Marcus spent eight years as a top performer. Delivered every quarter, mentored junior team members, stayed late when projects needed him. When the promotion came, he felt ready.
His manager handed him the org chart and said, "You'll figure it out."
Six months later, leadership pulled him into a conference room. Three of his nine direct reports had resigned. The engagement survey results looked grim. And somehow, this was Marcus's fault.
Nobody asked what happened in his first week as a manager. Nobody wanted to know that he spent forty minutes Googling "how to run a one-on-one" because no one had ever shown him. Nobody cared that he was drowning in spreadsheets, trying to decode what "enablement" meant in the context of his team.
They just showed him a number and told him to fix it.
Here's the truth nobody wants to say out loud: we've built an entire industry around measuring employee engagement, and we've done almost nothing to help the people who actually control it.
The statistics are absurd. Managers influence 70% of employee engagement outcomes. That's not debatable, it's documented. But when you look at where companies invest their resources, managers get nothing. HR gets the survey platforms, the analytics dashboards, the workshops. Executives get the quarterly reports. Managers get a spreadsheet six months too late and a vague instruction to "improve morale."
Then we act shocked when people quit.
Marcus didn't fail at management. He failed at something nobody can succeed at: reading minds and reversing time. By the time that annual survey revealed problems on his team, two people were already interviewing elsewhere. The third had mentally checked out months ago.
The survey told Marcus what happened. It never told him what to do.
This isn't a story about one bad manager or one dysfunctional company. It's a pattern repeated thousands of times every day. We promote people because they're good at their jobs, then give them a completely different job with no training, no tools, and no support. When it inevitably goes wrong, we blame them for not instinctively knowing things nobody taught them.
And we call this leadership development.
The cost isn't just Marcus's stress or his team's turnover. It's every manager sitting in their office right now, trying to fix problems they can't see until it's too late. It's every employee who needs help but doesn't know if their manager can handle the conversation. It's every company losing millions to turnover because they'd rather measure engagement than actually enable it.
Marcus deserved better. So does every manager trying to do right by their team with nothing but good intentions and an annual survey.
The system isn't broken. It was built this way.