Managers who shift to a performance-first approach are up to 21% more likely to deliver expected business results. Their employees report higher satisfaction with their experience, not lower.
March 2020 triggered a reconfiguration of work at a speed with no real precedent. Kitchens became offices. The boundaries between work and life dissolved overnight. A year later, voluntary attrition in the US surged roughly 30% above pre-pandemic levels, the period that came to be known as the Great Resignation.
Companies responded the only way they could at the time. CEOs put engagement and retention at the top of the agenda, compensation budgets rose sharply, and CHROs rewrote employee value propositions to match what workers had come to expect. Years of training managers toward empathetic, people-first leadership followed. It worked, in the sense that it addressed the crisis in front of it. But it also produced a managerial cohort where two-thirds of managers now see managing people, not the execution of projects and processes, as their primary role.
The Overcorrection, in Numbers
Gartner surveyed 2,947 employees and managers in December 2025. The results describe a workforce that swung further than intended.
62% feel obligated to protect their team
Managers report feeling responsible for shielding team members, sometimes at the expense of business outcomes.
45% admit favoring employees over the business
Nearly half of managers acknowledge making decisions that favor individual employees at the business's expense.
Nine hours a week on emotional labor
The average manager spends more than 20% of their working time absorbing employees' personal and emotional tensions.
None of that is a character flaw. It is what five years of people-first training was designed to produce. But it came with a real cost: only about half of employees say their manager is actually effective at the fundamentals, clear developmental feedback, help prioritizing work, and support through difficult projects.
The Mandate Has Shifted
Persistent economic uncertainty, rapid AI adoption, and a more volatile geopolitical landscape have pushed performance and productivity back to the top of the CEO agenda, ahead of engagement and retention. That does not mean abandoning empathy. It means reframing it as a tool in service of outcomes rather than treating it as the outcome itself.
The Four Levers, Not the Fifty
Here is where the data gets genuinely useful. Managers do not need to fix everything an employee experiences. Gartner's research points to four specific, controllable levers that move sentiment even in less flexible environments.
| Lever | What it looks like in practice |
|---|---|
| Work alignment | Connecting tasks to what an employee actually cares about, not just what needs doing |
| Perceived fairness | A clear, honest sense that decisions are made on consistent grounds |
| Prioritization help | Actively helping someone decide what matters most this week |
| Frequent recognition | Specific, regular acknowledgment of contribution, not an annual mention |
Notice what those four have in common. None of them requires a bigger budget, a policy change, or authority the manager does not have. They are within reach on any given week, for any manager, regardless of what is happening above them in the organization.
Resetting Objectivity
The last piece is the hardest to talk about honestly: the loyalty trap. A personal affinity for the people on your team is a real asset, and it can also work against the organization's interests when it tips into protecting someone the data says should not be protected.
Proof It Is Not a Tradeoff
AIA Group, a life insurance and financial services company operating across Asia-Pacific, built its culture explicitly around empowerment paired with accountability. It has won the Gallup Exceptional Workplace Award four years running. Performance-first and genuinely engaged are not opposites. The data says they compound.