Executives to Managers: Get More Out of Your People

First, there was the ask, followed by the demand, that workers return to the office more—or all—of the time. Then firms started ranking workers by performance. Now comes word that managers are being told to get tougher on employees not pulling their weight.

Indeed, 64% of managers report feeling pressured from above to take a harder stance on performance this year, according to a new survey from the HR-software company Perceptyx. The company, which surveyed 1,500 supervisors in the US and Europe, says many managers are being asked to drive higher output, faster decisions, and greater accountability. “It is possible that the existing crop of managers have simply tried everything else,” says James Bywater, a Korn Ferry senior client partner and business psychologist.

Over the last 18 months, many larger organizations have been on productivity drives, thinning out management layers to improve productivity. Yet productivity growth remains stubbornly hard to sustain at a national level. Last year, productivity rose 2.8% in the United States, only to decrease 1.8% in the first quarter of 2025. Now many executives are trying a different approach, giving big rewards to top performers and warning underperformers that their jobs are at risk. “Now, more than ever, you want the best players on the field,” says Dennis Deans, Korn Ferry’s vice president of global human resources.

How far firm leaders want managers to go to achieve that seems to be moving up a notch. Earlier this year, some companies decided to return to a decades-old practice of ranking employees, rewarding those at the top and removing those near the bottom. It’s a striking contrast from just a few years ago, when the prevailing management philosophy was to help underperformers improve via extra training or development, says David Farris, a Korn Ferry senior client partner and sector lead for the firm’s Professional Services practice. He cites the fact that many organizations are having difficulty growing top-line revenues as the key factor. “There’s so much pressure being applied on organizations to do more with less,” he says.

Yet the push adds yet another level of complexity for managers, whose ranks have been thinned in recent years as companies aspire to “flatten” organizational charts. An emphasis on performance isn’t always easy to implement effectively, especially with managers handling more direct reports. “It’s one thing to have that goal in writing, it’s another in practice,” says Kim Waller, a Korn Ferry senior client partner in the firm’s Organizational Strategy practice. Not all managers have been trained to deliver the message, and even among that have, some just aren’t that good at being direct. At the same time, going “cold turkey” or implementing these changes in a cumbersome manner could easily be a real shock to the system, Bywater adds.

Experts recommend that managers get additional training in having direct conversations, to help them deliver bad messages in an empathetic way. Expecting higher performance also shouldn’t just be a one-time push, Waller says. “You want these types of evaluations consistently for them to stick,” she notes.

Firms shouldn’t dial back completely on development, either. “The development part is how you get to the level you need,” says Arvinder Dhesi, a Korn Ferry senior client partner and organizational strategy expert. Indeed, highlighting how underperformers can move into more rewarding roles or achieve other career enhancements if they improve could be one way to boost short-term performance.

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