If a good part of what separates an engaged team from one that is not depends on who leads it, then the meaning of work cannot be left to a campaign. Gallup estimates that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in engagement across business units. For Brand Imprinting, that figure is an argument for putting the leader at the center: the leader is the one who connects daily work with purpose, and that cannot be delegated.

What the 70% says, and what it does not

It should be read precisely, because it is easy to exaggerate. Gallup presents it as an estimate, with the qualifier “at least”, and it refers to variation across business units: how much of the contrast in engagement between units can be attributed to whoever runs them. It does not say that 70% of each person’s engagement depends on their manager. And the article does not detail how the estimate was calculated, so it is a figure to take seriously, but not to cite as a law.

What it does show is that Gallup considers close leadership a highly relevant factor in engagement, backed by its work with some 27 million people in more than 2.5 million work units.

There is a second uncomfortable figure. According to the State of the Global Workplace 2026 report, managers’ engagement is 22%, compared with 19% for individual contributors, and the global average is 20%. A leader cannot pass on a meaning they do not feel themselves. That is why the model proposes that leaders align first and communicate afterwards.

Meaning is built

In a 2010 Harvard Business Review article, Getting Beyond Engagement to Creating Meaning at Work, Dave and Wendy Ulrich argue that meaning is not found by chance but built. And that those who manage to create it, on their own or with their boss’s help, work harder, more creatively and with more tenacity.

That idea of “with their boss’s help” is the hinge. If meaning is built, someone has to help build it, and the person best placed to do so is whoever is close to the work.

In practice, that looks less like a speech than a repeated conversation. A leader helps build meaning when they explain why a task matters to whoever receives it, when they connect the team’s work with what the organization wants to be, and when they listen to how each person understands their contribution. None of those things can be handed to another department. They are done, or not done, in the Monday meeting.

Here comes what is a Brand Imprinting proposal and not a research result: that this help take the form of a narrative. A brand narrative that answers the model’s five questions (what we do, how we do it, why, how I contribute and what I advocate) in an inspiring and truthful way. There is no study here proving that a narrative increases engagement. It is a working hypothesis, and the way to check it is to measure before and after.

Step 4 of the process

In the model’s process, leadership is the fourth step, after diagnosis, narrative and activation. The idea is simple: leaders are the link between the team’s work and purpose. They align first and communicate afterwards.

Aligning first has a concrete consequence: the leadership team should be able to tell the organization’s why in their own words, without reading a slide. If two managers tell it in incompatible ways, the organization receives two messages and each person picks the one that suits them. It is much cheaper to find out in a meeting room than in the cafeteria. A narrative that leaders cannot tell in their own words, or that they contradict with their decisions, ends up being a poster.

How to apply it

  1. Have each leader answer the five questions in writing, alone, before meeting. Then compare. The differences show where there is no alignment.
  2. Prepare the two-minute version of the “why”. Include a recent decision in which purpose changed what was done. If you cannot find one, you have a finding.
  3. Ask your team “how do I contribute?”. Listen to the answers without correcting them. This is the shared responsibility dimension: each person knows how their work affects others’ and feels that their opinion is heard.
  4. Mind the small signals. Who gets recognized, why and in what words. That is where the narrative becomes credible or stops being so.
  5. Measure by area. If results vary between teams, that is the leadership conversation that matters. Remember that a cut is only reliable with enough responses.

Where it fits in the model

In the Why? dimension (purpose and style), purpose must inspire and leaders must embody it. In How do I contribute? (shared responsibility), feeling that your own opinion is heard often depends to a large extent on the person closest to you. Leadership runs through both.

One closing note. Gallup’s figures support the idea that close leadership weighs heavily on engagement. They do not validate the Brand Imprinting instrument in particular. What this approach does allow is to put that conversation on concrete data from your own organization.