Turning Engagement Data Into Culture Change

Dr. Adam Hickman is Vice President of Employee Development, Talent Management, and HRIS at Partners Federal Credit Union, a learning and organizational development leader with more than two decades inside HR and a PhD in management.

He has spent years living inside Gallup’s engagement research, and in this episode of CultureClub X he makes a pointed case: engagement data is only a signal, and the impact comes from what managers do with it.

You will learn why manager engagement is falling fastest, the difference between managing and developing performance, how to build manager capability through reps rather than courses, why manager engagement is the front end of AI readiness, and the one non-negotiable for stopping managers from quietly disengaging.

The backdrop is sobering. Global engagement has fallen to roughly 20%, its lowest level since 2020. Manager engagement has dropped nine points since 2022. And around 70% of the variance in a team’s engagement comes down to the manager.

Put those together and the conclusion is unavoidable: the manager is the leverage point for employee engagement, and a dashboard full of scores changes nothing until a manager acts on it.

The most misunderstood engagement signal

Adam starts not with a statistic but with a question, the first item in Gallup’s Q12: do you know what is expected of you at work? It sounds basic, yet he carries it around as a daily test. The tell is in how people answer. Ask someone if they know what is expected of them and they will say yes.

Ask how they know, and if they immediately pull up their calendar, they do not really know, because a calendar should not be dictating what matters today. The difference shows up in how Sunday night feels: a dreadful countdown to Monday, or a get-ready session for the week ahead.

Underneath clarity sits something deeper: experiences and beliefs. Everyone joins a workforce carrying a résumé full of experiences, and those experiences have shaped their beliefs about how work should run. When someone new enters a team, it is like a new element entering an organism: things get disrupted, and that is fine, but it takes time for new experiences to fit the culture, the team, and the customer base.

Adam’s instinct is to strip away the traditional HR machinery, the obsession with whether onboarding takes thirty days or thirty-two, and just be simple and human about it. Hire right, put the right talent in the right seat, and the rest folds into place.

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Why managers are disengaging faster than anyone

If 70% of team engagement runs through the manager, the nine-point drop in manager engagement is the alarm worth hearing. Adam’s first answer for why is time. The most talented managers wake up asking how they will coach and develop their people, then have to fold everything else into a day that only holds so many hours.

The trap is letting disengagers, the meetings and busywork that pull you off course, quietly replace the priority you said mattered most.

His sharpest reframe is on performance itself. Organizations talk about performance management as a process, but Adam asks a better question: do you really manage performance, or should you develop it? Performance management is the path you go down once something has already gone wrong, the road toward discipline and documentation. Performance development is an ongoing, day-after-day conversation.

The same applies to delegation, which most managers treat as offloading. Done right, delegation is development. He points to employee development as the work that should sit at the center of a manager’s day, not the exception squeezed in at the end of it.

The second driver is selection. Too many organizations promote on tenure, which Adam calls the worst mistake you can make. Doing well as an individual contributor does not predict success as a manager, and when the innate ability to lead is missing, you get the familiar puzzle of a brilliant contributor who turns into a struggling boss.

Talent is the answer to why that happens, and the time to find out whether someone can lead people is before you hand them a team, not after.

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What the industry gets wrong about young and female managers

Young and female managers have been hit hardest by the engagement decline, and Adam is direct about it. Gallup’s research has long shown that women tend to have higher manager talent than men, and some of the best leaders he has worked for have been women.

The competing priority that historically pushed talented women out was the decision between staying in the workforce and raising children, and the companies that kept their top female leaders were the ones that recognized this and built in genuine flexibility rather than defaulting to a rigid eight-to-five.

His practical answer borrows a frame from pop culture: the eras tour of a career. People move through different eras of life, and what they need shifts with them. Someone may say they do not want the promotion right now, they want to focus on the job and family, but there will come a time when they are ready. The mistake is to wait passively to find out when.

Instead, poke your head in regularly and ask where they are, what development they need, and what their aspirations are. Consistent check-ins keep development moving and quietly dismantle the bias that leadership has to look a certain way.

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What really happens when you flatten the management layer

Organizations are flattening structures and stripping out middle management, and Adam wants leaders to be honest about what that does. Any time you remove or add a person to a team, you have reorganized that team, full stop. You change the dynamic and the rhythm, so things feel different because they are different.

Reducing span of control can be healthy when it means limiting how many direct reports a manager carries. His rule of thumb: ten to twelve direct reports with high manager talent is the sweet spot for engagement. Exceed that with low talent and it only gets worse.

Flattening can work in some settings. Adam describes coders who, once they know what is expected and how they are measured, need little oversight, or childcare workers who need schedules and support rather than someone hovering. But it only works when the culture is already healthy and engaged.

When organizations flatten to escape something, to avoid job eliminations or a performance conversation that has gone too far, they jump straight to the result and skip the action in the middle. The belief that flattening will make things better usually comes from a prior experience that no longer applies, because the people and the recipe have changed.

The org chart gets flatter, and the work that follows gets harder.

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Build manager capability through reps, not courses

Only 44% of managers have ever received formal management training, and the average organization spends around fifteen hundred dollars a year per person on manager development. Adam is all for investment, but he insists much of the best development costs nothing but attention. What managers actually need is reps. A naturally gifted manager, the Ted Lasso type, can be cut loose to do what they do.

But Gallup’s old benchmark was that only one in ten people has real manager talent, which means roughly 90% of managers are in the seat without that innate ability and need to build their competencies through practice.

The reps are concrete. Take the pay conversation, the stickiest, highest-risk moment a manager faces. Put it in front of someone with no experience and no talent and it can be a train wreck. So managers of managers should rehearse it: when this happens, let’s talk through what you would say, so people get their at-bats before they are in front of the live person.

Adam’s team runs end-of-year calibration sessions where managers meet the HRBP team and have to defend a rating, prove a three-out-of-five with documentation and a plan. No course, no spend beyond labor, but it would never show up in that 44% figure because it is not counted as manager development. It is just a conversation, and that is exactly the point.

Manager engagement is the front end of AI readiness

Disengaged managers are also slower to adopt AI, which creates a double productivity risk. Adam’s analogy is the iPhone. Apple never shipped an instruction manual, because they knew their customers started engaged. The same holds at work: when you give an engaged team a new tool, you almost do not need a manual, they take off.

As his organization rolled out AI tools, the most engaged people simply asked for the guardrails from InfoSec and cybersecurity, then ran with it, using it in ways he could barely keep up with. The moderately and fully disengaged waited to be told what to use it for, because they were missing the spark.

Adam admits he was the resistor for a while, a self-described geriatric millennial who still reads the paper and takes notes on a notepad. What moved him was a simple experiment, run in two thirty-day sprints, that turned skepticism into genuine adoption without cutting a single role.

The one non-negotiable: stop talking and start listening

Asked for the single action every people leader should take right now to stop managers from quietly disengaging, Adam’s answer is almost disarmingly simple: stop talking and start listening. We have stopped listening, he says, because we think we know the answer before the sentence is even done. But talent falls out of people’s mouths every day if you are willing to hear it.

He credits Judge Judy for the observation that the letters in “listen” rearrange to spell “silent,” and that is the discipline: go quiet long enough to hear someone’s talent, then individualize back to them.

Listening is how you see a person through the lens of their talent, which is how they see the world, and adapting your language to that lens changes what it feels like to work for someone. Command and control still has its place, Adam notes, in moments of physical danger, like the energy world he came from, where you do not need a strengths conversation, you need someone to say get out of the way.

But on an everyday basis, people do not need a hovering manager. They need autonomy, trust, and a leader who works within the boundaries of their talents. The way in is not always an assessment. Sometimes it is as simple as: tell me your most successful story, and let go.

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Don’t chase the survey number, explore what caused it

On manager effectiveness surveys, Adam is candid that the world has hit survey fatigue, the gas pump, the receipt, the tip screen on everything. But the answer is not to abandon listening, it is to use the data better. The smartest people he has worked with treat the score as the beginning, not the verdict: it is less about the survey number and more about the exploration of what caused it.

Acknowledge the number, good, bad, or indifferent, then go find the cause, because the cause is where the actual work lives. This is where a skilled OD and HR team turns employee sentiment into something a manager can act on.

He uses Gallup’s famous best-friend-at-work question to make the point. The action is not to assign best friends, which would be bizarre. It is to create environments where people can enjoy who they work with, with the organizational forms that allow collaboration on work and outside it.

When that becomes possible, engagement rises, and the downstream effects are concrete: fewer safety incidents, less absenteeism, the kind of numbers a CFO and CEO care about. The same goes for the expectations question. The easy button is to restate what is expected. The real work is asking where it went wrong, whether you failed to individualize the message enough for it to land, and then continuing the conversation.

Adam tells his directs that if they do not know what is expected at the end of the day, he expects a call or an email, because that means he missed something. That is what it looks like to turn a signal into impact, and to connect engagement and performance through the manager.