The Manager–Employee Gap: Why Leaders Stopped Eating Last

A senior HR leader I respect told me a story last quarter that I have not been able to shake.

She had inherited a sales organization of about 400 people across three continents. On her second week, she sat in the back of a Tuesday all-hands meeting and watched the regional VP, a likeable, reasonable guy who had been in seat for nine years, open the meeting with a slide titled “Our People.” On the slide were four photos, four names, and four very confident bullet points about how each person excelled in their roles.

Three of the four people had left the company more than a year earlier.

Nobody on the call corrected him. Not the chief of staff, the senior director, nor the 400 people remotely dialed into the call. They simply let him talk. After the meeting, when the senior HR leader gently flagged it, the VP laughed and said, “Oh, I haven’t refreshed that deck in a minute.”

That moment — a leader who genuinely believed he was talking about his people, while no longer recognizing his people — is the best visual I can give you of the gap that has been quietly widening underneath many of today’s workplaces.

It is not an engagement gap. It is not a communication gap. It is a distance gap. If you read Simon Sinek’s book, Leaders Eat Last (Portfolio, 2014), you already know what to call it: The Circle of Safety. Sinek argued, and the neuroscience he leaned on agreed, that humans are wired to feel safe in small groups led by people who put the group’s interests above their own. This circle has gotten too big, and most of our managers are no longer inside.

SHRM26 Session: The Future of Work is Still Human with Simon Sinek

Simon Sinek’s Circle of Safety — And Why it Still Matters

When Leaders Eat Last was published in 2014, the central argument for building trust and psychological safety landed gently in the HR consciousness because the world wasn’t yet hybrid, AI hadn’t yet eaten the calendar, and the word “manager” still mostly meant a person who sat near you. When explaining manager-employee safety, he pointed to the Marines, where senior leaders eat last not as ceremony but as principle: the group’s needs come first because the group’s safety is the leader’s job.

He also says that safety stems from a biochemical nature and explains that, within that circle, the human nervous system runs on the right chemistry. Trust gets built by oxytocin and serotonin, slow chemicals, made in the company of people who consistently show up for you. Stress gets buffered by leaders who absorb the heat instead of forwarding it. Outside the circle, the chemistry flips. Cortisol takes the wheel. Cooperation thins. People go quiet, then they go transactional, then they just … go.

Now read that paragraph again with 2026 conditions in mind.

Hybrid schedules have shrunk the casual interactions that used to do the slow work of building trust. AI has compressed the face-to-face conversations that used to happen between a manager and a direct report. Layoffs have moved from rare to regular. In fact, 78% of HR leaders in LHH’s 2026 research describe layoffs as a recurring, normal part of operations. The pandemic-era humanity that briefly pulled leaders closer to their teams has been replaced, in many places, by a return-to-office posture that feels less like reunion and more like reassertion of control.

In Sinek’s framework, all of those forces do the same thing. They abstract the people. They make the team smaller in the manager’s mind even as the headcount on paper stays the same. And once people become abstract, the chemistry of trust stops being possible, because trust is biological. It does not respond to a Slack emoji or a quarterly pulse survey. It responds to consistent, embodied presence from someone who has chosen the team’s interests over their own.

That is the gap. I’m not saying that all managers are bad. The problem is that we have built a managerial layer that is structurally unable to eat last, and then we have asked it to act like leaders anyway.

Webinar: Human-Centered Leadership: Transformation Through Creativity and Connection

Four Moves for Senior HR This Quarter

If you are a CHRO, a VP of HR, or a People + Strategy reader who shapes the manager experience for employees, here are the four moves I would put on the executive agenda before the end of Q3. I have watched each of these work, across organizations, across industries, across maturity levels, and I have watched the absence of each of them quietly metastasize into the engagement scores we then spend the next year trying to explain away.

1. Give your managers fewer people, not more support.

The simplest, hardest move on this list. Gallup reports the average U.S. manager had 12.1 direct reports in 2025 — up from 10.9 just a year earlier, and nearly 50% higher than when Gallup began measuring in 2013. Roughly one in eight managers now carries 25 people or more. 

Gallup’s data also shows manager engagement peaks at around eight to nine direct reports and falls off steadily beyond that. Past that ceiling you are not adding leverage; you are subtracting attention, and no leadership development program can override the math. Audit your spans against that eight-to-nine threshold and cut the largest ones in half by Q4. This is a structural decision, not a training decision.

2. Make the manager job description shorter and braver.

Other than the first line of “Manages a team of 10 or more,” most manager job descriptions (JDs) are functionally indistinguishable from individual contributor JDs with three coordination duties tacked on. Strip yours back to four things and write them in plain English: 

• Know your people. 
• Set the work. 
• Remove the obstacles. 
• Tell the truth. 

Anything else is a tax on attention. If your senior leadership team cannot agree that those four belong above everything else, you have already located the source of the gap.

3. Reinstate the Circle of Safety on a hybrid org chart.

Sinek’s Circle of Safety assumed proximity. Hybrid work models do not give us that proximity for free, so we have to build connection on purpose. Across organizations, the simplest, highest-yield move has been to formally reduce a manager’s immediate team to between five and seven named people; the ones the manager is actually responsible for protecting. Give the manager explicitly dedicated time to spend an hour a week on their reports, calendar protected, no agenda. It is unglamorous and it works. The manager-employee connection needs dedicated time for safety to take root and grow.

4. Promote for trust, not for performance.

This is the move that will rattle your CFO, and it is the one I most want senior HR leaders to fight for. Sinek makes the case that organizations consistently promote high performers who do not generate trust, and the cost of that decision compounds for years. Look at your last twelve months of manager promotions. For each one, ask the next layer below: Would you go into a hard quarter under this person? 

If the answer is no more than 40% of the time, you do not have a development problem. You have a selection problem. Fix the selection. In Leaders Eat Last, Sinek describes how the Navy SEALs, among the highest-performing teams on earth, choose their people using a matrix of performance and trust. 

The one profile they will not take is the high performer of low trust. That person, they have learned, is the toxic teammate who delivers the mission and quietly poisons the people around them. Given the choice, these elite teams would rather take a medium performer of high trust every time. Ask which of those two profiles your last promotion cycle actually rewarded 
 

Related Podcast: SHRM's CHRO on Building Trust During Times of Change and Uncertainty

Sinek will be on the stage at SHRM26 this year, and I expect a room of HR leaders to nod along in the way HR leaders are very good at nodding along. The challenge for our profession, for the People + Strategy readership especially, is to leave that room and do the unglamorous work of rebuilding the manager-employee relationships that underpin our org charts. That work is not on a keynote slide; it is in the headcount decisions we quietly make. The job descriptions we shorten. The hour a week we give back to a manager so they can sit with the seven people they are responsible for protecting. 

The gap closes one Circle of Safety at a time. Not at scale. Not with a platform. With a leader, eating last. That is still the job.

Njsane Courtney is the vice president of human resources for the American Bureau of Shipping, a certified executive coach, and founder of My Friend in HR podcast. Courtney has two decades of global people leadership experience. Concepts in the article above are referenced from Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek (Portfolio, 2014).