Three Questions Every VP of Engineering Should Ask Their Team
By Samantha S. Woo · March 2026
When velocity is down but everyone insists they’re “fine,” these three questions help you see what’s really happening in your engineering org.
“Where are we seeing effort without meaningful progress—and what might that say about capacity, not character?”
“What recent decision or change created the most emotional friction on this team, and how do we know?”
“If people could safely tell the truth about how it feels to work here right now, what do you think you’d hear—and what would you do with that information?”
Back in 2014, a Gallup study cited by Forbes found that only 13% of workers were actively engaged at work—meaning 87% were not. That level of disengagement was estimated to cost U.S. companies hundreds of billions of dollars in lost productivity each year.
A decade later, the story hasn’t changed nearly enough. As of early 2024, Gallup’s global survey showed only about 30% of the workforce is actively engaged, with the worldwide cost of disengagement estimated at $8.8 trillion. These aren’t just shocking statistics; they represent years of missed opportunities for transformation.
For much of that time, many organizations have defaulted to the same playbook: misreading lack of capacity as laziness, relying on hire‑and‑fire cycles, and letting a revolving door quietly drain the budget. When leaders finally feel the impact, they often turn to executive coaching as the fix. But by design and ethics, most coaching avoids clinical insight—ironically, exactly where many of the most nuanced people‑problems live.
Consider a tech org that’s just secured a new funding round in the current AI wave, but the engineering team is exhausted and velocity drops as pressure rises. It’s not always a skills issue. It’s evidence of a system at capacity—a system made up of human nervous systems, each with its own history, thresholds, and patterns of coping, in the context of constant global and local pressure.
Emotionally intelligent leadership doesn’t magically erase those cues, limits, or contexts, but it does change the trajectory. Leaders who can read emotional and relational signals alongside the KPIs are the ones who can turn disengagement into sustainable engagement instead of simply pushing harder on an already strained system.
If you suspect disengagement is quietly dragging on your team, you don’t have to fix everything in one offsite. You do have to be the leader who’s willing to see the emotional system you’re actually managing, not just the roadmap you wish you were running.