I recently stumbled across Gallup's State of the Global Workplace report. One statistic jumped out to me: Global manager engagement has been consistently dropping from 31 percent in 2022, 30 percent in 2023, 27 percent in 2024, to 22 percent in 2025.

In plain English, this means in 2025, only 22 percent of managers surveyed were genuinely enthusiastic and invested in their work. The other 73 percent were coasting or entirely checked out. Individual contributor (IC) engagement has been roughly flat—20 percent in 2022, 18 percent in 2023 and 2024, and 19 percent in 2025.

Think about this for a minute. Less than 25 percent of managers and ICs jump out of bed each day fired up about their job. It’s also interesting to note that the engagement gap between managers and ICs has narrowed from a 10-percentage point difference in 2022 to just a three-percentage point difference in 2025.

On the bright side, among U.S. organizations, the 2025 manager engagement number is 36 percent, and in best practice organizations the number jumps to 79 percent. While these numbers are encouraging, it doesn’t mean there’s not a problem. Managers (including project managers) are responsible for translating an exec’s why and what into how. If managers aren’t engaged, then driving the how becomes more risky.

Taking the position that a professional, whether a manager or IC, needs to do whatever is in their power to improve their engagement, I’d like to give you five things to consider to improve engagement for both you and your team:

Read more at ProjectManagement.com.

As an individual contributor, Joe was praised by his management for his speed in delivering results. His management was so enamored with his ability to get things done quickly that he was promoted to a leader role over a team of ten. Joe’s speed in taking action carried over into his decision making. He saw making decisions fast as a sign of getting “real work done,” versus sitting around talking about things. “Great leaders don’t have all the facts,” he would say to his team, as justification for moving forward without a good understanding of a decision’s implications. Joe’s team learned to just say, “Yes, Sir,” and do their best to execute what Joe wanted done by the time expected. His impulsive decision making came to a head with a new hire named Greg.

I love baseball. I grew up playing as a kid. I had a pretty good fastball and a knee-buckling curve. I like to think I could have broken into the pros if it only I was bigger, stronger, faster, and had more talent. (Only a few minor details that stood between me and the Cooperstown Baseball Hall of Fame.)

I particularly enjoy going to spring training games in Arizona. This year, I went to four games in five days, including a day and night game on the same day. At the night game, Patty and I took my 91-year-old father-in-law. I bought good tickets that minimized the number of stairs, and we sat in the section behind home plate.

We had peanuts and beer during the game. The weather was beautifully comfortable; not too hot or cold. We stayed until the middle of the 8th inning and left to avoid traffic. The one thing from that game that will stick with me into my old age was during the seventh-inning stretch.

Read more at ProjectManagement.com.

In my blog post In-Person Jekyll, Social Media Hyde, I discuss some takeaways to consider when posting to social media. I wrote it in 2021, spurred on by an onslaught of surprisingly divisive social media posts from people who, when face to face, appeared nothing like how their posts represented them.

I am connected with many business colleagues on social media, including LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and X. Many are relatively reserved in their commentary and use business platforms for business topics, and personal platforms for things like vacation pics and family updates.

I really enjoy seeing both sides of colleagues, as it helps me get a more rounded view of them and discover their interests. For example, one of my colleagues is well-established in the tech industry, but also a lead singer for a cover band. It’s really fun to see him live his Sammy Hagar alter ego on the weekends. (Sammy Hagar over David Lee Roth any day!) Whenever I see one of his posts, I know I’ll be lightheartedly entertained and can celebrate his fun side.

My focus, though, is not on those like my lead-singer buddy.

It’s on the finger-wagger.

Read more at ProjectManagement.com.

Throughout my career, I’ve facilitated and been a party to disagreements or conflict more times that I can possibly count. Sometimes things worked out okay, and those affected were satisfied with the outcome.

Other times, things didn’t turn out as well. As I’ve thought about both the good and not-so-good outcomes, it caused me to dig deeper to find the underlying factors that helped drive the outcomes.

Read more at ProjectManagement.com.

As of this article, my wife and I are in process of buying a car. We are looking for a very specific model with “must-have” features, like exterior color and interior appointments. At one dealer in particular, the salesperson was clearly trying to endear himself to me, wanting to talk about things that I wouldn’t generally talk about with someone I just met—and had nothing to do with buying a car.

Now, I’m a relational guy and love to learn more about people—but I can also tell when someone is manipulating me. His dis-ingenuousness made me not want to work with him. I was looking to buy a car and wanted to stay focused on what needed to be done to buy the car, but the salesperson was trying to work me. I ended up walking away and will avoid doing business with the salesperson in the future.

You might be asking what buying a car has to do with being a project manager. So much of what a project manager does is about relationships—guiding and working with others to deliver something on time, on budget, and within scope.

However, relationships aren’t one size fits all. Depending on the situation and the parties involved, I’ve found that relationships can take on one of three forms, as follows:

Read more at ProjectManagement.com.

So maybe you think you're all that and a bag of chips and that you can get more things done than most people in your organization.  As managers, though, it's not just about you getting things done on your own; it's about you getting your team to be as effective (or more) as you.

I deliberately use the term effective versus efficient.  For me, there is a very clear distinction which I believe is crucial in driving results.

I’ve been a micromanager, been micromanaged, and advised clients on how to avoid micromanaging and being micromanaged. To help peel back the onion on micromanagement and what to do about it, I’d like to start with a concept in my book,  Straight A’s, that empowers followers. The Straight A’s focus on five core steps, as follows:

1. Articulate the why
2. Align on the what
3. Advise on the how
4. Hold accountable the who
5. Agree on the when

For this to work, both the leader and the follower have to do their parts in each step of the process. For each of the steps, here are responsibilities for both leaders and followers:

Read more at ProjectManagement.com.

Bud was one of the most brilliant people in his organization.  Only in his mid-thirties, Bud amazed his senior managers with his ability to grasp problems and develop innovative and effective solutions to those problems.  He was highly sought after as a "go-to" guy and would consistently come up with creative approaches.  His management decided to give him a thorny project with a team of over 100 professionals.  "This is my chance to really prove I can deliver", Bud thought as he willingly accepted the project.

Bud wasted no time in coming up with some great solutions which his management thought were brilliant.  Expectations were sky-high and Bud was on a project high.  Then the problems started.

When I was a kid in Connecticut I went with my Father to take my sister and her infant son to the train station.  My sister had a lot of bags so my Father helped her carry her things on to the train.  I was standing on the platform waiting for my Father to get off the train so we could go home.  Then all of a sudden the train started moving with my Father still on the train!  Here I am, an 8-year-old boy standing on the train platform all by myself while my Father is on the train heading to Washington DC. I remember seeing the train start to pull away, and my Father waving at me through the window to go to the ticketing office so I can tell them what happened.   This was in the days where there were no cell phones, so my Father couldn't communicate with me to let me know what was happening.  I went into the ticketing office and through sobs told the ticket agent that my Father got stuck on the train and I got left on the platform all by myself.  The ticket agent was very reassuring and told me that everything was going to be OK.  Fortunately the next stop was only about 30 minutes away so I was reunited with my Father in an couple of hours.  It was one of the scariest times of my entire childhood, being left on the train platform all by myself.