Annual, conservative
$0
Productivity drag plus replacement cost
The Leadership Ripple Estimator
Three numbers. Five minutes. A clearer picture of what one unsupported leader may be costing your organization right now.
Gallup’s research on 2.7 million employees across roughly 100,000 teams found that managers account for at least 70 percent of the variance in team engagement. Not compensation. Not the mission statement. Not the benefits package. Two teams inside the same company, with the same pay bands and the same tools, will produce dramatically different results depending on who leads them.
The practical consequence is uncomfortable. When one leader is struggling, unsupported, or quietly out of their depth, the cost does not land on that leader’s salary line. It lands on everyone downstream of them, and it shows up in your books as turnover, missed delivery, and quiet underperformance that nobody traces back to its source.
This estimator uses published Gallup and SHRM benchmarks to help you see what that may look like around one specific person in your organization. You probably already have someone in mind.
1
Step 1
How many people sit downstream of this leader?
Direct reports plus anyone reporting into them. This is the leader’s true span of influence, not their org chart box.
people
People affected daily
25 people
Share of engagement they explain
At least 70 percent
Based on Gallup’s finding that managers account for at least 70 percent of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units, drawn from engagement data covering 2.7 million employees in roughly 100,000 teams.
2
Step 2
What is the average fully loaded salary on that team?
Salary plus benefits and employer taxes. Use $95,000 if you do not have a precise figure.
$
Disengagement cost, conservative (18%)
$17,100 per person
Disengagement cost, true (34%)
$32,300 per person
Gallup estimates the cost of an actively disengaged employee at 18 percent of annual salary on the conservative end and 34 percent, or $3,400 for every $10,000 earned, on the fuller measure that includes absenteeism, lost productivity, and reduced profitability.
3
Step 3
What share of that team has checked out?
Not who complains. Who has gone quiet. Use 34 percent if you are unsure.
Estimated disengaged
9 of 25 people
Versus national baseline
2.0x the US average
Roughly 17 percent of the US workforce is actively disengaged in a typical setting. Because the manager explains the large majority of between-team variance, teams under a struggling leader commonly run at or above double that baseline. Adjust the slider to match what you actually observe.
The ripple
One leader. 25 people downstream.
Gold at the center is the leader. Each ring outward is another layer of the team.
The leader
Still engaged
Checked out
Your estimated annual cost of inaction
Annual, true cost
$0
Productivity drag plus replacement cost
Three year, conservative
$0
If nothing changes
Three year, true cost
$0
If nothing changes
Optional adjustment
Add the executive time this is absorbing
Hours per week a senior leader spends managing around this situation. Rerouting decisions, absorbing escalations, smoothing things over. Most leaders underestimate this.
Annual executive time cost
$0
Working weeks counted
46 per year
Priced at a fully loaded senior executive cost of $250,000 across roughly 2,000 working hours, or about $125 per hour. This figure is added to the totals above.
What this number tells you
This is a floor, not a ceiling. These figures count productivity drag and direct replacement cost. They do not count the clients who quietly stopped renewing, the strong internal candidate who took herself out of the running for a role under this leader, or the reputation cost in your recruiting market when people talk.
The people you lose first are the ones you can least afford to lose. High performers have options and use them earliest. Disengagement does not spread evenly. It clears out your best people and retains the ones who have nowhere else to go.
The leader is usually not the villain. In most cases the person at the center of this diagram was promoted for technical excellence, given no development, and is now failing publicly at a job nobody taught them. Gallup finds only about one in ten people have high natural talent for management, and another two in ten can perform at a high level with coaching and development.
Source: Gallup, State of the American Manager
The cost of intervention is a fraction of this. A serious coaching engagement for one leader typically costs a small percentage of the annual figure above. This is not a development expense. It is a retention and performance decision with a measurable return.
Why this number will only grow
Manager engagement is in free fall. Global manager engagement dropped from 30 percent to 27 percent, then fell again to 22 percent the following year. The people responsible for holding engagement together are losing their own grip on it faster than anyone else in the organization.
Source: Gallup, State of the Global Workplace, 2025 and 2026 editions
The manager premium has nearly disappeared. Between 2022 and 2025 the engagement gap between managers and individual contributors collapsed from plus 11 points to plus 3. Managers are now barely more engaged than the people they lead, which means the buffer that used to absorb organizational stress is gone.
Source: Gallup, State of the Global Workplace, 2026 edition
Overall engagement is falling for the second consecutive year. Global employee engagement declined from 23 percent in 2022 to 20 percent in 2025. Gallup estimates low engagement now costs the world economy roughly $10 trillion annually, about 9 percent of global GDP.
Source: Gallup, State of the Global Workplace, 2026 edition
Most managers were never trained. Only 44 percent of managers globally report receiving management training. The majority are improvising, and the ones improvising badly are the ones this calculator is about.
Source: Gallup, State of the Global Workplace, 2025 edition
Spans of control are widening. As organizations flatten, each remaining leader absorbs more people. Gallup finds manager engagement declines as span of control grows, which means the same struggling leader affects a larger population next year than this year.
Source: Gallup, State of the Global Workplace, 2026 edition
What development actually returns
The intervention side of the ledger
Gallup found that managers who receive training focused on best management practices are 22 percent more engaged themselves, and that teams led by trained managers showed an 18 percent increase in engagement. The figures below apply that 18 percent improvement to your inputs. They are illustrative, not a guarantee, and they assume the leader is coachable and the organization supports the work.
Annual cost of inaction
$0
Modeled annual recovery
$0
Over three years
$0
Recovery modeled as an 18 percent reduction in the disengaged share of this team, applied to the conservative annual figure. Source: Gallup, State of the Global Workplace, 2025 edition.
You have a name in your head right now.
That is the point of this exercise. If the number above is larger than you expected, the next conversation is not about whether to act. It is about what is actually happening for that leader, and whether it is coachable.
Start the conversation