture for what the FSM’s job actually is. At the top sits something most management frameworks never address explicitly: removing barriers to FSM engagement. Everything below that depends on it.

The Sales Management System — © Transforming Sales Results, LLC. All rights reserved.

The system encompasses the Sales Hiring System, the Sales Management Operating System (smOS), and Sales & Management Technology. Let’s look at the smOS in particular, because this is where the operating rhythm lives.

The Sales Management Operating System (smOS)

The Sales Management Operating System (smOS) — © Transforming Sales Results, LLC. All rights reserved.

The smOS gives managers the structured, proactive approach that replaces reactive firefighting with intentional, repeatable management. It covers the Customer Lifecycle, Sales Process, and Sales Methodology; management Activities and Meetings (what they are, the best practices for each, and the expected cadence for each); the Sales Coaching Framework; Sales Performance Management; and Sales & Management Technology.

When managers operate from a clear system like this, they know what the job is and how to do it. That clarity is itself an engagement driver.

Hiring the Right People First

The Sales Hiring System — © Transforming Sales Results, LLC. All rights reserved.

Manager engagement—and team engagement downstream—starts at the front of the employee lifecycle: hiring. When FSMs are equipped to hire well, they start with a team that has the foundation to succeed. When they hire poorly, they spend their days managing performance gaps and disengagement rather than developing talent. Lewin’s equation applies here, too: get the right people (P) into the right environment (E) and the probability of high performance rises substantially.

The Sales Employee Lifecycle — © Transforming Sales Results, LLC. All rights reserved.

The Sales Coaching System: The Highest-Leverage People Development Tool

Sales Coaching System — © Transforming Sales Results, LLC. All rights reserved.

Of all the levers available to a frontline sales manager, purposeful, structured, and personalized (dynamic) coaching is the one with the highest impact on both performance and engagement. Coaching done well builds competence (which builds confidence), fosters growth (which creates meaning), demonstrates that the organization is invested in the individual (which drives belonging and loyalty), and creates clarity and accountability (which earns trust).

These aren’t soft benefits. They map directly to what Google’s landmark research—Project Aristotle and Project Oxygen—identified as the characteristics of high-performing teams: psychological safety, dependability, structure and clarity, meaning, and impact. The Sales Coaching System addresses all of them.

The system is built on several models, each designed for a different root-cause situation:

  • SLED (Set the Stage, Lead the Performance Analysis Discussion, Explore Solutions, Develop an Action Plan)—the meeting framework that governs how every coaching session is led. The manager starts with the R and O of ROAM independently—reviewing Results vs. Objectives to identify a performance gap worth addressing. That analysis surfaces the focus for the session. Then SLED governs the meeting itself, where the manager pulls the rep into the diagnosis collaboratively. The A (Activities) discussion happens with the rep inside that session, and the M (Methodology) observation typically requires call or meeting recordings, or live field observation, during or after the initial meeting. Often, the first two steps of SLED occur in one meeting with the second two steps in another, with observation occurring between them.Note: ROAM doesn’t hand off to SLED—they’re intertwined. ROAM finds the focus and, together with the rep, confirms the root cause; SLED structures the conversation through which that happens and the solution is chosen.
  • Field Training Model (Tell, Show, Do, Review)—directive teaching for when a rep doesn’t know what, why, or how to do something. Builds competence from the ground up. Think of this like pouring water into an empty pitcher.
  • Sales Coaching Model (Engage, Practice, Do, Review)—facilitative coaching for when a rep knows the skill but needs to do it better. Think of this as drawing the water (capability) out of the pitcher, rather than pouring it in.
  • Sales Counseling Model—often overlooked and underutilized. Applied when the root cause is mindset or self-limiting beliefs rather than skill gaps. When a rep believes their way is better, or your approach won’t work, no amount of training or coaching resolves it. They may also lack confidence, which is directly correlated to the likelihood they’ll try what they learned in the field. Sales counseling addresses the thinking that drives the behavior. This is where breakthrough moments happen, and where managers who don’t have this tool stall.
  • SOIL Model (Situation, Observed Behavior, Impacts, Learning)—helps when the seller just needs feedback. If they think they’re doing something but aren’t, feedback may be all that’s needed upfront. That may lead to retraining or coaching, but it’s good to set a solid expectation first.
  • Understanding Checks—in training, coaching, counseling, and SOIL feedback, Understanding Checks should be used at every step. If the employee can’t summarize the discussion or role-play the skill, there’s no way to know whether communication actually occurred or whether the rep can do what they were taught or coached.

Developmental Coaching (Dynamic Coaching) deserves special mention because it has the most direct impact on engagement. Developmental coaching is forward-looking and personalized to the individual needs of the seller — focused on growth, advancement, and unlocking potential. Reps who experience it feel genuinely invested in. They develop mastery, which creates meaning. They see a future for themselves at your company, which creates loyalty. This connects directly to PAM Orders Power BARS — the nine personal motivators (Purpose, Autonomy, Mastery, Order, Power, Belonging, Achievement, Recognition, Safety) that drive individual performance.

Rolling Reviews close the loop. After each coaching session, a Rolling Review keeps the rep focused on their action plan and targeted improvement areas, maintains continuity across sessions, and demonstrates that the manager is genuinely committed to development over time. Without Rolling Reviews, coaching becomes episodic. With them, it becomes a system. That sustained investment is one of the most reliable engagement drivers available to a sales manager.

The Adoption & Mastery Mantra

The Adoption & Mastery Mantra— © Transforming Sales Results, LLC. All rights reserved.

Having the right coaching system matters only if it’s actually used. I’ve found this principle holds across every sales organization I’ve worked with:

  • What gets asked about gets focus.
  • What gets measured gets done.
  • What gets integrated into workflow gets adopted.
  • What gets coached gets mastered.
  • What gets adopted and mastered moves the needle.

This isn’t just psychobabble. It’s the operating logic of performance improvement. Organizations that apply it consistently see 12–47% revenue improvements in 6–12 months, depending on organization size and commitment level. (Note: Full sales methodology roll-outs may take longer to achieve >75% adoption. I’ve seen it happen faster in smaller organizations, but 18–36 months is not unheard of.) Third-party research reinforces it: formal, dynamic coaching consistently outperforms ad-hoc approaches on quota attainment and win rates.

The Environment Side: Create the Conditions Where Managers Can Thrive

What sales managers doThis is where most organizations stop short. They invest in manager training, hand FSMs a playbook, and then put them in an environment that defeats them. Deming said it best: put a good performer against a bad system, and the system wins nearly every time. Equipping the person (P) is necessary but not sufficient. The environment (E) must also be designed for success.

This is a senior leadership responsibility — and it’s where the cascade matters most. The engagement that shows up in your sales teams doesn’t start with the FSM. It starts at the top and works its way down: CEO and ELT set the conditions for second- and third-line sales leaders; those leaders set the conditions for FSMs; FSMs set the conditions for their teams. If disengagement exists anywhere in that chain, it flows downward.

Remove Barriers to FSM Engagement

Look again at the top element of the Sales Management System: Remove Barriers to FSM Engagement. I put it there intentionally, because it’s the thing most likely to be overlooked—and the thing most likely to undermine everything below it.

What barriers? Administrative drag. Excessive internal reporting that keeps FSMs in spreadsheets instead of with their teams. Meetings that crowd out coaching time. CRM hygiene requirements that fall on managers rather than being automated. If your FSMs are spending their days on non-coaching activities, you’ve designed a system that produces disengagement regardless of how good your coaching program is.

Worth asking: if you mapped how your FSMs actually spend their time, what percentage would be on high-leverage activities—diagnosing performance, coaching, developing people—versus administrative compliance? Most leaders who do this exercise are surprised by the answer.

Realistic Spans of Control

The Gallup report identifies organizational flattening as a structural driver of the engagement collapse. When companies cut management layers and expand team sizes to reduce costs, manager engagement declines — and team engagement follows. A manager with twelve reps doesn’t have the bandwidth to coach each one effectively. They’re playing whack-a-mole with performance gaps instead of building capability.

This is not a training problem. You can’t coach your way out of a structural design problem.

Servant Leadership From Above

Managers need to be led the way they’re expected to lead their teams. If the CRO’s management philosophy is “Harder, Faster, Longer, Louder” — pressure on outcomes with no investment in how — that posture cascades directly to the FSM and then to the rep. You cannot build a coaching culture from the middle of the org chart. It requires visible, consistent servant leadership from the top.

That means clear expectations from above, not just targets. Coaching and development for the FSM themselves. Protection from organizational dysfunction. Recognition of the role’s genuine difficulty — Gallup’s data shows leaders and managers report more stress, anger, sadness, and loneliness than individual contributors. That emotional burden is real, and ignoring it is a design choice.

Compensation and Incentives Aligned to the Right Behaviors

Incentive structures that reward only revenue and quota attainment—without accounting for leading behaviors like coaching quality, rep development, and methodology adoption—reward the wrong things. They incentivize the FSM to jump into deals rather than coach reps through them. They reward the short-term hero save over the long-term capability build. If you want FSMs to invest in coaching, make coaching visible, measurable, and rewarded.

Psychological Safety as an Organizational Norm

Google’s Project Aristotle found psychological safety—the shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking—to be the single most important characteristic of high-performing teams. This applies above the FSM as much as below. If FSMs can’t surface problems, admit mistakes, or push back on unrealistic targets without career risk, you’ve designed a system that produces exactly the disengagement Gallup is measuring.

Psychological safety isn’t a culture initiative. It’s a leadership behavior. It shows up in how senior leaders respond when an FSM brings them bad news. And to be clear, psychological safety isn’t a “get out of accountability free” card. It is possible to have both. See this newsletter for more on that topic: How to Merge Psychological Safety & Accountability

What Results Look Like When Both Sides Are Working

This isn’t theoretical. I’ve seen the cascade work at scale across more than 48 organizations—both employers and clients—from startups to Fortune 10.

When FSMs are equipped with a real management operating system and put into an environment designed for their success, the results are measurable and substantial. Organizations that commit to this approach—equipping FSMs with the full Sales Management System and designing the environment to support it—consistently see 12–47% revenue improvements within 6–12 months, depending on organization size and the quality and depth of implementation.

That range isn’t random. The organizations at the high end do something the others don’t: they apply the Adoption & Mastery Mantra with discipline. They ask about it, measure it, integrate it, coach it. What gets adopted and mastered moves the needle. What doesn’t, doesn’t.

The 79% manager engagement in Gallup’s best-practice organizations isn’t an outlier. It’s the outcome of doing both halves of Lewin’s equation right—consistently, systemically, over time.

The Straight Talk Version

The Gallup data is telling you something important. The engagement collapse isn’t a generational attitude problem. It isn’t a remote work problem. It won’t be solved by a town hall or a better survey instrument.

It’s a systems problem. Managers are operating without real operating systems, in environments not designed for their success, held accountable for outcomes they don’t have the tools or conditions to produce. Of course they’re disengaging.

The question isn’t whether you can afford to fix this. It’s whether you can afford not to.

If you’re ready to do something about it, reach out on LinkedIn or visit mikekunkle.com/services.

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About Mike

Mike Kunkle is an internationally recognized expert on sales training, sales effectiveness, and sales enablement. He’s spent over 30 years helping companies drive dramatic revenue growth through best-in-class enablement strategies and proven-effective sales systems—and he’s delivered impressive results for both employers and clients. Mike is the founder of Transforming Sales Results, LLC, where he does research and publishes thought leadership, designs sales training, delivers workshops, and helps clients improve sales results through a variety of sales effectiveness practices, sales systems, and advisory services. His book, The Building Blocks of Sales Enablement, is available on Amazon, and The CoNavigator Method for B2B Sales Mastery will be published in 2026.

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