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This issue offers a fresh perspective and actionable tips to enhance your leadership this week.

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This might be the move.

We’re expected to translate vision from above, protect and support your people below, and somehow stay grounded in the middle. Most days, there’s no clear place to process that reality honestly.

Over the past year, I’ve had dozens of quiet conversations with leaders who’ve said versions of the same thing: “I don’t need more leadership content. I need a place to think, reflect, and not carry this alone.”

So I’m building something new.

Leader’s Lens Lab is a small, intentional leadership community for people in the middle. For those navigating team culture, decision pressure, and responsibility without many safe places to process it.

It is a response for leaders seeking to apply leadership, with other leader in the middle wanting to build sustainable ways to lead in real time.

This is for you if you want to:

A few of y’all have shared interest in a community in this way. My desire is to design:

But I am avoiding it being a place where you see it as:

I am currently in the community design phase for it to be open for founding members to join mid to late February. To get on the list when it drops, all you have to do is reply “Lab” and you will be in the know!

As always, you can send me your questions as well!

Alright, let’s get into this issue.

Often times when I come across an article or data point centered on employee engagement, I think about how useful it would be for our Leader’s Lens community to grapple with it.

A new Gallup study shows that overall U.S. engagement has hovered at 31%, down from its 2020 peak. The steepest drops are not among seasoned workers, they are among younger employees and early-career professionals.

If you manage a team, especially one that skews younger, do you see your team operating with:

It would be easy to pin it on the person (or culture or generation). That can be explained away; accountability is on the person to bring up their engagement from their own boots straps.

But I don’t think our leadership should be removed from equation…

What if this is more of a leadership design problem than a personal motivation one?

Gallup found that younger workers experienced the largest declines in three areas:

But the narrative you hear about the next generation workforce is:

These declines Gallup point to requires a structural reflection.

Younger employees entered organizations during constant disruption. They rely more heavily on clear guidance, feedback, and development pathways and many of those systems quietly weakened over the last few years.

In other words, the ladder was removed while people were still climbing.

When employees say they want to feel cared about, they are not asking for motivational speeches or culture slogans.

Gallup’s qualitative data bluntly states employees want:

One employee said this when asked what would help them feel more cared about:

“If I felt listened to. If we have a complaint, the response is always ‘remember why you’re here’ or ‘practice gratitude,’ which doesn’t solve the problem.”

I remember this being true when I first entered into the workforce. I was able to know that care was offered to me from my leadership by how they communicated to me as a person. In contrast, some leaders I’ve encountered that were not considered a “people-person” left a poor perspective to how I viewed the work place.

An engaged leader made me want to stay longer. A dismissive (or passive) leader made me want to find the nearest exit faster.

Care is being responsive, not in how your tone.

What is most alarming insight in the study is less than one-third of leaders strongly agree they know what exceptional performance looks like in their own role.

If leaders are unclear, expectations degrade as they move downward.

That puts middle managers in an impossible position:

When expectations are fuzzy, engagement it erodes. And the next generational workers feel that erosion first.

This data highlights what I felt 20 years ago coming into the workforce and reenforces what I’ve seen in leadership the last 12 years. I hope you don’t feel like you are being accused of poor leadership, but reframe it as permission.

Permission to stop blaming yourself or your team regarding employee engagement concerns, and start addressing the systems you actually influence.

Here are three places to focus.

Your team doesn’t need another values slide.

They need answers to questions like:

Clarity is oxygen, especially for people early in their careers.

Care shows up through:

You don’t need perfect answers.

You need consistency and follow-through.

Employees want more communication, not less, when things are unclear.

That doesn’t mean pretending certainty.

It means saying:

Silence gets interpreted as indifference.

If engagement feels low on your team, try this reframe:

“What is unclear, unsupported, or underdeveloped in the system right now?”

That question moves you from managing morale to designing leadership conditions.

And that’s the real work of leaders in the middle.

I am interested to know, what stood out to you in this Gallup survey? And which action do you plan on taking this week?

— Ray

Whenever you are ready, here are ways you can work with me: