achieveCPR: Performance, Live in Atlanta - Performance Management Fails Without Manager Support

Performance Management Isn't Broken Because of Employees. It's Broken Because Nobody Is Supporting the Managers

For the second year in a row, CHROs named the same top priority for 2026: leadership and manager development. Forty-six percent of chief human resources officers cited it in SHRM's 2026 CHRO Priorities and Perspectives report, making it the most common answer across sixteen HR practice areas. That is not a coincidence. It is a symptom.

Gallup's newest State of the Global Workplace report found that global employee engagement slipped to 20 percent in 2025, its lowest level since 2020. The decline was driven almost entirely by one group: managers. Manager engagement fell five points in a single year, from 27 percent to 22 percent, and is down nine points since 2022. Gallup estimates the resulting drag on productivity at roughly 10 trillion dollars a year, worldwide.

Put plainly, most performance problems that land on an employee's desk started a level up, with a manager who was never given the clarity, time, or training to do the job well. That was the starting premise behind achieveCPR: Performance, Live in Atlanta, a recent session that brought HR and people leaders together to talk through what it actually takes to fix performance management from the inside out.

The Manager Capacity Problem Is Bigger Than Most Org Charts Admit

Part of the reason managers are struggling has nothing to do with skill and everything to do with math. Gallup's most recent workforce data shows the average number of direct reports per manager climbed from 10.9 in 2024 to 12.1 in 2025, an increase of nearly 50 percent since Gallup first measured span of control in 2013. Much of that growth comes from companies flattening org charts and consolidating middle management, often to fund AI investment or cut costs. The math rarely gets revisited once it is set: a manager who could reasonably coach five people is asked to coach twelve, with the same number of hours in a week.

This is not a peripheral issue. McKinsey research on more than 1,800 companies found that organizations that focus deliberately on their people's performance are 4.2 times more likely to outperform their peers, posting 30 percent higher revenue growth and five percentage points lower attrition. Capacity is not a soft consideration bolted onto performance strategy. It is the strategy.

Why This Matters Even More With AI in the Mix

The pressure is compounding as AI enters the picture. Gallup's 2026 data shows that when managers actively support their team's use of AI, employees are 8.7 times more likely to say AI has meaningfully changed how work gets done, and 7.4 times more likely to say it gives them room to do their best work. Yet fewer than a third of employees say their manager is actively supporting AI adoption at all, largely because those same managers are already stretched thin. Handing an overloaded manager one more transformation to lead, without addressing their capacity first, is a fast way to stall an AI rollout before it starts.

Why "Good, Great, and Excellent" Beats a SMART Goal

Most performance surprises do not come from underperformance. They come from undefined expectations. McKinsey research found that 72 percent of employees cite goal setting as a strong motivator for performance, but only when goals are clear and tied to company priorities. The gap between a "met the ask" outcome and one that genuinely stands out is rarely written down anywhere, which means managers and employees are negotiating that gap after the fact, at review time, when it is far too late to do anything but disagree.

The fix does not require new software. It requires managers to define, in advance, what good, great, and excellent look like for a specific goal and role, in language specific enough that two different people watching the same performance would agree on the rating. That single habit removes most of the ambiguity that turns performance reviews into arguments.

Diagnose Before You Discipline: Will, Skill, or Way

When a performance issue surfaces, the instinct in most organizations is to move straight to a conversation about consequences. A more useful first move is diagnostic: is this a motivation problem, a capability gap, or a structural barrier the person cannot control? Coaching someone harder on a structural problem, like a lack of time, staffing, or authority, wastes effort and damages trust, because the person was never actually capable of succeeding under the conditions they were given.

McKinsey's research on effective performance systems points to the same idea from a different angle: the best systems are agile enough to let managers weigh the headwinds and tailwinds an employee faced, rather than judging outcomes in a vacuum. Diagnosis before judgment is not a soft skill. It is a design requirement.

Feedback Is the Cheapest, Highest-Leverage Fix You Have

If there is one lever every organization already has access to, it is feedback timing. Gallup has found that 80 percent of employees who received meaningful feedback in the past week are fully engaged at work. Yet across most companies, feedback still travels on an annual or semi-annual clock, arriving long after the moment it would have been useful.

The fix is both simple and hard to execute consistently: give feedback within 48 to 72 hours of the moment it is needed, and be explicit about which of three things you are offering, appreciation, coaching, or evaluation. Giving someone coaching when they were looking for an evaluation, or the reverse, reads as a miss even when the substance is accurate. Naming the type out loud removes most of the friction before it starts.

Compensation Has to Say What Your Culture Says

No amount of stated values will outrun a compensation plan that rewards the opposite behavior. If a salesperson is paid purely on closed revenue, talk about collaboration or retention will not change what they do, because the incentive structure is teaching a different lesson every payday. McKinsey's research on rewards has found that noncash motivators, praise from a manager, leadership attention, and the chance to lead a project, can be just as effective as top tier financial incentives, and in some cases more so. Aligning what you pay for with what you actually want to see is one of the few performance levers that works immediately, because it does not require anyone to change their character. It only requires changing what gets rewarded.

What This Looked Like in the Room

These ideas were the spine of achieveCPR: Performance, Live in Atlanta, hosted by Nicole Long, Associate Vice Chancellor for Classification and Compensation at the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia. Nicole moderated a practitioner panel that included Matt Neylon, Chief Talent and Experience Officer at Mount Vernon School, Hope Knowles, Director of Learning and Development at Priority Commerce, and Kamaria Scott, founder and chief performance strategist at Enetic.

Across the session, the panel worked through frameworks for diagnosing performance problems, defining what excellence actually looks like before a review cycle starts, and giving managers a real, scheduled home for the behaviors organizations expect of them but rarely build time for. The panel also tackled the AI-era anxiety many managers are feeling firsthand, the sense of being asked to absorb more responsibility with less support, and what leaders can do to address that head on rather than assume it will resolve itself. The room worked through real scenarios, including a candid exchange about what happens when a top performer's results come at the cost of team culture, and left with language attendees could use with their own managers the following week.

That is the format behind every achieveCPR Live session: a full day, a small room, and a group of practitioners willing to work through what is actually broken, not just what is comfortable to say out loud.

Where This Conversation Continues

Performance management will not fix itself, and neither will the managers holding it together. The organizations that get ahead of this in 2026 will be the ones that treat manager capacity, clarity, and feedback as infrastructure rather than an annual event.

Achieve Leadership Network members get access to the full achieveCPR Live series at no additional cost, including sessions like this one on performance, along with the frameworks, discussion guides, and peer network built around them throughout the year. If your organization is wrestling with any of what is described above, unclear standards, overloaded managers, feedback that arrives too late to matter, this is the room built for that conversation.

Learn more about Achieve Leadership Network and see the full 2026 achieveCPR Live schedule.