kaimb Founders · September 8, 2026

Managers: The Missing Link in Women Leadership Development

Why is the manager layer the gap in women's leadership?

The instinct is to look up: board numbers, C-suite percentages, the quota. The data points somewhere else.

Women's progression in India Inc. stalls at the move from mid-management to senior leadership. That is the transition where the manager relationship matters most, where a stretch role, a name put forward in a succession conversation, or a direct development conversation can change the trajectory of a career. It is also where the manager layer is going quiet.

LinkedIn's Workplace Learning Report 2025 found that only 15% of employees had a manager help them build a career plan in the past six months, a figure that dropped five points in a single year. Career planning is the mechanism through which sponsorship becomes visible at mid-career, stretch roles get assigned, and readiness gets named. When managers go silent on it, the development gap is distributed unevenly, and women carry the largest share of the cost.

This is also why performance reviews are a design problem as much as a manager problem. The system does not equip managers to have the conversations that move careers. It just expects the conversations to happen.

What do organisations with strong manager cultures achieve?

They treat the manager layer as an investment, not an assumption, and the representation data reflects it directly.

Great Place To Work India's DEIB Report 2025 puts numbers to the gap. The best workplaces hire 9% more women and carry 6 percentage points higher women's representation in leadership: 32% compared to 26% at other organisations, a figure that has stayed flat for three consecutive years.

The difference comes down to how far managers are equipped, supported, and held to account for career development, well beyond any culture initiative or DEI pledge. What the 2026 data on women in leadership shows is consistent: representation follows enablement. Organisations that invest in the manager layer produce measurably different outcomes. Those that do not have 26%, flat for three years.

How far has manager engagement fallen?

Far, and the specifics matter.

Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2026 puts global manager engagement at 22%, down from 31% in 2022, a nine-point drop in three years. Female managers saw the steepest single-year decline: seven points. The people organisations most depend on to sponsor women's transitions are themselves under the most pressure and the least supported.

The consequence compounds. Gallup research shows managers account for roughly 70% of the variance in team-level engagement. When a manager disengages, the effect moves through every career conversation not had, every stretch role not offered, every succession discussion where no name is put forward.

The frame matters. Managers here are under-resourced, loaded with execution, communication, and inclusion responsibility without the tools or time to do any of it well. The intent is usually there; the infrastructure is missing.

Can organisations reverse the manager engagement decline?

The Gallup data answers this directly: yes.

In best-practice organisations, 79% of managers are engaged at work, nearly four times the global average of 22%. These organisations span all sizes and sectors. The differentiator is whether the organisation has built the systems, expectations, and support structures that make manager enablement a strategic priority, regardless of industry or geography.

For women's progression at the mid-to-senior transition, that signal matters more than most HR metrics, because the manager layer is the variable that moves careers forward or leaves them in place. Declining manager engagement is a choice, and so is reversing it.

How kaimb helps

kaimb works one layer up from the women themselves. The intervention point is the manager.

We build structured programs and conversation frameworks that give managers the tools to support their teams through the mid-to-senior transition. That means making leadership readiness visible, so advocacy in a talent review is evidence-based. It means structured development conversations at the moments that matter. And it means giving managers something specific to say when a woman on their team is ready, rather than waiting until someone asks.

For CHROs and people leaders building the pipeline: DM Anu or Kaveri to talk about how kaimb works with organisations.

For individual women navigating this transition: start with the assessment to understand where your leadership profile is strong and where a targeted intervention would help most.