Flat engagement scores rarely signal a culture problem. They signal a problem with how organizations decide who gets promoted into leadership, and what happens to those people once they do. Steve Degnan, a former CHRO with 32 years of executive experience, explains why fixing that distinction changes everything.
St. Louis, MO - Workforce disengagement has stayed stubbornly elevated across industries for years. According to Gallup's State of the Global Workplace report, only about one in four employees worldwide is engaged at work, a figure that has barely shifted despite enormous organizational investment in culture programs, recognition platforms, and listening tools. Steve Degnan, founder of Pragmatic Leadership Keynotes & Advisory, says that number persists for a specific, fixable reason that most organizations haven't fully confronted: the way they decide who gets promoted into leadership is producing leaders who weren't ready to lead, and their teams know it.
Key Takeaways Persistent disengagement usually traces back to a root problem in how organizations make promotion decisions, not to a culture gap that training or recognition programs can close. Promoting someone based on individual performance and tenure rather than proven ability to lead others creates a predictable trust problem that compounds quietly across business units. Two structural failures drive most flat engagement scores: selecting for the wrong criteria when promoting, and providing no meaningful support once someone steps into a leadership role. Steve Degnan brings 32 years of executive experience, including 20 years as CHRO at Nestlé Purina, a $13 billion global food and pet food company, to advisory work with mid-to-large organizations. His advisory practice focuses on leadership pipeline development, agile workforce re-engineering, and organizational transformation for companies where leadership quality directly determines whether change sticks.
Why Are Engagement Scores So Resistant to Change?
A structural problem, for the purposes of this conversation, means one that's rooted in policy or process rather than in individual attitudes or team dynamics. It affects the whole organization systematically because it's baked into how decisions get made, not just how people feel about those decisions.
Here's the mechanism. When an organization consistently promotes its strongest individual contributors into management without examining whether those people have the inclination or ability to lead others, it creates a predictable outcome. The skills that made someone exceptional as an individual contributor, including technical precision, independent execution, and personal accountability, are often the exact skills that create friction when that person is asked to develop, direct, and advocate for other people.
The new manager struggles. Their team watches. And the lesson that gets absorbed isn't just about that one manager. It's about the organization's judgment. When this pattern repeats across business units over time, teams learn to quietly discount the credibility of leadership decisions. That's a trust problem. And a team that doesn't trust the organization's judgment won't stay engaged no matter how polished the culture initiative is.
Degnan's advisory experience, developed across two decades of CHRO work at a company with tens of thousands of employees operating in multiple geographies, consistently points to this pattern as the underlying driver of flat engagement data in organizations that have already tried everything else.
What the Promotion Audit Most CHROs Haven't Run Looks Like
Organizations that want an honest answer to why their engagement numbers aren't moving should start by looking at their recent promotion decisions.
Not just who got promoted. What the decision was actually based on.
Here's a practical starting point. Pull the last 12 to 24 months of promotions into first-level and mid-level management. Then ask these specific questions for each one:
Were promotion criteria weighted toward individual performance, or toward proven ability to lead others? Was there documented evidence that the person had successfully coached, developed, or influenced others before receiving the promotion? Was leadership potential explicitly assessed, or was it assumed from strong individual performance reviews? Did the organization provide structured coaching or sponsorship in the first 90 days after the promotion? At the 12-month mark, did the promoted leader's team show measurable signs of engagement and trust, or did the unit quietly decline?
Most organizations find that honest answers to at least two or three of those questions are unfavorable. That's not a failure of character or effort. It's a failure of process, and process can be redesigned.
Why Adding More Training Doesn't Fix This
The instinct that drives most organizational responses to flat engagement scores is to add programming. More manager training. More leadership cohorts. More facilitated offsites.
Training delivers knowledge. What a new leader actually needs is the development of capability, meaning behavior change under pressure, in real situations, over time. A two-day program introduces concepts. It doesn't change how someone leads when a project is behind schedule, a high performer is considering leaving, or a business unit is being restructured under them.
Degnan's approach addresses this directly. His work with organizations emphasizes building post-promotion support systems that extend well past the first 90 days. That timeline matters because most first-time managers initially apply their old habits to their new role. The real test comes when those habits stop working and they don't yet have the leadership instincts to replace them.
What new leaders need at that point isn't a course. They need honest feedback that doesn't arrive through a formal performance conversation. They need coaching conversations structured around real decisions they're facing, not hypotheticals. And they need organizational permission to ask questions without signaling weakness or uncertainty to the people they lead. Most organizations provide none of these things systematically.
This is part of what Degnan addresses through his speaking work with senior leadership teams and through his advisory engagements, helping organizations build the infrastructure that makes first-year leadership development actually work rather than simply exist on paper.
An Honest Limitation Worth Acknowledging
This approach works best in organizations where senior leadership is stable enough to consistently model and reinforce the promotion criteria being developed. In environments undergoing rapid restructuring, where the senior team changes significantly every 12 to 18 months, promotion-based trust erosion can be partially overridden by structural instability that sits above the promotion decision itself. In those cases, the structural leadership work is still valuable, but the sequencing and scope of the engagement needs to account for that context from the start.
Degnan is direct about this in early conversations with prospective clients. The diagnostic matters before the intervention does.
About Steve Degnan
Steve Degnan is a former Chief Human Resources Officer with 32 years of executive leadership experience, including 20 years overseeing enterprise HR strategy at Nestlé Purina. He's also a U.S. Army veteran whose experience with leadership under pressure and accountability in high-stakes environments directly informs how he approaches organizational work.
He currently serves as Board Chair of multiple non-profit organizations, including the Starkloff Disability Institute. His client endorsements include senior leaders from Fortune 500 companies and academic institutions. He's completing a book titled "Promotable and Fireproof," which addresses the career resilience gap that often sits underneath persistent engagement challenges, specifically what it takes to build a track record that makes you genuinely difficult to overlook and difficult to lose.
If you want a preliminary sense of where your own leadership development approach has gaps, the Promotable and Fireproof assessment is a practical starting point before a formal conversation. You can also find related thinking on leadership development and organizational culture at the newsletter archive.