{"id":606387,"date":"2026-07-30T02:15:39","date_gmt":"2026-07-30T02:15:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.olympiajournal.com\/news\/story\/606387\/70-of-workers-lack-manager-support-degnan-offers-a-fix.html"},"modified":"2026-07-30T02:15:39","modified_gmt":"2026-07-30T02:15:39","slug":"70-of-workers-lack-manager-support-degnan-offers-a-fix","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.olympiajournal.com\/news\/story\/606387\/70-of-workers-lack-manager-support-degnan-offers-a-fix.html","title":{"rendered":"70% of Workers Lack Manager Support. Degnan Offers a Fix"},"content":{"rendered":"

Only 30% of U.S. employees strongly agree their manager helps them set clear priorities, according to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace: 2025 Report. That gap isn’t a training problem. It’s a promotion problem. Organizations keep advancing high performers into leadership roles without giving them the tools to actually lead people. Steve Degnan, a former Fortune 500 CHRO and U.S. Army veteran with 32 years of organizational leadership experience, is now working directly with mid-to-large enterprises to close that gap. Through executive keynotes, team-level consulting, and a framework built around what he calls “Promotable and Fireproof” leadership.<\/p>\n

Key Facts: 70% of U.S. employees do not strongly agree their manager helps them prioritize work, per Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace: 2025 Report Managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores, according to Gallup’s ongoing workplace research Steve Degnan spent 20 years as CHRO of a $13 billion food and pet food company. Overseeing people strategy across tens of thousands of employees He currently serves as Board Chair on multiple non-profit boards and maintains an active advisory practice alongside his keynote speaking His forthcoming book, Promotable and Fireproof, identifies the specific behaviors that stall otherwise high-potential managers before they ever reach the C-suite Degnan’s speaking and consulting work is available to organizations of 500+ employees, with a particular focus on leadership teams in transformation or succession planning mode<\/p>\n

Gallup’s data isn’t new. But what’s happening in boardrooms right now makes it urgent in a way it hasn’t been before. Senior leadership retirements accelerated post-pandemic, succession pipelines thinned out during the hiring freezes of 2023-2024, and now organizations are staring at a cohort of mid-level managers who are technically capable but haven’t been developed to lead through uncertainty. The talent is there. The framework isn’t.<\/p>\n

Degnan’s approach is direct about what doesn’t work: one-day leadership workshops, 360-degree feedback tools used in isolation, and promoting based on tenure rather than demonstrated leadership behavior. “You can’t fix a structural problem with an event,” Degnan said. His consulting engagements, which range from agile re-engineering projects to full business transformation work, are built around observable, repeatable leadership behaviors rather than personality assessments or abstract competency models. In a typical engagement, executives describe the same pattern: their best individual contributors get promoted and immediately struggle with the shift from doing the work to directing others who do it. That transition point is where Degnan’s methodology lives.<\/p>\n

What makes his position distinct is the combination of real corporate stakes and operational specificity. This isn’t someone who studied organizations from the outside. He ran HR for a company that had to hit quarterly earnings, manage union relationships, navigate acquisitions, and develop leaders under actual pressure. That background shapes every keynote and every advisory session. The frameworks he uses are grounded in what he’s seen fail as much as what he’s seen work. Which is why they’re practical rather than aspirational.<\/p>\n

The business case for getting this right isn’t soft. Gallup estimates that low engagement costs the global economy $8.9 trillion annually. Roughly 9% of global GDP, per the same 2025 report. For an organization with 2,000 employees, a mid-range engagement improvement doesn’t just improve culture scores. It shows up in retention, speed of execution, and the quality of the next generation of leaders coming up through the pipeline.<\/p>\n

“The data on manager effectiveness has been telling the same story for 20 years, and most organizations are still trying to solve it with the same things that haven’t worked. The problem isn’t that managers don’t care about their people. It’s that no one ever taught them the specific behaviors that make a person worth following. And most organizations don’t figure that out until someone valuable walks out the door.” — Steve Degnan, Founder, Pragmatic Leadership Keynotes & Advisory<\/p>\n

“Promotion is often treated as the reward for doing the last job well. What it should be is the start of a different job entirely. The skills that made someone indispensable as an individual contributor are not the skills that make someone effective as a leader. That’s not an opinion. That’s what the retention data, the engagement data, and three decades of organizational experience all say. And the gap between knowing that and doing something about it is exactly where organizations lose ground.” — Steve Degnan, Founder, Pragmatic Leadership Keynotes & Advisory<\/p>\n

Media Contact<\/span>
Company Name:<\/strong> Steve Degnan
Contact Person:<\/strong> Steve Degnan
Email:<\/strong> Send Email<\/a>
City:<\/strong> St. Louis
Country:<\/strong> United States
Website:<\/strong> https:\/\/stevedegnan.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Only 30% of U.S. employees strongly agree their manager helps them set clear priorities, according to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace: 2025 Report. That gap isn’t a training problem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.olympiajournal.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606387"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.olympiajournal.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.olympiajournal.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.olympiajournal.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.olympiajournal.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=606387"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.olympiajournal.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/606387\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.olympiajournal.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=606387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.olympiajournal.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=606387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.olympiajournal.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=606387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}