[KerrAvon]

That's fine. The place to address it is directly, in private, with those employees. You do not humiliate people in public, not a single person, not a group of people. That's what flailing, incompetent managers do.

For every person like you who doesn't think the execs are talking about them, there is a person who is actually performing very well, who management would like to keep around, who does think it applies to them, and it is killing their morale.

And you don't know definitively that they aren't talking about you either, Mr High Performance. Your management chain could easily have a different view of you than you have of yourself, whether it's justified or not.