Gallup released its 2026 State of the Global Workplace report this spring. The headline was that global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, the lowest reading since 2020, at a cost of roughly $10 trillion in lost productivity. 

Here's the one that matters if you manage people. Manager engagement has dropped nine percentage points since 2022, from 31% to 22%. The steepest single-year fall came between 2024 and 2025, when it slid five points in twelve months. Across those same three years, engagement among individual contributors moved from 20% to 19%. Almost flat.

The people being managed held steady.

The people doing the managing came apart.

Gallup calls this the end of the manager "engagement premium." For years, managers were meaningfully more engaged than the people they led. That gap has closed. The emotional data underneath it shows why. Compared with individual contributors, leaders report more stress, anger, sadness, and loneliness the previous day.

So when someone tells you to be more resilient, you're right to bristle. It sounds like a personal failing dressed up as advice. Your workload, your budget, and the two open positions you've been covering since March are all still sitting there in the morning.

Resilience is still worth your time. It works differently than you've probably been told.

Here's the honest version of the research, because you deserve that before you spend an hour on anything.

Vanhove and colleagues published a meta-analysis in 2016 covering 37 studies of workplace resilience programs. The overall effect was small, at d = 0.21. The benefit also faded. Measured within a month of training, the effect was d = 0.26. Measured beyond a month, it fell to d = 0.07. Close to nothing.

If you've sat through a lunch-and-learn on stress management, felt better for a week, and then forgot all of it, the data is on your side.

The researchers ran moderator analyses. For programs aimed at people already at elevated risk, meaning anyone under heavy stress or short on protective resources, the pattern reversed. Weak early effects grew stronger when measured later. The skills held. The authors' recommendation was direct: run a needs assessment and identify who's genuinely at risk before you build anything.

Measurement is what separates resilience training that sticks from resilience training that evaporates.

Which raises the obvious question. How do you find out where you're thin?

The six domains of resilience

Peter Rossouw and Jurie Rossouw published the Predictive 6-Factor Resilience Scale in 2016. What sets it apart from earlier approaches is that it treats resilience as measurable and teachable rather than as a personality trait you either have or lack. The scale breaks resilience into six domains.

Vision

Vision covers your sense of purpose, your ability to work toward clear goals, and congruence, meaning how well your daily work lines up with what you care about.

Vision fails quietly. You won't notice it going. You'll find yourself busy for months and then be unable to say what any of it added up to. In the 2017 study by Rossouw and colleagues, Vision showed a notable relationship with job satisfaction, which points toward purpose as a lever for engagement rather than only for comfort.

A strong Vision score means you can name the next 90 days without checking your calendar.

Tenacity

Tenacity covers persistence, motivation, and realistic optimism.

Notice the word realistic. Tenacity holds you steady through a hard stretch while you're still telling yourself the truth about how hard it is. When yours is strong, you recover your footing faster after a setback and you read the failure as information.

Tenacity is what lets you treat a bad quarter as a data point instead of a verdict.

Composure

Composure covers emotional regulation, stress management, and staying steady under pressure.

This is the domain that comes to mind first when you hear the word resilience, and it's the one most often misdiagnosed. If your fuse feels shorter than it was, you'll assume Composure is the problem. Sometimes it is. Often the driver sits in Health or Collaboration, and Composure is only where the failure becomes visible to everyone else.

Composure is the symptom you notice. The cause is usually somewhere else.

Health

Health covers sleep quality, nutrition, movement, and your general attitude toward your own physical condition.

The Rossouws included Health on purpose, because resilience models at the time treated the topic as purely mental. Your capacity to regulate emotion and think clearly runs on a physical system, and that system has requirements.

This is the least glamorous domain and the one with the highest return. Sleep is the first thing you'll sacrifice and the thing that quietly degrades the other five.

Reasoning

Reasoning covers anticipating challenges, resourcefulness, and problem solving.

When Reasoning is strong, you see the difficult conversation coming three days out and you prepare for it. When it's depleted, everything arrives as a surprise and you spend the week reacting.

Reasoning turns emergencies into scheduled problems while there's still time to solve them.

Collaboration

Collaboration covers your support network, your sense of connection, and your communication skills.

This domain carries a specific risk for you as a manager. Promotion moved you out of the peer group that used to hold you, and you can no longer process a hard week with the people you now evaluate. If you didn't rebuild a support network on purpose after you stepped into leadership, this is likely your lowest score.

Gallup's loneliness finding backs this up. Leaders report more loneliness the previous day than individual contributors do. The isolation is structural, so you can stop treating it as a character flaw.

Your weakest domain sets your ceiling

Here's the practical point most resilience content misses.

You have six scores, and they're uneven. Strong Composure with weak Health looks calm right up until the week it doesn't. Strong Tenacity with weak Vision will carry you through an eighteen-month project and leave you hollow when it finishes. Strong Reasoning with weak Collaboration means you solve every problem alone, which burns through capacity faster than any of them.

Resilience behaves like a system rather than a single dial. Your weakest domain sets the practical ceiling for the other five, which means your highest return usually sits in the area you're least drawn to.

That's also why one-size training produces small effects. A general session spends most of its time on domains you already have covered.

A note if you manage in a nonprofit, agency, or small business

You carry a version of this that corporate resilience content rarely addresses.

You're doing the work and managing the work at the same time. Your development budget is small or missing. Your team is stretched, and you know the name of everyone whose workload has become unsustainable, including your own. When engagement drops on your team, there's no HR business partner to escalate it to. There's you.

Gallup's data offers you something useful here. When managers are engaged, they report every negative emotion at lower rates than individual contributors do, and they're 14 points more likely to be thriving in life than the average leader. Gallup also found that inside best-practice organizations, 79% of managers were engaged in 2025, close to four times the global average.

The distance between 22% and 79% tells you the decline isn't a law of nature.

You can't fix your budget by Friday. You can find out which of your six domains is carrying the most strain and start there.

Frequently asked questions

Are you born resilient? The PR6 model treats resilience as a set of trainable skills rather than a fixed trait. Rossouw and colleagues describe it as a collection of skills that combine into capacity, and the assessment is built for repeated administration so you can track change over time.

Does resilience training work? The evidence is mixed and worth understanding honestly. Vanhove and colleagues found a small overall effect that faded after a month. The same analysis found that programs targeting people at genuine risk produced effects that strengthened over time. Targeting and follow-through appear to matter more than volume of content.

How long before you see a change? Domains respond at different speeds. Emotional regulation practices in Composure tend to shift quickly. Domains tied to habit and physiology, like Health, build over weeks of consistency.

Which domain should you work on first? Usually the weakest one, since it sets your ceiling. It's also the domain you're least likely to pick on your own, which is the argument for measuring instead of guessing.

Is resilience a way of blaming individuals for bad workplaces? It can be used that way, and that use earns the criticism it gets. Gallup's data points squarely at structural conditions like span of control, training gaps, and organizational flattening. Individual resilience work is what sits inside your control while the structural conversation continues, and both are worth holding at once.

Work your six domains with a group

Starting Tuesday, September 8, I'm running a four-week Resilience Deep Dive built around the PR6 assessment. Four sessions, 12:15 to 1:00 PM Central on Teams, September 8, 15, 22, and 29. You take the assessment first, so the sessions work on your profile instead of a general overview. Every session is recorded.

The series includes a 1:1 coaching call with me.

Save your spot →

References

Gallup. (2026). State of the global workplace: 2026 report. Gallup, Inc. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx

Robertson, I. T., Cooper, C. L., Sarkar, M., & Curran, T. (2015). Resilience training in the workplace from 2003 to 2014: A systematic review. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 88(3), 533–562. https://doi.org/10.1111/joop.12120

Rossouw, P. J., & Rossouw, J. G. (2016). The predictive 6-factor resilience scale: Neurobiological fundamentals and organizational application. International Journal of Neuropsychotherapy.

Rossouw, J. G., Rossouw, P. J., Paynter, C., Ward, A., & Khnana, P. (2017). Predictive 6 Factor Resilience Scale: Domains of resilience and their role as enablers of job satisfaction. International Journal of Neuropsychotherapy, 2(1), 25–40. https://doi.org/10.12744/ijnpt.2017.1.0025-0040

Vanhove, A. J., Herian, M. N., Perez, A. L. U., Harms, P. D., & Lester, P. B. (2016). Can resilience be developed at work? A meta-analytic review of resilience-building programme effectiveness. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1111/joop.12123

Dr. Donita Brown is Professor of Management and Vice Chair in the College of Business at Lipscomb University, with more than 20 years of Fortune 500 experience in healthcare IT and operations. She's a certified PR6 resilience practitioner and habit coach, and the founder of Management Minute.