What Should Leaders Manage and Review?
Rewriting the Leadership Checklist in an Era of Collapsing Engagement and Plunging Trust — Five Review Areas Seen Through Gallup, DDI, and McKinsey Data

The question "What should a leader manage?" is an old one. However, the answer in 2026 is different from the past. The era when a leader's role was fulfilled simply by keeping track of sales, schedules, and performance metrics has passed. Global survey data consistently shows that what is collapsing first in organizations today is not numbers, but human engagement and trust. This means the priority of what leaders must manage and review is shifting. Based on the latest surveys from Gallup, DDI, McKinsey, and Gartner, as well as domestic data, this article outlines five areas that leaders must regularly review today.

The Leadership Report Card: The Reality of 2026 Told by Numbers

First, it is necessary to check our current position. According to the 'State of the Global Workplace' report published by Gallup in 2026, global employee engagement in 2025 dropped to 20%, the lowest level since 2020. This marks a decline for the second consecutive year. Gallup estimates that productivity losses due to low engagement amount to approximately $10 trillion annually, or about 9% of global GDP.

What deserves more attention is the group driving this decline. In Gallup's data, manager engagement dropped by 9 percentage points over three years, from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025. In particular, it fell by 5 percentage points within a single year from 27% in 2024 to 2025, which is the largest annual drop observed by Gallup. Gallup diagnoses that while managers historically enjoyed an 'engagement premium' with higher engagement than general employees, that premium is now disappearing. This is a signal that those tasked with leading teams are growing exhausted as much as, or even faster than, their team members.

During the same period, DDI's 'Global Leadership Forecast 2025' illustrates the internal state of leaders. Surveying approximately 13,000 leaders across roughly 50 countries, the report revealed that 71% of leaders stated their stress has increased significantly since taking on their current roles. This is higher than the 63% recorded in the 2022 survey. Among leaders reporting high stress, 40% said they have considered quitting the leadership role itself. What these numbers imply is clear: the first target a leader must review is not the organization or the market, but the leader themselves.

First Review Target: The Leader's Own Engagement and Energy

A fact repeatedly confirmed in Gallup's long-standing research is that about 70% of the variance in team-level engagement is explained by manager factors. This figure does not mean that 'managers create 70% of engagement,' but rather that most of the reason engagement varies significantly from team to team within the same company depends on who leads that team. Ultimately, a substantial portion of the difference in engagement between teams is interpreted as being related to manager factors, though this does not imply a strict causal relationship excluding all other variables such as compensation systems or macroeconomic conditions.

Is the leader's own engagement then a manageable variable? Gallup's 2026 report presents an interesting contrast. In high-performing organizations that treat engagement management as part of their long-term management strategy, 79% of managers were found to be engaged. This is nearly four times the global average of 22%. The fact that these organizations are not concentrated in any specific region or industry suggests that the collapse of manager engagement may not be an inevitable trend of the times, but rather a matter of organizational design and support.

Practically speaking, leaders have three items to check. First, are they regularly checking their own energy state? Burnout does not arrive suddenly one day; it accumulates over months. Second, do they have coaching and peer support—channels for mutual support with fellow leaders? Third, do they find meaning in their leadership role? It is worth noting that DDI's survey pointed to self-reflection, open dialogue, and continuous learning as common traits among leaders who successfully transformed stress into growth.

Second Review Target: People — Managing Expectations, Feedback, and Recognition

Naturally, the second review target for a leader is people. The problem is that most leaders spend very little actual time on people management. According to a middle manager survey published by McKinsey in 2023, middle managers spent less than 25% of their total working time actually managing people and developing talent. The remaining time was scattered across administrative tasks, reporting, and individual operational work. In the same survey, 43% of middle managers reported being in a state of burnout.

The core of reviewing people is not grandiose systems, but the frequency and quality of dialogue. A behavior commonly found by Gallup among exceptional managers was frequent, meaningful conversations with individual team members, rather than annual evaluations. This involves setting clear expectations, focusing on strengths, and treating team members as individuals rather than through uniform standards. The question a leader must ask themselves is simple: Over the past week, have I had substantive conversations with each team member about their work progress and difficulties? Were these conversations connected to their growth, rather than just formal pleasantries?

McKinsey's analysis shows that this review is also financially meaningful. Organizations with top-tier management capabilities outperformed bottom-tier organizations by 3 to 21 times in 5-year cumulative total shareholder return (TSR). Time spent on people management can be interpreted not as a cost, but as an investment with proven returns.

Third Review Target: Trust — An Asset That Collapses If Not Measured

The third review target is an asset that is most frequently neglected because it is invisible: trust. In a survey published by DDI in 2025, the proportion of leaders who said they trust their direct supervisor stood at 29%. This is a decline from 46% in 2022 and 24% in 2024. Trust in executive management was also around the 32% level. Notably, in this survey, trust in the direct supervisor encountered daily (29%) was actually lower than trust in distant senior executives (32%). This result suggests that the chain of trust is weakening at the middle leadership level.

Trust is not created by declarations. The pathways through which trust is formed are predictability and consistency. The accumulation of repetitive behaviors—such as whether a leader keeps their word, shares bad news without hiding it, passes credit around rather than taking it, and admits mistakes—determines the trust balance. Therefore, reviewing trust should be done not through gut feeling, but through questions. Do team members bring bad news to me first, or do I find out last? Do dissenting opinions emerge in meetings, or does silence linger? The speed at which bad news is delivered and the frequency of dissenting opinions are practical proxy indicators showing the level of trust.

Another point worth noting in the DDI survey is that frontline leaders are more isolated. Frontline leaders were found to be 1.5 times less likely to trust executive management compared to leaders at other tiers. This is interpreted to mean that trust is worn down across hierarchies while organizational messages flow from top to bottom. Therefore, from the perspective of executive management, trust reviews must be conducted not only between themselves and direct C-suite executives, but down to the frontline leadership tier where messages ultimately arrive. Have you ever tracked what sentences your town hall remarks turn into after passing through the mouths of frontline team managers? That gap is precisely the gap in trust.

Fourth Review Target: Work Structure — Bureaucracy Consuming Leaders' Time

The fourth review target is the structure of work itself. In the McKinsey survey, 44% of middle managers cited organizational bureaucracy as the single biggest cause of negative experiences in their managerial roles. Unclear decision-making authority, lack of delegation, and excessive administrative tasks encroach upon leaders' time, with the result that work only leaders can do—namely, developing people and aligning direction—gets pushed aside.

This problem cannot be solved with individual time-management skills. Because it is a structural issue. Questions leaders must review include: Out of the reports our team produces, how many are actually used in decision-making? Out of the meetings I attend, how many would reach the same conclusion even without me? What rules force team members to come to me for approval on matters they could decide for themselves?

This aligns with the same problem awareness found in the '2026 Leadership Perspective Survey' conducted by Evanta, a Gartner C-level community, among approximately 750 CHROs, where 'leader and manager development' was chosen as the top HR priority for the second consecutive year. An interpretation is emerging that the focus of leadership development is shifting from individual competency training toward creating structures where leaders can actually work.

Fifth Review Target: AI Transformation — Manage Adoption, Not Technology

A new review area added for leaders in 2026 is AI. Interestingly, the management point pointed to by data is not the technology itself. Gallup's 2026 report points out that AI investments often fail to translate into organizational performance, presenting 'whether managers actively support AI utilization' alongside the level of integration with existing work systems as a top factor driving frequent AI usage. Gallup's Q1 2026 U.S. survey also showed that manager-led AI adoption is one of the top factors driving frequent AI usage among employees.

In other words, what leaders must manage in AI transformation is not the algorithm, but the adoption environment. Review questions are summarized as follows: Have I clearly communicated to team members for what tasks and under what criteria AI may be used? Am I demonstrating the use of AI in actual work myself? Have I agreed with the team on where time saved by AI is reinvested? Gartner's 2026 HR Trends Survey (targeting 426 CHROs across 23 industries) also focuses on capturing business value and redesigning work and workforce rather than AI introduction itself, sharing the same diagnosis that success or failure depends on the role of leadership rather than technology adoption rates. Tools are already evolving fast enough. Combining the two survey results leads to the diagnosis that the bottleneck is not the technology, but the role of leaders in translating that technology into the team's working methods.

The Specificity of Korean Organizations: A Checklist in the Age of 'Leader Phobia'

These five review areas are even more pressing in Korean organizations. This is because aversion to the leadership role itself is becoming pronounced. In a survey published by University Tomorrow 20s Lab in 2025, only 36.7% of office workers aged 19–36 responded that they hope to hold a middle manager position, while 32.5% responded that they do not want it. Responses stating they do not want to take on executive roles in the future reached 39.2%. The public sector is no different. An analysis of public institution workforce operations released by the Board of Audit and Inspection in January 2026 showed that 31 out of 35 surveyed institutions reported a phenomenon of avoiding executive promotions.

In such an environment, the exhaustion and attrition of incumbent leaders become a problem for the entire leadership pipeline, not just a personal issue. This is because if leaders collapse now, there will be no one to fill their shoes. This is where executive management gets one more review item to handle: Is the position of leader designed to be bearable in our organization? Do prospective next-generation leaders look at current leaders and want that role? If one cannot answer these questions with confidence, the leadership role itself requires redesign before individual leaders are reviewed.

Management Is the Repetition of Review, Not Control

To summarize, the targets a leader must manage and review in 2026 are five: their own engagement and energy, expectations, feedback, and recognition with team members, the organization's trust balance, work structure and bureaucracy, and the AI adoption environment. The principle running through all five areas is one: management is not control, but the repetition of regular reviews. Just as financial statements are checked every quarter, leaders must have a routine of periodically checking the status of people, trust, and structure.

While the pictures painted by Gallup and DDI data are gloomy, they simultaneously point the way. The fact that a manager group with 79% engagement actually exists, and that common behaviors of leaders who turned stress into growth have been identified, suggests that the decline of leadership is not a destiny. What makes the difference is not talent, but the habit of review. Open your calendar this week and check: Is time booked to look into even one of the five review areas on a regular basis? If not, that is the first item you need to manage.