I do not think it means what you think it means
Photo by Deeana Arts.
The small child was up overnight. The small child isn't even so small these days. Which made it extra disruptive when the kid hollered at 2:27am. We know it was 2:27am because this morning, when we asked the child if they remembered waking up at 2am, they corrected us. And pointed out that it wasn't 2am. It was 2:27am. To be exact.
The child literally said the words "to be exact." Straight-faced. Because they care about precision in a way that is remarkable and ridiculous all at the same time. When this child was a toddler, if one of us got the make or model of a piece of construction equipment wrong, we'd hear about it for days. Accidentally call something aqua that is technically teal? Forget it. You're sunk.
For many adults, this might be a pain but it's actually quite endearing. And also eerily familiar.
Well, actually...
A love of precision is quite common in tech circles. Particularly within a specific wing of tech nerdery. Our early careers were forged in that wing. In forums and newsgroups and the quick-to-challenge, quick-to-prove-you-wrong days of the world wide web.
The struggle for this flavour of tech nerdery is that if the framing of something is wrong, none of the conclusions can be considered. This happens so frequently that many old school folks can't write a sentence on the internet (or a newsletter, ahem) without checking themselves. And even once you're an impressive grown up who hasn't hung out in a newsgroup for decades, you can still feel it when it's happening.
A quick assertion. An off-the-cuff remark. An overly enthusiastic citation of since-disproven approaches. These are all prime "well, actually..." territory. And the reaction isn't a minor annoyance. It's a bite-the-inside-of-your-cheek response. Especially if the thing they're saying off-the-cuff is something you know a whole awful lot about.
Someone is wrong on the internet
We're hearing a ton about performance and specifically about how orgs can build high-performing cultures. That shift. The thing where performance went from being a noun to being an adjective, that's the framing error. And everything about that shift messes with the downstream conclusions.
When we talk about high-performing as an adjective, we point to attributes of the work. Where it's happening (high-performing teams have bums in seats). When it's happening (high-performing orgs work long hours). How we incentivize that work (high-performing leaders reward the 10xers on their teams). But note that this framing has shockingly little to say about the work itself.
Performance as a noun means doing the thing. And for that, we all need to have a shared idea of what the thing is. Every discussion about high performance must start by defining terms. And for most orgs, the way we define performance is with a set of clearly articulated goals. It's not possible to know how your team is performing if you cannot point to present or absent outcomes.
Your team can be in the office before dawn and stay through midnight but that doesn't make them high-performing. Doing the thing they set out to do is what defines performance. And while we are here for identifying contributing factors to aid in that performance. We are absolutely not here for conflating them.
Performance starts not with a vibe the CEO is having. Not with a blog post someone on the exec team read on LinkedIn. But with a super clean set of questions:
What are we here to do?
How will we know if we're on track?
How will we know if we've done it?
You may notice this is just a long-form way of writing out OKRs. Yes, you're very clever. Regardless of which goals framework you use, if your leaders can't tell you what they are, you do not have a high-performance culture. Full stop.
We are men of action
"Performance" is generally just a tricky word in organizations. For one thing, it's as close to an unassailable good as possible. Who could be against performance? If you can take whatever thing you want to do and staple it to the idea of performance, you insulate it from criticism. Anyone who disagrees with your plan is disagreeing with performance.
Performance also has a brass-tacks, plain-talk, no-bullshit connotation to it. In good times, companies might talk about employee satisfaction, or work-life balance. But when things aren't going well, a very popular executive posture is to say "We're done coddling people. We're focusing on performance now."
You see how this becomes a cudgel, right? When a new performance focus is announced, with a set of attendant policy changes/rollbacks, what are your options? You can get on board, obviously. But if you're not on board, then what does that say about you? That your junior naïveté can't understand the big picture? That you're an entitled member of whatever generation the CEO isn't who wants to be coddled? That you are opposed to brass-tacks, an enemy of plain talk, and possibly an agent of bullshit.
And so these performance initiatives, whatever they are, also end up with a swagger of menace. There's often a layoff or three. For the staff who remain, there are townhalls where the CEO says things like, "Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here."
But hey. Brass tacks, right? What about orgs who really do need to turn the ship around? Whose performance really isn't where it needs to be? Why are we making these leaders sound like assholes when they're just trying to help their organization succeed?
Lies do not become us
Here's some plain talk: attaching the word performance to something doesn't automatically make it a good idea. In fact, most of the time when we see performance initiatives announced, they have the opposite of their stated intent. Oh, they might achieve other goals. They might shut some people up or show them the door. They might put an end to remote work, or DEI efforts, or some other program that senior leaders find grating. But they generally tank performance.
Because the problem with a lot of vaguely menacing, brass-tacks, common sense, hard-nosed sounding policies is that they're...garbage. They don't work. They undermine performance. They are often intuitively appealing, but over and over again, they don't hold up.
Stack ranking is a popular and enduring one — have every manager rank their team members. Focus your efforts and rewards on the top-ranked employees, cut the bottom ones from the company, raise the bar and repeat. Sounds pretty hard-nosed! Very brass tacks! The only minor gotcha with it is that it utterly destroys culture, collaboration, and productivity.
How about just straight up paying for performance? Make rewards contingent on success in your role, ideally as specifically as you can. What could be more common-sense intuitive than rewarding your people for the thing you want them to do? Common sense or no, the more organizations rely on targeted incentives, the worse things get.
Setting gigantic, audacious stretch goals? They usually fail, and when they do work it's with thriving but complacent orgs, not struggling ones.
Layoffs to reposition your team to compete and win? Post-layoff companies generally underperform for years, and the performance impact on those who remain can be massive. If you've done several layoffs in a single year, your biggest performance problem is in the C-suite.
These aren't new findings. They're around for anyone who wants to find them. Neither are the findings around what generally does drive high performance. Clear expectations and alignment around a tight set of challenging but achievable shared goals. Support for collaboration and risk taking in a high-trust environment. Authentic and accountable leadership. Psychological safety, to be exact. This is all pretty well-known.
But we find that most performance initiatives don't mention this stuff. They spend a surprising amount of effort putting employees in their place, and surprisingly little looking at what actually drives performance. We think we know why. And it's at the heart of why we reject the original framing. Because if they did the reverse — if they did the things that actually drove and supported high performance, it wouldn't be called a new performance initiative in the first place. It would be called good management.
— Melissa & Johnathan