I want to start with something I hear regularly in my work with leadership teams across South Africa and beyond. A senior leader sits across from me, clearly frustrated, and says something along the lines of: “I genuinely care about my people. I check in with them. I run team lunches. I have an open-door policy. So why does it feel like they are here in body but not in spirit?”
It is one of the most honest and painful questions a leader can ask. And the answer, in my experience, is rarely about bad intent. Most leaders I work with are not cold or indifferent. They are busy, well-meaning, and doing what they believe good leadership looks like. The problem is that what they believe is happening, and what their people actually experience, are two very different things. In relational cultures (and South Africa is one of the most relationally oriented workplaces in the world) that gap between intention and impact is where disengagement quietly takes root.
Intent does not equal impact in relational cultures
What does well-intended leadership look like? We are talking about the manager who sends a motivational message on Monday morning. The executive who invests in team-building events. The director who genuinely believes their people are their greatest asset. None of this is insincere. And yet, disengagement persists.
Gallup’s most recent global data tells a sobering story. In 2024, global employee engagement fell to 21 per cent. This is the lowest level recorded in over a decade. Gallup has called this “The Great Detachment”: employees who remain in their jobs but are emotionally checked out, going through the motions rather than genuinely investing in their work.
What makes this striking is that most of these businesses are not led by people who do not care. Disengagement is not a product of malice or neglect but of a leadership approach that prioritises visible action over relational depth. Intent is assumed to be sufficient. Impacts are rarely examined.
The relational gap that leaders often miss
In relational cultures, people do not simply respond to what you do as a leader. They respond to how you make them feel. They are reading the room with extraordinary precision; noticing whether you remembered what they shared with you last week, whether your affirmation felt genuine or formulaic, whether your open-door policy is a real invitation or a performance. These are not trivial observations. They are the “data points” from which your people construct their experience of working for you.
The Centre for Respectful Leadership captures this clearly when it notes that in most workplace interactions, we assume positive intent on our own part without considering how our behaviour lands on the receiving end. The target of behaviour – the employee on the other side of the interaction – cannot see your intentions. They can only experience your impact. This is the crux of the problem for well-intended leaders. A leader might genuinely believe they are being transparent, inclusive, and supportive. Yet their team might experience them as inconsistent and unapproachable. Both realities are true simultaneously. And in a relational culture, it is the experienced reality that drives engagement, not the intended one.
The manager effect is real, and it is profound
Gallup’s research consistently finds that 70 per cent of the variance in team engagement is attributable directly to the manager. Not the strategy. Not the compensation package. Not the office environment. The manager. When managers themselves feel disconnected, overwhelmed, or unclear about their role as people-leaders, their teams will reflect this. And the Gallup 2025 report highlights a particularly concerning trend: manager engagement fell from 30 per cent to 27 per cent in just one year. That is a steeper decline than in any other employee category.
What this tells us is that we have a generation of middle and senior managers who are carrying significant pressure, attempting to lead with good intentions, and still producing disengaged teams. The issue is not motivation or effort. It is capability, specifically the relational capability that allows a leader to move beyond surface-level engagement and build the kind of trust that sustains discretionary effort over time.
Data from Culture Amp confirms this further: when employees’ perception of their leaders declines, organisations can expect an immediate drop of around ten per cent in overall engagement levels, and that decline can take considerable time to reverse. What is more, the leading indicator is almost never a dramatic event. It is a quiet accumulation of moments where leaders failed to show up in the way their people needed.
When the gap between values and experience widens
One of the most damaging dynamics we observe in business is what happens when a company espouses strong values around people, respect, and inclusion, but the day-to-day experience of employees tells a different story. Leaders talk about psychological safety, but people do not feel safe raising concerns. Leaders talk about recognition, but acknowledgement is infrequent, generic, or applied inconsistently. Leaders talk about growth, but conversations about development are rushed or non-existent.
This is not hypocrisy, in most cases. It is a gap between aspiration and skill. Leaders genuinely believe in these values. They simply have not been equipped to translate belief into consistent relational practice. And in a culture where people are extraordinarily attuned to authenticity – where they will sense immediately whether something is real or performed – this gap is felt acutely.
Disengagement in these environments is not defiance. It is a rational response. When the cost of investing fully in a team or company exceeds the perceived return, people protect themselves by withdrawing. They remain. They perform at a functional level. But they stop bringing their full selves to work, and that is precisely where creativity, innovation, and genuine commitment reside.
What this means for leadership today
If you are a middle or senior leader reading this, the most important question to sit with is not “Do I have good intentions?” You almost certainly do. The question is: “What is the actual experience of working for me like?”
This requires a willingness to look beyond output metrics and performance dashboards and to examine the relational quality of everyday interactions. It requires curiosity rather than assumption. It requires leaders who are willing to hear difficult feedback without becoming defensive, and who understand that impact, not intent, is where trust is built or broken.
In a country and continent where relationships are not merely a cultural nicety but a fundamental currency of working life, leaders who do not understand this dynamic will continue to invest in engagement initiatives that produce surface-level compliance rather than genuine commitment. The numbers are already telling us this is happening. The question is whether leaders are willing to examine why.
At 4Seeds Consulting, we work with leadership teams who are ready to close the gap between who they intend to be as leaders and who their people actually experience them to be. If this resonates with navigating leadership in your organisation, get in touch. We would welcome the conversation. Click here to book a discovery call with Kerstin Jatho to scope a bespoke programme designed to restore and retain employee engagement.