Why engagement has become a credibility test for leaders

The opportunity for organisations in 2026 is to reframe culture as the operating system that fuels their performance, writes Fayssal Merheb.

As organisations head into 2026, many are confronting a growing credibility gap: the distance between the culture leaders describe and the culture employees actually feel. While leaders continue to articulate purpose and values with confidence, employees measure culture not by what is said, but by what consistently happens.

Across sectors, engagement scores tell a similar story: capable professionals are checking out of advancement pathways, managers are reporting lower motivation and job hugging, and confidence in leadership is stagnating. Culture Amp data shows that only about half of employees believe underperformance is addressed or that feedback leads to change, and fewer than half of employees say they are not overstressed. This is in the context of 2025 benchmark data, which reveals a continued decline in employee motivation, with a willingness to go above and beyond dropping for the third year in a row. The common denominator is a misalignment between intent and experience, between what organisations say matters and what they actually value in practice.

Why the credibility gap is widening

Several forces are driving this divergence.

Employee expectations have shifted faster than organisational operating models.

Clarity, autonomy and accountability are no longer differentiators; they are baseline conditions against which credibility is judged. When standards are unclear or inconsistently applied, culture statements lose meaning. Our data signals that expectations, pathways and accountability are not visible in practice, with more than one in five employees unsure whether they can grow in their current role.

Leadership aspiration is declining.

Reduced interest in leadership is often treated as a pipeline problem, but it is more accurately a verdict on the environment. Culture Amp data shows that managers and directors experience heavier strain than individual contributors. Fewer than six in 10 managers say their workload is reasonable, and only around a third report manageable stress levels, compared with almost four in 10 individual contributors. When leadership is experienced as unsustainable, opting out of advancement becomes a rational choice. This is a cultural signal, not a talent shortage.

Fatigue is changing how work is experienced.

Sustained cognitive load has become a defining feature of modern work, with employees continually navigating shifting priorities, ambiguity and pressure. In that context, gaps between stated values and everyday behaviour are experienced as added friction, not nuance, accelerating judgments about organisational credibility.

In this context, engagement has become more than a survey metric; it is a credibility test. Engagement shows whether cultural intent is translating into the employee experience. It measures the key drivers of employee engagement, including whether people trust their leaders; they feel safe to contribute; growth pathways feel real; work is sustainable; and culture is consistent across teams.

Closing the credibility gap

If culture is the story an organisation tells about itself, engagement is the story employees tell back. For senior leaders in 2026, the challenge is how to align the two. For senior leaders and boards, closing the credibility gap is now a leadership responsibility, not a cultural aspiration. There are three shifts that senior leaders need to drive:

1. Make culture observable and behavioural

Values and purpose statements do not create culture; consistent behaviours do. Leaders need to translate cultural aspirations into daily practices – decision-making norms, feedback rituals, expectations for how people collaborate and how conflict is handled. Culture should be visible in how work gets done, not just how it’s described.

2. Treat engagement as an early-warning system

Engagement should be monitored with the same discipline as financial performance or customer satisfaction. Culture Amp’s industry benchmarks allow organisations to see not only where friction is emerging within their own workforce, but how that experience compares with peers and competitors for talent. When engagement diverges from cultural intent, it is not a failure; it is intelligence about emerging risk and competitive position long before it shows up in attrition, stalled leadership pipelines and eventually, organisational performance.

3. Equip leaders to sustain culture

Leaders operate in systems that reward delivery while leaving cultural stewardship implicit and unsupported. Closing the credibility gap requires clarifying expectations, decision rights and incentives so leaders are enabled to model culture consistently.

The opportunity for organisations in 2026 is to reframe culture as the operating system that fuels their performance, where culture is shaped intentionally through leadership behaviour and decision making, and where the way culture and values are articulated matches the lived experience of the people.

If organisations with strong cultures adapt faster, retain talent more effectively, and sustain high performance, the next generation of high-performing organisations will be those that close that loop deliberately, ensuring credibility, capability and leadership ambition endure in a more complex and demanding world of work.

Fayssal Merheb is a senior people scientist at Culture Amp.