It is a sunny Sunday, even here in Ireland. While my wife is going through articles to find her next career path, I find myself wanting to write down some reflections about a few reports I have been reading lately, and how clearly they mirror what I experience in my daily working routine.

McKinsey’s State of Organizations 2026, published in May, makes something very explicit that most senior leaders already sense but rarely act on: middle managers are the primary carriers of organizational culture. They are the ones who translate strategy into daily behavior. They decide, in practice, what gets celebrated, what gets tolerated, and what gets ignored. No amount of executive messaging overrides what an engineer experiences in their one-to-ones, in sprint reviews, or in the way their manager handles failure.

This is not a new observation. What is new in 2026 is the size of the gap between what organizations need from their engineering managers and what they actually invest in them. And given how fast engineering teams are expected to move, that gap is now expensive.

Engineering Managers Are Not a Scheduling Layer

When I moved from senior systems engineer to team leader, one of the first things I had to unlearn was the assumption that my job was to coordinate work. It is not. Coordination is a small part of the role. The larger part is creating the conditions in which engineers can do their best work, stay motivated, and grow.

That sounds abstract, so let me be concrete.

The LeadDev Engineering Leadership Report 2026, based on data from hundreds of engineering leaders across Europe and North America, identifies the most impactful things engineering managers do. At the top of the list:

  • Establishing psychological safety within the team
  • Clarifying priorities and removing ambiguity
  • Acting as a genuine career partner for each direct report

Scheduling and task tracking rank at the bottom.

Honestly, this list matches my experience exactly. The moments where I feel I am doing my job well as a team leader are never the ones where every task is assigned and every ticket is moving. They are the ones where an engineer feels safe enough to say “I have no idea how to approach this” in a team call, or when someone comes to me to talk about where they want to go next in their career. That is the actual work.

This matters because many organizations still treat engineering management as a promotion path for strong individual contributors, with no deliberate investment in what the role actually requires. The result is predictable: technically brilliant people who are uncomfortable with conflict, unclear on how to give feedback, and unsure what “good management” even looks like. Nobody taught them. Nobody invested in them.

The McKinsey report is direct on this point: organizations that empower and develop their middle management layer see faster strategy execution, lower attrition, and stronger overall team performance compared to those that focus investment exclusively at the top or at the individual contributor level.

For a CTO, this is a business ROI conversation, not a soft-skills conversation.

The CTO’s Real Job Is to Multiply the Multipliers

Think about how technical force multiplication actually works. A CTO can directly influence a handful of direct reports. Each of those direct reports manages a set of engineering managers. Each engineering manager shapes the daily experience of eight to twelve engineers. At scale, a CTO’s real impact on the organization flows almost entirely through the quality of that middle layer.

If an engineering manager is unclear on company priorities, that uncertainty reaches twelve engineers immediately. If an engineering manager creates a low-trust environment, those twelve people spend their mental energy on self-protection instead of problem-solving. If an engineering manager consistently runs poor one-to-ones, twelve people feel invisible, and some of them start looking for the exit.

The JRG Partners Engineering Executive Talent Gap report (2026) notes that the shortage of qualified engineering leaders is expected to be one of the defining talent challenges of the next five years. The pipeline is thin, because most organizations have not been building it.

I have seen this firsthand. When I took my team leader role, I was fortunate to work under a manager who trusted me with genuine autonomy and gave me room to make mistakes. Not every engineering manager gets that. Many are left to figure it out alone, and the people who pay the price are the engineers underneath them. The Workplace Culture Trends 2026 data from Inclusivity Insight puts a number on it: teams with supported, psychologically safe managers show roughly 40% lower attrition. That is not a marginal gain.

What Senior Leaders Should Actually Do About It

I am not going to produce a list of ten things to implement by next quarter. That is not how meaningful change happens in engineering organizations. But there are three shifts in perspective that, based on both the research and my own experience, make a real difference.

1. Treat Engineering Management as a Discipline, Not a Destination

Becoming an engineering manager is not a reward for being a strong engineer. It is the beginning of a different career path with different skills, different failure modes, and different definitions of success. Organizations that frame it as a promotion tend to under-invest in development and rely too heavily on technical seniority as a proxy for leadership capability. They are usually surprised when things go wrong.

Part of treating it as a discipline means building a learning path specifically designed for engineering managers. Not the same generic leadership training distributed company-wide, but something that addresses the concrete challenges of leading engineers: how to handle technical disagreements without undermining authority, how to give meaningful feedback to someone who knows a specific domain better than you do, how to hold a conversation about technical debt with a stakeholder who only cares about the roadmap. Generic management programs rarely land well with engineers, and the managers who attend them usually know it. Investing in dedicated, role-specific development sends a very different signal: this organization takes this role seriously.

2. Make Culture Operational, Not Aspirational

Culture is not what you articulate in the all-hands; it is what your engineering managers reinforce or undermine in every interaction with their teams. The chain has to be complete from the top down, and that means being very concrete about what “living the culture” actually requires at the EM level. Engineering managers will mirror what they experience from above, not what they are told to do.

In practice, making culture operational looks like this:

  • Asking your EMs “what is not working?” before asking “what did you ship?” It signals that surfacing problems is valued, not punished.
  • Sharing real business context with EMs before the all-hands, not after. Transparency cannot be a value if leadership withholds information until it is convenient.
  • Publicly acknowledging when a leadership decision was wrong. If you expect blameless post-mortems in your engineering teams, you need to model the same behavior one level up.
  • Rewarding EMs who escalate early, even when the news is uncomfortable. The alternative is a culture where problems hide until they explode.

None of these require a new process or a new tool. They require consistency.

3. Invest Before Things Break

Most organizations pay attention to engineering manager quality only when something has already gone wrong: a resignation spike, a failed delivery, a team in visible dysfunction. By then, a lot of damage is already done. The organizations that win on talent and culture in 2026 are those treating their engineering manager layer as a strategic asset deserving continuous investment, rather than a problem to diagnose when it surfaces.

I have written before about delegation and ownership and about my own transition from senior engineer to team leader. The common thread in all three is the same: great engineering outcomes come from people who feel trusted, supported, and clear on why their work matters. Engineering managers are the people who create or destroy those conditions every single day.

For CTOs and senior engineering leaders, the question is not whether engineering managers matter. The research is clear, and most experienced leaders know it intuitively. The question is whether your organization is actually treating them as if they do.

The ROI of getting this right is not measured in individual performance reviews. It compounds across every team, every quarter, in the form of faster delivery, lower attrition, and a culture that does not need to be rebuilt after every reorg.

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