There’s a popular idea about high performance that sounds really good, but it’s actually completely wrong when you look closely: if you want to do your best, you have to do your best.
Every day, every project, every deadline, push harder, stay focused, raise the bar, give 110%. It all sounds so good in theory, and it sounds so disciplined and high-performing and like the mantra of someone who is a cut above the rest.
The rub is that nothing is designed to operate at 100% all day, every day.
Your PC overheats if you leave it at max power for too long
The battery dies if you leave it draining
Your muscles need rest and recovery time
Your motivation needs a boost
Even the most disciplined people have down days, where they aren’t at their best, and their focus and motivation just aren’t there. Yet, somehow, at work, we are often judged as if these aren’t down days. It is almost as if, because you produced your best yesterday, today is no excuse for being less than perfect.
Because you got through that hectic week in May, this week is no excuse to dial things back, and if you’re especially good for a while, people, including yourself, start to expect it to be the norm. We start to expect peak performance, since everything was peak performance for a while. That’s where the rub starts to become really bothersome.
Peak Performance is a Peak, not a Permanent State
We tend to think about performance as a sliding scale. You’re doing 60%, or 80%, or 100%. The more you can push towards 100%, the better.
However, real performance isn’t about getting to 100% and staying there. Some days you can push, sprint, and run at maximum capacity; other days, you need to hold steady, slow down, breathe for a bit, and take stock. It’s a matter of the ebb and flow of performance.
The mistake is seeing peak performance as the maximum and assuming that maximum performance is sustainable. Maximum performance is a peak, just like the name suggests. That doesn’t mean it can’t last long. It just means it can’t last forever.
For example, you may be able to work ten hours straight at an amazingly high level during a crisis, but that doesn’t mean that ten hours of work is now your new standard. You may be able to pull off an amazing presentation after a few nights of poor sleep, but that doesn’t mean sleep deprivation is somehow good for you. You may be able to handle weeks of non-stop deadlines, meetings, and interruptions, but that doesn’t mean your brain can function at peak capacity under those conditions. A peak is valuable, precisely because it’s a peak – it shows you where your ceiling, your upper limit is, when all the conditions are right to achieve it. If everything is a peak, nothing is.
If your company always expects you to have your best week, then eventually your best week will be the week that ruins everything for you. That’s where the myth that high performance comes from high pressure falls apart.
Pressure can create urgency or generate focus. It can help push through challenges when things really matter. What it cannot be is a productivity strategy. It simply doesn’t make for a sustainable workplace. That’s why the research into the effects of work demands and performance is so interesting. Some demanding jobs are energizing when the demands feel meaningful and manageable, but other demands, particularly ones that are unnecessary or obstructive, lead to exhaustion.
That means it’s not a matter of getting rid of all demanding situations, but more so a matter of realizing that more pressure will stop giving you returns at some point. You will eventually reach a point where, instead of pushing you forward, it’s holding you back.
This leads to the problem companies have with high-performance employees: the difference between getting people to work hard and getting people to work beyond sustainable levels. They may look similar on paper, but they’re very different in practice.
Your Workload Is Not a Test of Your Discipline
If performance doesn’t mean operating at 100% all the time, then the next question is obvious:
What is actually getting in the way of sustainable performance?
It is rarely a lack of discipline. It is actually the design of the work required of people.
We tend to measure workload in fairly simple terms: hours worked, deadlines met, tasks completed, targets achieved. That’s the visible part of the workload, but it’s only part of the picture. There is also the invisible workload of constantly deciding what deserves your attention:
Which email needs an answer?
Which meeting matters?
Which project has suddenly become urgent?
Who needs a response?
What can wait?
What did you forget?
What happens if you don’t get to it today?
Additionally, we combine these two parts with the dreaded interruptions: a message arrives while you’re writing, a notification appears while you’re analyzing something, someone asks a “quick question” while you’re trying to solve a complicated problem.
You move from the presentation > email > slack > meeting > presentation.
Technically speaking, you have been working the entire time, but working is not the same as concentrating.
Being Busy Can Look Like Performance
One of the stranger things about modern work is how easy it is to confuse activity with progress.
A full calendar looks productive
A constantly active inbox looks productive
Being available all day looks productive
Answering immediately looks productive
Working late looks productive
None of these things necessarily produce valuable work; in fact, they can make valuable work harder, since deep work requires continuity & focus. Complex problems need enough uninterrupted attention for the brain to build connections, test ideas, build the mental box in which it will work, and hold several pieces of information in mind at once. Every interruption adds another demand on that limited attention, pulling our focus out of the box.
This is why a day filled with meetings, messages, questions, inquiries, and small requests can leave you exhausted without giving you the satisfying feeling that you actually accomplished anything.
You weren’t doing nothing; you were just spending your energy on switching, and switching has a cost. Modern workers often carry several streams of cognitive and emotional work simultaneously while constantly toggling between them. The problem isn’t the number of tasks, but the mental energy required to change priorities and modes of thinking repeatedly.
This is an important difference to keep in mind, because if the problem is workload, the obvious solution is to become more efficient. However, if the problem is fragmented attention, efficiency will not solve it.
You can become extremely efficient at being interrupted. You will still be interrupted.
Your Brain Needs Some Space to Do Its Best Work
This is where deep work becomes more than another productivity trend. If you have important work that requires judgment, creativity, analysis, or sustained concentration, it needs protected space. This isn’t due to some weird ingrained ideas of “fragility”, but because the work itself demands it.
A complicated problem cannot always be solved in the gaps between notifications
A good strategy rarely appears because someone answered 47 emails before lunch
Creative thinking doesn’t necessarily improve when your calendar is full of meetings or bombarded with additional tasks
Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is make yourself temporarily unavailable. That might mean different things to different people: 45 minutes with notifications turned off, a meeting-free morning, closing your inbox while you work on something important, or batching email instead of reacting to it every five minutes.
The exact method matters less than the principle: you don’t have to be available for everyone, every time, all at once.
There is an important detail to add here regarding expectations, because they matter, and every organization differs. Some are better at understanding what expectations are and how to forge them, and some aren’t.
If an organization says it values deep work but rewards instant responses, deep work will lose.
If leaders say people should disconnect but send messages at midnight, people will notice which instruction is real.
If managers say priorities matter but continue adding new priorities without removing old ones, employees eventually learn that everything is urgent.
If an organization says quality matters but consistently rewards whoever delivers fastest, people will learn to optimize for speed.
If leaders say employees are trusted to manage their own workload but constantly monitor when, where, and how they work, autonomy quickly becomes another word for surveillance.
You cannot solve a structural problem with a motivational speech. Actions matter more than words.
When Everything Is Important, Nothing Is Prioritized
Another pressure mechanism hides in plain sight, and is tied to the aforementioned expectations: that people should somehow fit every new demand into the existing workload.
A new client comes in.
A deadline moves forward.
Another meeting is added.
A new reporting requirement appears.
A project that was already important becomes even more important.
Now what happens to the old work? To the previous task that was the main task up until a moment ago?
Usually, nothing. It simply moves, but not laterally, vertically, or horizontally, but in a list. It gets placed into a list, and it stays there. This creates an impossible equation comprised of 3 variables: more priorities, the same amount of time, and an expectation that performance should remain unchanged.
Eventually, people compensate by extending the workday: they answer messages at night, work through lunch, catch up on weekends, or borrow energy from tomorrow to finish today’s workload.
Since the deadline gets met, the system concludes that the workload was manageable. This is one of the most dangerous feedback loops in high-performance environments, because successful overextension gets mistaken for sustainable capacity.
Example Scenario
Someone stays late and saves the project ➜ the organization learns that the project can be delivered.
Someone answers messages over the weekend and prevents a delay ➜ the organization learns that weekend availability works.
A high performer absorbs three people’s workload for a quarter ➜ the organization learns that one person can apparently handle it.
The same person keeps doing it because they are praised for being “reliable” ➜ exceptional effort becomes part of their reputation.
The next deadline arrives with the same unrealistic timeline ➜ instead of changing the timeline, everyone assumes they will find a way again.
They do ➜ the organization gets another successful outcome and receives even more evidence that the system is working.
The workload quietly becomes the new normal ➜ what was once exceptional is now simply expected.
Eventually, the person starts taking fewer breaks, working longer hours, and recovering less ➜ their available capacity shrinks.
Since they are still delivering ➜ nobody sees a problem.
Until the performance finally drops, and then the story can become: “What happened to them? They used to be so good.”
The individual may even reinforce the story themselves, internalizing it by thinking, “I can handle it.”
Perhaps they can. For now, at least. However, capacity isn’t infinite simply because someone has demonstrated exceptional capacity once.
This is how the vicious cycle reinforces itself: exceptional effort produces a successful outcome, the successful outcome becomes a new expectation, the new expectation requires more exceptional effort, and eventually the effort that once exceeded capacity becomes the baseline.
Sustainable Performance Requires Pacing
Think about almost any activity where performance matters over time. Take sports for example. Sports don’t work by asking an athlete to sprint at maximum speed from the beginning of the season to the end. Their training, recovery, crunch, and competitions all have cycles. Intensity changes according to the objective. So why should work be expected to look identical every day, too?
Some periods will require extraordinary effort for a major launch. There will be periods when a difficult problem demands intense concentration. There will be moments when the right thing really is to push. The problem comes when the exception becomes the operating model.
A crisis becomes the normal workflow.
A deadline becomes the permanent pace.
The “temporary” late nights become less temporary and more like the expected late nights.
The sprint becomes the marathon.
Eventually, people stop recovering between efforts.
That is when pressure stops being useful and starts consuming the very capacity the organization needs. It is also why sustainable performance isn’t about finding a magical level of effort and holding it forever like a dragon’s hoard. It is about pacing effort intelligently, where some days will be stronger than others & some weeks will produce extraordinary output. In contrast, other periods will be quieter or more focused on maintenance, learning, and recovery.
When we witness this type of variation in the workload, it isn’t evidence that performance has disappeared; rather, it is evidence that performance is human. Organizations that understand this can start designing work differently:
Protecting focus rather than glorifying availability
Clarifying priorities rather than continually adding them
Reducing unnecessary meetings and interruptions rather than expecting employees to “manage their time better“
Creating genuine boundaries around communication
Stop treating recovery as something employees earn after they have finished everything, because they will never finish everything
There will always be another email, another project, another target, another thing to improve. If rest only begins when the work is finished, rest never begins, and without recovery, the organization eventually starts spending tomorrow’s performance to pay for today’s output.
The Best Performers Know When to Push and When to Recover
So, if sustainable performance isn’t about 100%, what is?
The answer isn’t as flashy as it seems, or as some gurus would have you believe. In fact, the people who sustain high performance across years are often not the ones who push relentlessly whatsoever.
They can concentrate intensely when the moment calls for it, disengage when concentration is a liability, balance intensely demanding work with more routine work, have a draining week without every week being draining, and, most importantly, know how to quit.
A lot of people are under the (misguided) impression that quitting is the easiest part. As any high performer will tell you, quitting can sometimes be quite uncomfortable, to the point where you feel it physically, for what is otherwise a mental task.
If doing a good job is a part of your identity, having a less useful self feels like falling short. Yet quitting is not true renunciation, but recovery, and recovery isn’t the opposite of performance – it is its enabler.
There are studies about psychological detachment from work, and large-scale reviews show the benefits of switching off from work: better wellbeing and less exhaustion, linked to improved sleep and work performance. Therefore, recovery can come in without depriving you of performance. Conversely, it can add to your performance.
Recovery Has to Be Part of the Design
This is where organizations get it wrong, since they usually tell people to recover when the work is done.
“Take your holiday after the big project.”, “Rest after the deadline.”, “Switch off after being caught up.”, “Take a breather after we’re done here.”
The problem is work is never done, and there is always another project waiting. Consequently, recovery has to play second fiddle to work and has to be seen as an input rather than an output.
Sleep matters, breaks matter, time away from screens matters, a lunch that isn’t dedicated to answering messages matters, an evening where nobody expects a response from you matters, and even having enough space between demanding tasks for a reset before the next one matters. None of that requires turning the workplace into a wellness retreat, just a recognition that people can’t spend attention and energy endlessly without recharging them.
Even small interruptions in the cycle can help and are better than nothing: walks in between meetings, ten minutes of no notifications, a real lunch break, a protected block for focused work, an end to the working day. All of these things seem insignificant compared to a quarterly target, but performance is made up of small conditions that repeat over time.
The same holds for the other direction: small amounts of unmanaged pressure repeated every day ultimately add up to a very large amount of exhaustion.
Boundaries Are a Performance Tool
The boundaries between work and life are often seen as just about employee wellbeing. They are, make no mistake, but they are also about performance. If work follows you everywhere, your working day never really ends. You might not be at your desk, but part of your attention is expecting the next notification.
Did the client reply?
Did the manager send something?
Is there another issue waiting?
Should I check email?
All this background monitoring incurs a cost. This is especially taxing for remote and hybrid work, which can make it harder still to create psychological boundaries between work and everything else.
A simple transition ritual can help: shut the laptop, take a walk, change clothes, leave the workspace, and decide the day is over. The ritual itself is not important (it can be anything feasible for you); the separation is. Then, leaders compound this effect.
If the person at the top sends emails at midnight, people notice. If managers work through every holiday, people notice. If someone tells you “you don’t have to respond tonight” but then follows up ten minutes later asking why nobody has responded yet, people are very aware of it.
Culture isn’t what the handbook says; it’s what people learn they are actually expected to do:
If you want people to recover, make it visible
If you want boundaries, be them yourself
If you want deep work, protect it
If you want sustainable performance, stop rewarding people for secretly extracting energy from them
The Organization Has to Stop Spending Tomorrow’s Performance Today
This is ultimately about more than just the individual. An employee can turn off notifications, plan their day, take a walk, and use a focus block. All of that helps, but no productivity tool can compensate for an organization that continually demands more work than the people can handle.
Too many priorities?
Someone needs to kill some priorities.
Meetings eat the day?
Some meetings need to vanish.
Is every request urgent?
The organization needs to learn what actually is urgent.
Not enough people to do the work?
The organization needs to address the capacity gap instead of expecting existing employees to absorb it.
When a high performer is carrying the workload of three people, telling them to “manage their stress” or “deal with it” is outsourcing a management problem to the person living it. This is why sustainable performance has to become a work-design issue: leaders need to ask better questions.
It is fine for them to ask “How much did we get done?”, but they should also ask “What did it cost us to get it done? Did the team have time to think? Did quality suffer? Did people stop taking breaks? Did decision-making become rushed? Did employees lose patience with each other? Did everyone finish the quarter exhausted? Can we do this again?”
If the answer is no to such questions, what you achieved might have been impressive, but it wasn’t sustainable performance; it was extraction, much like how we’d rapidly deplete an ore mine by mining 24/7, and then wondering what happened when it dried out.
A team that achieved an extraordinary result and then spent the next three months recovering from it won’t have outperformed a team that delivers strong results repeatedly over time.
The first team might have had a higher peak, but the second has a higher baseline, and that wins out in time.
Final Thoughts
High performance doesn’t require relentless, unmitigated pressure; it doesn’t require maximum effort every day, or people to live permanently at their personal peak. That’s not how humans work. People simply don’t function optimally under such circumstances.
Performance has rhythms; there are peaks and troughs, intensely demanding days and days where recovery is needed, days where the brain is sharp and days where it is not, projects that require everything you have and ordinary days where a steady performance is what good performance looks like.
The goal isn’t to remove those fluctuations, but to work with them rather than pretending they don’t exist. That means realistic workloads, protecting attention, reducing unnecessary interruptions, creating space for deep work, setting expectations, making boundaries real, and recovering to enable future performance.
For leaders, it also means resisting a tempting but dangerous equation: more pressure equals more output. Sometimes it does, until it doesn’t. Until someone breaks and the pieces can no longer be put back together, which is how you can easily lose a star employee.
The organization that continually pushes its people towards maximum capacity might win impressive numbers for a while, but the costs will eventually appear elsewhere: poorer decisions, weaker relationships, lower creativity, disengagement, turnover, and exhaustion.
The smarter question isn’t “how do we get everyone to perform at 100%,” but “how do we create the conditions in which people can perform well, recover, and do it again tomorrow?“
A 100% effort might win a sprint, but business is rarely a sprint, and sustainable excellence doesn’t come from staying at the peak but knowing when to climb, when to push, when to slow down, and most importantly, when to recover so you can climb again.
A certain type of employee seems to appear in every company. These are the people who never seem to meet deadlines, who always have to be pushed to get their work done, who make the same mistakes over and over again, who don’t seem to do much on their own, and who never seem to try very hard.
At some point, it seems, every manager has decided, “Well, this employee just isn’t performing,” and sometimes, they may well be right. This begs the question, though: How much of this poor performance was actually caused by the manager?
This has the potential to be a wildly uncomfortable question, since managers are, by definition, responsible for judging performance. They set standards, determine who is doing the best and worst jobs, decide who gets promoted and who gets fired. They evaluate and judge. They decide what’s acceptable and what isn’t.
Yet here’s the thing: management comes before performance.
Managers decide what’s important, what gets done and what doesn’t, what gets approved and what gets dismissed, what gets rewarded and what gets punished. Managers decide how much autonomy employees have, how much freedom they have, how much leeway is allowed, how quickly problems are solved, and how much employees understand what they’re supposed to be doing.
In short, managers don’t just evaluate performance; they have tremendous influence over it. They may be standing in the control room, but they’re also often the ones pushing all the buttons.
The Employee & Manager Slices of the Problem Pie
A 2024 NBER study sought to identify the causal effect of managers on their teams’ performance.
The paper’s authors experimented with repeated reallocations of managers, controlling for differences in the skill sets of the teams. The purpose of the experiment was to quantify the effect of a simple managerial change, and the results were astounding.
The study found that good managers improved their teams’ performance by approximately double the number of “good workers” would have. The paper uses the phrase “good manager” to denote someone who consistently drove better-than-expected results from their team.
N.B.: The cited results do not mean managers are twice as productive as employees. Far from it – both the phrasing and the findings suggest the opposite.
The findings suggest that if you hire a good manager, you cannot simply lay off half your staff in favour of the manager and expect double the performance. Neither do they suggest that employees are fungible or that an outstanding manager would be able to extract twice the performance from any arbitrary set of subordinates.
What the study does suggest is that the people managing your team can affect your team’s performance by a surprisingly wide margin. It suggests that both your employees and your managers matter, and that the combination of the two matters even more.
Another NBER study of transfers between stores in two large retail chains found that, given the consistency of management practices across the businesses, studying how individual managers affected the performance of their new teams gave a less distorted view of the contribution to productivity that a manager can reasonably be expected to provide.
Both these studies suggest not that employees are unimportant, but that “the team is underperforming” is a dangerously incomplete diagnosis. Your team may be underperforming because your employees lack the experience, skill, or commitment to do the job well. It may be that your employees are entirely appropriate for the task, but they are, in fact, being managed poorly – either at the level of individual contributors or individual executives. It may also be that your employees are being managed by an ineffective manager, an ineffective system, or a combination of the two.
Consider the following scenario:
Your manager changed your team’s priorities on Monday.
You spent all of Tuesday prioritizing the newly prioritized project.
On Wednesday, an emergency cropped up, and you had to change priorities again.
On Thursday, your manager asked you why the first project wasn’t getting done.
On Friday, you found out the delivery date for the first project had slipped because of something that happened in another department.
When you go into your performance review, your manager tells you that you need to be more organized, take more ownership, and all the usuals. Maybe you do need to be more organized, but have you considered that it may not be your responsibility to rearrange your entire workload when priorities change?
This is why management should not be considered an optional part of the performance system – because it is an integral part of the performance system. It has to be. Research on role ambiguity shows that when there is insufficient clarity about what’s expected of you, your performance tends to suffer.
This does not mean that every underperforming employee is necessarily being managed badly. However, it does mean that we can no longer think of clarity of expectations as an employee competency. That kind of clarity is frequently the responsibility of managers, which, again, puts it squarely in the realm of managerial responsibility. Using this framework to understand performance issues can help you recognize some “bad” behaviours as the result of years of poor management.
An employee who is afraid to make decisions may have learned that decisions are rarely wrong.
An employee who asks permission constantly may have learned that acting without permission makes them look foolish.
An employee who is disengaged and cynical may have learned that no matter how hard they try, nothing changes.
An employee who misses priorities may have been given too many changing priorities.
An employee who always works right up to a deadline may have learned that nothing gets done before one.
An employee who can’t do anything without their manager may, in fact, have been taught that by their manager.
This brings us to one of the most damaging management practices: managerial interference.
When managers interfere with the day-to-day responsibilities of their direct reports, they train those direct reports to deal with everything at a level two steps below their actual level of responsibility. It doesn’t matter whether they are “helping,” “teaching,” “managing,” or “holdingaccountable.” Interference creates inconsistency, confusion, and the impression that the manager can’t handle anything without stepping in. Employees managed this way may always present problems at the executive level.
They may be unable to own problems or solutions.
They may always need their manager’s help or approval.
They may fear making mistakes without knowing their manager’s input.
They may have become unreasonably rigid in their approach to their responsibilities.
Micromanagement Can Manufacture the Dependence It Complains About
Micromanagement is typically defined as a practice that is detrimental to employees because it limits their freedom of action. This is partially true, but it is also a consequence of a much larger effect. Micromanagement can actually cause behavioural changes in people.
🔄 For example, suppose that you have hired a competent person to do a competent job. They make a decision you wouldn’t have made. You tell them they’re wrong. The next time they’re faced with a similar decision, they ask you what to do. You tell them, they do it, and you correct them again. The next time they’re faced with a similar decision, they ask you what to do. You tell them, they do it, and you correct them again. The next time they’re faced with a similar decision, they ask you what to do. You tell them, they do it, and you correct them again. 🔄
See where this loop is going? Eventually, they stop making decisions and simply ask you for instructions. You give them more detailed instructions. They ask you for more detailed instructions. You decide that they simply don’t have the initiative to do their job, and you start watching them more carefully.
🎉 Congratulations! You’ve just created the employee you were originally complaining about! 🎉
For those scoffing at this example, this is not just theory. A meta-study of 72 studies, 83 samples, and more than 32000 people found that employees who perceived their leaders as acting in an autonomy-supportive manner had more positive work outcomes. This includes positive associations with work performance, engagement and proactive work behaviours, and negative associations with turnover intentions.
Autonomy-supportive leadership is not being completely uninvolved. It provides freedom in action and decision-making, takes their input into account, and encourages self-initiative without hindering them, which is an extremely important difference.
Good management is not telling people to do whatever they want, or to do exactly what you would do; rather, it is telling them what you want them to accomplish and letting them do it, while intervening when they cannot accomplish their goals without assistance and helping them when they can. This results in much more competent employees, who are much less reliant on their managers.
This is especially important because a manager’s job is not to process every single decision that their employees make. If you have to answer every question they have, you’re not managing effectively, and you’ll likely end up with a queue of people waiting to hear from you, rather than competent employees who can handle most things on their own.
The irony is that managers often fall into this trap precisely because they want to be effective. They feel like they are doing their job by answering every question, but they are actually defeating their purpose.
Managers are accountable for their team’s performance, so it can be tempting to take responsibility for everything they do, but it is far more effective to let them handle things on their own and intervene only when absolutely necessary.
This is the difference between a manager who is simply a bottleneck for decision-making, and a manager who actually manages.
This is also where the myth of the manager as a performance evaluator falls apart: a manager does not simply determine whether someone can perform; they determine how much opportunity they have to perform.
That is not to say that a manager is not accountable for performance; it means that they have much less opportunity to affect performance, and much more opportunity to create poor performance by failing to provide the resources, freedom, and feedback necessary to actually perform.
If someone is consistently underperforming, even when given the resources, freedom, opportunities, and feedback they need, then they are likely to be a poor performer, but if they are not, then they may not be the problem, and it may be the system that is failing them.
Right now, ten thousand manager voices cried out in agony, objecting virulently because they are often expected to be the ones who determine whether or not someone can perform, and therefore they feel like they need to control everything in order to make that determination.
The Meaning of Management
A manager should not try to determine whether someone can perform; they should create an environment in which they can perform, then evaluate whether they are performing, rather than trying to determine whether they can perform.
This is also the point where many managers will start to see the flaws in their own management practices. The manager who is constantly changing priorities, rewarding the wrong people, avoiding difficult conversations, and putting out fires is not doing so out of malice or incompetence, but rather out of a desire to manage effectively.
They are trying to create an environment in which their employees can perform, but they are failing to do so; as a result, they constantly have to intervene to prevent employees from failing. Such a method is not an effective way to manage, and it is a sign that the manager is not administering matters effectively.
It is important to remember that management is a process, and that there are many different ways to achieve its goals. Some managers are better at it than others, and some managers are simply better at certain aspects of it than others.
However, there are some fundamental principles that all managers should follow, and one of them is providing their employees with the freedom of action and decision-making, taking their input into account, and encouraging self-initiative, while not hindering them.
The Behaviours You Reward Become the Behaviours You Get
One of the easiest ways for a manager to destroy performance is to reward the wrong thing, and this is rarely because they are evil. They are usually just rewarding the most obvious things.
Someone stayed up late to finish a project – that’s dedication. 10 points for Gryffindor!
Someone dropped everything at 7 pm to help out with an urgent customer problem – that’s heroism. 20 points for Gryffindor!
Someone responds to my Slack messages within 30 seconds – they are committed. 30 points for Gryffindor!
Someone worked over the weekend to meet a deadline – let’s give them a round of applause. 40 points for Gryffindor!
Meanwhile, someone quietly fixed the processes that would have stopped the weekend crisis from happening in the first place, but they have gone unnoticed. No points for Ravenclaw!
Alas, that is how companies end up rewarding people for making fires rather than putting them out.
One of the most interesting things about organizational performance is that the market value of various workplace behaviours often bears little relation to what the company says it values.
A company can say that it values planning, quality and sustainable performance, but if the people being promoted are the ones who work the longest hours and save the day at the last minute, the rest of the company will quickly learn that last-minute heroics are the most important thing. They are not dim in any way whatsoever; they simply observe their colleagues’ behaviours and learn from them.
A manager’s actions are effectively a set of behavioural coaching cues for the whole team.
If you reward people for being available to your team at all times, you can expect availability to become a key performance indicator.
If you reward speed of response regardless of errors, you’ll get speed of response.
If you reward people for taking all decisions up the chain of command, you’ll get a company that cannot make decisions.
If you reward people for preventing problems, you’ll get people who prevent problems.
If you reward people for being “a bit of a pain but getting things done”, you’ll get people who get things done but are “a bit of a pain”.
That is why recognition is such a powerful tool. Beyond making people feel good, it sends market-value signals to the team about what is and isn’t important.
Studies on management practices have found that goals, monitoring and feedback can have a major impact on productivity. In field experiments on airline captains, management practices such as performance monitoring, feedback, target-setting and prosocial incentives all led to significant improvements in targeted fuel-saving behaviours and, in some cases, increases in overall job satisfaction.
Now, this does not mean that managers should monitor everything. That would simply proliferate the very thing we want to see less of. What it does mean is that monitoring is part of the feedback loop. What you measure, discuss, and reward affects performance. So does what you allow to continue without correction, and most importantly, what you repeatedly rescue.
If a manager has a team that misses every deadline and responds to every problem by throwing the manager into the fray to “sort it out”, they should ask themselves what they have taught the team. They may believe they have taught the team to do better, but the team has actually learned that the manager will always rescue them when things go wrong. They learn to avoid responsibility and expect the manager to take over when things get tough. Meanwhile, the manager learns that the best way to deal with recurring problems is to rescue people rather than fix systems.
They have all been conditioned to act that way, without anyone intending to, and that is one of the fundamental problems with management.
Managers are powerful role models, and everything they do sends behavioural signals to the team. When it comes to busyness, managers don’t have to tell people to work long hours; they model it.
If they work 12-hour days, people will notice.
They will also notice if someone leaves at 5 pm every day and quietly works from home in the evenings.
They will notice if someone is praised for working 80-hour weeks and taking no breaks.
They will notice if working from home is seen as a perk and taking holidays is presented as selfish.
They will all learn different lessons about busyness and productivity, adjusting their actions and becoming incredibly busy without actually doing much useful work.
The difference between busyness and productivity is often invisible to the people involved.
Preventing problems before they occur rarely seems as important as putting out fires.
Processes and procedures are often seen as less exciting than dramatic actions.
Careful decision-making seems less impressive than “thinking on your feet”.
A team that learns to solve its own problems without constantly escalating them to the manager will make the manager feel less important.
It can make the manager feel redundant, which is why effective managers often feel their contributions are less valued by executives than they should be. They are busy people, making important decisions, solving problems, and rescuing the company from disasters, but those actions do not have the same impact on the bottom line as preventing those disasters from happening in the first place.
That is the real value of a good manager: they make the company less reliant on them, which makes the company more successful. It also makes the manager less valued by the people at the top.
Avoiding Problems Doesn’t Keep the Peace – It Changes the Team
There is a certain kind of management mistake that feels reasonable in the moment:
There is a certain employee who doesn’t perform.
You think to yourself, “Well, I’ll give them a little time. Maybe they are just having a rough week. I’ll bring it up at their next review. It’s probably not worth creating a scene over.“
A year later, everyone except the person in charge understands that the employee isn’t performing, but no one has addressed it because, really…who has the time?
This mistake is often called avoidance, but it can also be seen as a type of management decision. You’re deciding that this behavior is acceptable, and the rest of your team sees it. You should care because if they are not performing, it impacts the performance of others. It affects your own performance and your team’s culture.
A team’s culture is not defined by the individuals that make it up, but by the standards they share. People look around and think about what it means to be a good member of their team. What does it mean to miss a deadline, to be rude to a coworker, to be chronically underperforming, to do consistently incredible work?
Answers to these questions aren’t written anywhere, but they can be found in managers’ actions. If you tolerate one employee who routinely misses deadlines, conscientious employees will start to ask themselves why they are putting in extra effort. They might not think, “Oh, I’m so glad that [slacker] has more flexibility with their schedule,” but they might think, “Maybe I’m working too hard.” This is an example of a single performance issue affecting others’ performance.
Such instances are why it’s not that difficult actually to have a good conversation and why such conversations should be actively encouraged. A good manager does not have to enjoy difficult conversations, but they should be willing to have them. You don’t have to shame employees or turn every minor performance issue into a morality play, but you should be willing to address issues clearly and directly. You should hold people to standards, because they hold you to standards.
The research on manager-employee relationships also points to the importance of strong working relationships. In particular, a huge meta-analysis on Leader-Member Exchange Theory highlights the value of positive, supportive relationships between managers and employees. Trust, empowerment, and motivation all lead to positive behaviours like increased performance and citizenship behaviours.
This isn’t suggesting that managers should be best friends with their reports, but it does highlight the importance of working relationships. You can’t have trust without mutual respect and the feeling that each party is acting in good faith. That applies to both sides of the relationship. Employees have to trust that their manager will support them, but managers also have to trust that their employee will deliver. Neither side gets to demand loyalty or goodwill from the other. They have to earn it by showing up reliably and doing the right thing.
That’s why inconsistent standards from one employee to the next are so corrosive.
If you promise flexibility to one person because you like them, but deny the same flexibility to another employee who asked, you create distrust on your team.
If you hold one person to consistently lower standards than everyone else, you’re creating similar distrust.
If you tell people that the priorities are one thing, but you change them when it’s convenient for whoever is asking, you’re creating a toxic workplace.
It’s easy to dismiss these issues as unfair, but they shouldn’t be dismissed as unimportant. They effectively erode the trust between manager and employee, and once that trust is gone, you can lose your ability to manage effectively.
Management has a responsibility to set standards. If you’re not enforcing standards, it becomes much harder to enforce standards later. It’s one reason why management is so much harder than employees think.
You aren’t walking into a clean slate each morning. You are always working with an existing culture that you help shape, and that helps shape you.
You can make it easier or harder depending on the decisions you make.
You can make problems more visible or more hidden.
You can make employees self-thinking or dependent on you.
You can make excellent performance commonplace, or you can make extraordinary acts the norm.
Then, after all is done, when you get caught in the middle of it all, you can think, “Why is my team underperforming?“
Who knows, maybe you’re right, but maybe you’re not. They might be underperforming, but it might stem from a source or reason where they are giving you honest feedback on your management system.
So, if you’re thinking about firing them, consider whether firing them would actually solve the problem.
Final Thoughts
Sometimes the issue really is the person. Some people are just slovenly, consistently underperforming, and then failing to meet expectations despite your help, guidance, opportunity, and clear communication.
Managers aren’t superheroes, and your employees are adults. However, managers bear responsibility for the conditions in which their people work.
Before moving on to judgment, consider asking yourself a few tough questions:
Were expectations clear?
Did your reports have the information, authority, and resources they needed to fulfill the requirements of the position?
Did you address issues before they became problems?
Did you allow failures to dominate conversations, or withhold feedback and opportunities for advancement?
Did you fail to delegate, and take over tasks that were rightfully the responsibility of your people?
Would this person be a different performer under a different manager?
This is not an indictment, but an assessment, since research on managerial impact shows a clear conclusion: managers are often powerful predictors of the performance of the people they lead.
So when we find ourselves thinking about firing one of our reports, it’s worth remembering that we may not have maximized the conditions for their success to begin with.
This is not to suggest that we can turn poor performers into strong ones by simply changing their managers or through sheer willpower. Nor is anyone arguing that the solution to every personnel problem is to replace the manager. What matters for memory is that people are often products of their circumstances.
This reframes the conversation from “how do I get more out of these people?” to “what is getting in the way of their success?“
Maybe the issue is unclear priorities.
Perchance the real root problem is an unhealthy dependency on approvals.
Perhaps your people have been rewarded for putting out fires, and are consequently avoiding the larger issues.
Mayhaps conversations are consistently put off until after months of mounting tension.
Possibly you’re not delegating enough and are always solving problems for people who need to learn how to handle them on their own.
These are the sorts of things good management can address: removing roadblocks and creating conditions for success.
The most effective managers aren’t the ones who provide the most resources or information, but the ones who create an environment where their people feel empowered and supported. They promote autonomy, mastery, a sense of purpose, and belonging.
To the untrained eye, the result may often look like the manager isn’t doing much of anything at all. When done well, management is a gruelingly difficult job that is completely invisible, because their role is to ensure everyone else’s role runs smoothly. When done correctly, management creates the conditions for performance rather than extracting performance through brute force of will.
Often the most important questions aren’t about who is to blame for poor performance, but about who is most responsible for improvement. That doesn’t always make it the manager’s fault, but it does mean there’s always a right answer.
For decades, companies have been trying to find a way to get employees to be more motivated.
Some have tried to raise salaries, others have tried bonuses, employee-of-the-month plaques, team-building exercises, pizza Fridays, wellness programs, flexible schedules, or free coffee in the office (and the coffee is the cheapest one imaginable).
Every few years, a new management theory comes along, promising to revolutionize the workplace and unlock the secrets to engaged employees. Despite all this, it seems disengagement is still the norm and burnout is rampant. People are leaving well-paying jobs for seemingly little reason, while at the same time, refusing to budge from lower-paying ones.
What gives? What does it all mean?
The popular answer is simple: money is the most important motivator.
On paper, it makes intuitive sense. People need money to survive, and more money usually means more luxuries. Seems logical, seems good. The problem is it’s only half true!
Money is an important motivator, surely, but it’s a motivator for getting a job, not for doing a good job. This is an outstanding distinction, because most companies don’t have trouble finding people willing to do the work. Getting people through the door is the easy part.
Finding people willing to go above and beyond, solve problems, hone their skills, help out their coworkers, and really care about the job – now there…THERE’s your real challenge. Those things can’t be bought, and no, the old adage of “everyone has their price” doesn’t actually work.
You’ll soon find out that as you increase the salary to keep up the good work & dedication, it goes up and up and up, becoming unsustainable. Then, sensing a shiver down your spine and a feeling of dread, you will quickly realize it was never about the money…but now you’re in the red.
Money Isn’t the Villain, and It Never Was
Before diving into the subject matter, it is important to dispel a common misconception that often surrounds discussions of motivation. In many cases, articles on the topic present the premise as a choice between paying employees well and providing them with motivation at work.
In some cases, they go so far as to list “ways to motivate employees without spending money.” This is not an accurate perspective, however, as fair compensation is a necessity, and not a variable that should be bargained with.
If someone has to pay rent, cover utilities, feed their children, and buy groceries, motivation is most definitely not a priority.
If people are aware that they are significantly underpaid in comparison to their peers, motivation is not a priority.
If salaries barely see an increase from year to year, while workloads and expectations remain steady, motivation is not a priority.
In all of these cases, money is the determining factor in an employee’s attitude and performance. It is an obvious point, but one that is often overlooked by management in favour of other, less effective, motivators.
Money may not solve every problem, but it certainly helps in many cases. Few other motivators hold as much power when it comes to financial concerns. Therefore, it is plain to understand that fair pay is the foundation upon which motivation is built, rather than the other way around.
Or, to put it in less academic terms: you cannot simply replace a raise with a pizza party.
The Difference Between Showing Up and Caring
One reason this myth was born is that compensation really does change behaviours.
Pay someone more, and they will be more inclined to join your company. Offer someone a substantial bonus, and they will be motivated to perform better so that they can receive it. This is known as extrinsic motivation, and it works. Extrinsic motivation is real, and it is important. Without it, few individuals would willingly commit to forty hours of unpaid work each week.
However, once a person’s most basic needs are met, additional increases in compensation motivate them less and less. That’s where intrinsic motivation comes into play.
Think about it:
Why is it that some people always seem to seek out better ways of doing their jobs while others are quite happy to do the tasks that are simply required of them?
Why do some teams manage to stay enthusiastic about their work while others burn out at the same salary?
Why do some talented individuals choose to stay in their current position at a lower wage rather than move to a new company?
Why do some employees remain deeply committed to an organization despite receiving offers with higher salaries elsewhere?
Why do people willingly go above and beyond for one manager, yet do only the bare minimum for another?
This is the motivation that comes from within. Once people stop thinking about how money affects them, they start to think about how their work affects them.
People will rarely change their behaviours for a different paycheck if they feel that there is no impact beyond whether or not they can afford the food on the table and a roof over their head.
If they do not feel that their work has meaning, that they are contributing to something bigger than themselves, that they matter, then they are unlikely to put in extra effort.
Motivation Is Not a Transaction
Perhaps the easiest mistake to make when it comes to motivating employees is thinking it can be bought. It can’t.
Companies often act as if motivation is something they can hand out like another type of compensation: raises, bonuses, employee recognition, wellness programs, benefits packages.
Now, to be clear, all of these are important, but none of them are motivation. Motivation comes from somewhere else. It comes from the relationship between what employees put in and what they feel they get out: trust, opportunity, recognition, respect, growth, autonomy, fairness, meaning.
It all adds up when you think about it. When employees feel as if they are no longer getting what they believe they deserve in return for their efforts, it doesn’t just affect their opinions of the company. It has a direct impact on their willingness to put in that effort in the first place.
It happens gradually, almost imperceptibly at first.
People stop trying to contribute.
They stop experimenting.
They stop advocating for their ideas.
They stop caring.
None of these things occur because they’ve decided the work itself isn’t worth it, but because they no longer feel it is.
That, in the end, is the real reason for any drop in performance: not a change in the work itself, nor a shift in the challenges they face, but a feeling that the effort it takes for the rewards isn’t worth it.
A far easier way to think of it is that people rarely stop working because they’re doing something hard. They stop working because they’ve decided the rewards for getting it done aren’t worth it.
What Actually Keeps People Motivated?
If fair payment is the basis, what else is missing?
This is a question many psychologists and economists have asked for decades. Their main focus has been on finding the correlation between motivation and pay. The different perspectives have led to different conclusions. However, almost every theory boils down to one main idea, which, funnily enough, is also true for almost every aspect of human life:
People will only stay motivated if their work continues to satisfy certain criteria.
One of the theories, which has some strong points, is the Self-Determination Theory, or SDT for short. It focuses a lot on the quality of motivation.
Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, the psychologists who came up with it, believe that researchers should not think about motivation being high or low. Instead, the emphasis should be on the type of motivation a person is showing.
Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation Aren’t Opposites
Most people have heard of the concepts of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.
To keep matters brief, the former refers to one’s inner drive to engage in an activity, whereas the latter is one’s desire to engage in an activity to gain some reward from outside.
While the ideas behind this division are not wrong, they are often misinterpreted since those who promote this view suggest that intrinsic motivation is good and that one should only strive for it. In contrast, extrinsic motivation is presented as bad, and one should even go so far as to actively shun it.
In reality, the truth, like people, is more nuanced and multifaceted. Few people are driven purely by one factor alone, and their motivational factors are usually intertwined and cannot be easily decoupled.
If one wants to become a competent software developer, one has to study and learn the subject matter regardless of any rewards that society offers. However, most developers choose this career solely because of rewards and benefits, such as high pay, opportunities to work remotely, and job stability.
Similarly, few nurses engage in their work purely for personal satisfaction, and most are motivated by the desire to help others, coupled with the ability to earn a comfortable income.
While some salespeople might love what they do and find fulfillment in building relationships with clients, most aim for career growth and the additional income that comes with it.
Likewise, many teachers enter the profession because they genuinely enjoy educating others and making a difference in young people’s lives, but they also expect stable employment, career progression, and compensation that reflects the importance of their work.
From an employer’s perspective, the best course of action is to make sure that their employees’ extrinsic motivations are well taken care of so that their work does not become a chore and they can continue bringing their best performance on the job.
Autonomy Creates Ownership
One of the most effective ways to predict long-term motivation is surprisingly simple: people want some level of control over how they work.
Autonomy does not mean having no accountability or being completely independent in all aspects of work, but rather, having enough freedom from a controlling force to feel trusted in making decisions without being dictated at every step.
Think about the difference between two contrasting office environments.
A well-oiled machine; everyone knows their place, what is expected of them, and how to do it.
A loosey-goosy environment, with laid-back guidelines, but more trust & confidence in their employees to figure out how to get the work done, even in a crisis.
Both have equally competent workers, but which one do you think has the potential to create truly motivated employees?
Well, let’s answer this question by saying ownership breeds motivation. People who have a sense of ownership in their work are more likely to think beyond what is asked of them and how they can make a difference. They see a problem before it is brought to them and take initiative in fixing it. They think beyond their job title and do the work because they want to, not because they are told to.
As can be seen, this has absolutely nothing to do with accountability or lack thereof, but rather the feeling that they have a personal investment in what they do.
Trust fosters a sense of ownership, and that leads to motivation, or in a more modern-worded take: people want to feel that they have a say in how they do their work.
Mastery Makes Improvement Rewarding
Think of any skill that you’ve learned over the past weeks, months, or years: driving, cooking, programming, writing, teaching, or playing an instrument.
At first, you were most likely, probably not very good. You must have made lots of mistakes, and the work was hard, but THEN…then something magical happened. You started to get better. Things that were once hard became easy, and problems that seemed impossible became doable.
This stoked a warm feeling deep inside, and your brain got hit by wave after wave of dopamine as you neared the solution to your challenges. The feeling only got greater as you saw yourself improving. Psychologists call this urge to improve mastery.
Many companies fail to realize how important mastery is. Most people don’t just want a job. Some do, but eventually, after many dreary eves pass, even such individuals crave more.
They want a career
They want to learn and grow
They want to be challenged
They want to become experts in their field
They want to get better every day
If you stop challenging your employees, you’ll start to see a drop in curiosity. They’ll still be putting in the hours, but they’ll feel like they aren’t really accomplishing anything, and your ambitious employees will get hit much harder by this than the average staff member.
That’s why companies that invest in making sure their employees are constantly learning and improving usually see much more than just an increase in technical skills. They send a message to their employees that they care about their future.
In other words, employees are much more likely to stick around if they feel like they’re constantly improving.
Purpose Gives Effort a Reason
There is this phrase that most people never actually get to experience and is uttered in almost every mission statement: “Our people are our greatest asset!”
(If good taste would allow it, they’d add 3 !!!, and then the next company would do 4, and soon it would turn into an !-measuring contest)
Purpose, as a concept, has followed suit much in the same way, sadly. It has become one of those hollow words that is overused in the corporate world, to the point it has become a meme.
It is lamentable because a sense of purpose is one of those things that can be incredibly motivating for people. Purpose doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re doing something that will change the world. It just means that you know why you’re doing what you do.
A customer service rep who helps angry customers return products
An engineer who makes the widgets that people use every day
An accountant who keeps the company’s finances in order
A janitor who ensures that the hospital is a clean environment for its patients
An IT technician who keeps the systems running so hundreds of colleagues can do their jobs without interruption
A warehouse worker who ensures that products reach customers accurately and on time
They might not all be earth-shattering jobs, but they all have value, a sense of purpose, meaning, and impact on the world. What’s important is to realize that the thing they’re doing isn’t just something that they do for the sake of it. It needs to be something that they do for a reason, a purpose – that’s when it becomes transactional: do this for me, and I’ll give you that.
It’s not a bad system, and there’s nothing wrong with it. For some people, that’s all they need. For many people, though, eventually, it becomes dissatisfying. They stop caring about doing the thing and start caring about why they should do the thing. That’s when the “I just want more money” becomes a problem. That’s also when people stop thinking about the task at hand and start thinking about why they should even care about it.
It’s much harder to answer that question with a raise because money can’t achieve that. It can’t tell you why you should care about what you do. It can give you a reason to do it, but not a reason to care.
Money talks to your wallet. Purpose talks to your soul.
The Hidden Motivators Organizations Overlook
By now, you should already know that motivation is not produced by a single source. It is generated through a multitude of interactions, and it can be created or destroyed by hundreds of tiny occurrences. Pay and perks matter, as does autonomy, professional development, and purpose.
However, there are additional factors that have a significant impact on an employee’s motivation and engagement in the workplace in the long run. The crucial point is that these factors are rarely mentioned during job interviews: they are usually discussed in exit interviews.
Fairness Builds Trust
Imagine two similar employees: same salary, similar-ish work, equivalent ratings. Yet, out of the two, one always seems to get the plum assignments, public praise, endless cheer, and opportunities for promotion.
Now, the question at hand becomes: how long until the other begins to ask pungent, uncomfortable questions? Not long, I’d wager.
This is due to the fact that one factor stands out as an extremely powerful motivator: the perception of fairness.
Fairness in the workplace goes far beyond pay, as important as that is. It is the great equalizer, and it also entails consistency in how decisions are reached for things such as promotions, assignments, workload, kudos, mistakes, and communication.
People may be willing to accept outcomes they do not like, but they are much less tolerant of confusing circumstances. When it comes to explaining a decision, transparency seems to have an enormous impact on whether people will accept it. Give people enough information that they can understand a choice, even if they are not happy about it, and they will be much more likely to accept it than if they are in the dark and suspect something negative might be lurking.
When employees begin to feel as if they are getting less than they deserve, it is rarely productive to argue the point directly. Compensation issues, for example, are often emotional affairs, in which employees are apt to ask themselves not only how much they are being paid, but whether they are being treated fairly. By that, they often mean, how does my employer feel about my contributions?
Compensation is one of those tell-tale signals of how much value a company feels like it is getting out of its employees. The company is constantly sending out signals via compensation levels, and the truth is often hard to disguise, even when no one is discussing it openly.
Recognition Validates Contribution
Recognition is one of the most misunderstood concepts in modern management.
Many companies have turned it into a token, almost-jokey gesture: a monthly award, a thank-you note, an article in the company newsletter, a gift card.
While all these things may have their value, they fail to address the most important aspect of recognition: the simple fact that people care whether what they do matters. Recognition is valuable because it reassures employees that their work has not been in vain.
It is a response to the question “did what I do actually make a difference?” which is especially important when talking about demanding, difficult jobs.
“If I put my heart and soul into a challenging task and, when it finishes, nothing is said about it, does it mean it was not worth doing? Maybe it does not matter to me, but most likely, it will affect my motivation to do similarly demanding work in the future.”
Recognition is valuable because it reassures employees that someone has noticed and that what they do matters to somebody. It should be noted, however, that recognition, in many ways, is a tool that can only be used effectively in a good workplace.
If the company culture is unhealthy, and employees feel like their work is not valued, recognition gestures will do little to reassure them. They will see them as hollow tokens, attempts to manipulate them.
Recognition cannot fix rotten foundations. It cannot compensate for constant underpayment or lack of appreciation. It should not be used in bad faith, as a way to cover up management’s mistakes.
In simple, clear terms: pizza parties don’t fix broken workplaces.
Progress Is One of Motivation’s Strongest Fuels
Think about the last time you went all out trying really hard on some project. Now imagine there are two possible outcomes:
You see results. Things are coming together. You are improving. Things are getting done.
Despite your best efforts, things seem to get nowhere. One week seems much like the next. Problems arise, often in the same places. Goals appear ever distant, and your efforts seem to vanish up the memory hole, never to be remembered again.
Which would make you feel better? Which would make you want to keep working? How do we feel when we are reminded that too many workplaces are inadvertently creating the second situation for their employees?
Too many of us are working without the benefit of seeing the value of our efforts. Studies on worker motivation have shown that a sense of making progress is one of the most important factors in influencing positive emotional reactions toward work. That doesn’t mean we should expect huge leaps forward or giant achievements.
It means that people need to see some form of forward movement to feel good about what they do. It could be small steps. It could be baby steps, but people need reassurance that they’re actually getting somewhere. Some progress makes people feel their work has value. Without it, everything seems pointless.
That’s why effective leaders acknowledge and celebrate progress all the time, not just when people reach the end goal. It’s not that people don’t need goals or don’t care about rewards, but because forward movement answers the silent question, “Are we really getting somewhere?“
As long as the answer is “Yes,” then people can remain motivated. When the answer starts to sound more like “I’m not sure,” then well…that can be demotivating.
People don’t need to finish the race each and every week. They just need to know they are still running towards the finish line.
Burnout Isn’t a Motivation Problem
Burnout is often attributed to something that happens when employees “just lose their motivation.” That’s a reductive view of what it means to experience burnout. It isn’t that sudden; it usually results from a slow process of exertion with decreasing perceived psychological return.
The workload increases, or the rewards for said work decrease, and the worker’s relationship with their work deteriorates. People begin to feel ineffective, powerless, unable to accomplish the things they think are important, even if their work itself doesn’t change.
People who suffer from burnout continue to perform their tasks because they feel like they have to, not because they feel like it has meaning or value. Most people can handle hard projects, long working hours during important periods, unexpected problems, and high levels of responsibility. What they can’t handle is feeling like all of their hard work is wasted, stagnant, irrelevant, or unnoticed.
When companies have people who are burned out, the default question is rarely “how can we incentivize these people to perform better?” but rather “what made them feel so devalued in the first place?” These are two completely different lines of inquiry with very different solutions.
Final Thoughts
This article started with a simple myth: money is the greatest motivator.
Like many myths, this one has a grain of truth. Money does matter – it satisfies basic needs, reduces stress, attracts people to the organization, and indicates whether the company cares about its employees. In other words, ignoring the importance of money would be foolish.
However, it is only one factor influencing workers’ motivation. A more critical source of motivation is an individual’s perception of their work and how they are treated within the workplace.
Employees are more likely to be motivated if they realize their efforts make a difference, they improve themselves, their performance is valued, they can rely on their colleagues, and they are not stuck doing the same tasks. Such motivation is fragile, as it takes care to create the aforementioned circumstances.
Many people think of motivation as a binary indicator: either individuals are motivated to work, or they are not. In reality, motivation is more of a continuum. This is why people need to feel their contributions are worthwhile, and they can rely on their colleagues. Organizations should focus more on nurturing a culture in which employees understand that their work matters. It will enable them to achieve greater productivity as motivated individuals will be more likely to go above and beyond.
In today’s exceptionally modern times, there is no reason organizations shouldn’t strive to make employees feel that both money and non-monetary aspects of work are adequate. After all, people are unlikely to quit doing their tasks because they do not enjoy them. They are more likely to leave if they perceive no value in their efforts. People only experience dissatisfaction when their efforts do not provide them with rewards they want. Therefore, an organization should ensure that employees feel rewarded both intrinsically and extrinsically.
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Motivation is more complex than a paycheck. Build the knowledge and skills to manage employee performance with a broader understanding of what drives people at work through Certified Employee Performance Management
The Myth: Feedback Automatically Improves Performance
We’ve been told for decades that feedback is an agent for improved performance. If that were true, annual reviews would produce high-performing teams, generic comments would influence behaviour, and being told you “need to do more communication” would make you communicate better.
None of that has been shown thus far to work in any capacity. Furthermore, organizations don’t appear to be starved for feedback. In most, performance reviews happen annually, managers talk to people one-on-one regularly, there are post-project discussions, and feedback is “offered” in casual conversations. Employees continue to rack up “satisfactory” performances with write-ups, and employees’ careers are littered with commentary in the vein of “needs development in A, B, and C,” yet continue to repeat their same errors and get stuck in the same traps. The issue stems from the inability to give people the kind of feedback they might be receptive to.
This in particular is a really crucial distinction: feedback, on its lonesome, is just information.
Information becomes development in four areas:
Understanding
Acceptance
Retention and Translation to Behaviour
Action
Fail any of these four, and feedback may have been delivered, but it hasn’t been useful. This is where a deeply cherished organizational myth crumbles. So many leaders believe that they have “delivered the feedback” and thus have “done” the change development side themselves; the remainder is up to the employee.
Research clearly shows it does not work that way. In 1996, research conducted by Avraham Kluger and Angelo DeNisi undertook a meta-analysis of hundreds of studies of feedback interventions. While many feedback interventions were helpful, the research found that nearly a third of feedback interventions actually caused people to do worse.
This then begs the question: if feedback was so good for people’s performance, why would it be negative one-third of the time?
Such a realization clarifies why simply giving feedback isn’t the issue; rather, it’s the quality of that feedback across these different areas, as only good feedback develops behaviours.
Why Most Feedback Fails to Improve Performance
Unfortunately, most workplace feedback is not very useful. If you’re in a managerial position, think about what your employees hear every day:
“You need to be more strategic.”
“Improve your communication skills.”
“Take more ownership.”
“That didn’t turn out well.”
On the surface, these are all well-intentioned pieces of feedback. They acknowledge that something needs to change, but they don’t answer the most important question:
What, precisely, do I need to do differently?
Without this question, feedback is mere judgment and becomes an exercise in frustration. Imagine telling a person to “do a better job of taking care of their health.” Should they get more sleep? Exercise? Eat differently? Reduce stress? Drink more water?
The advice is not wrong; it is simply so broad that it is impossible to act on and will just be taken as something given in bad faith.
The same is true of workplace feedback. Telling your employee to “communicate better” leaves them with no direction on what behaviour to modify, when & how it needs to change, and how success will be assessed. Employees typically end such meetings knowing they didn’t meet expectations, but still unclear on what “different” looks like.
Clarity gives people confidence while vagueness makes them hesitate, and hesitation has a cost.
Employees unable to see what “good” is may second-guess their decisions, delay taking action, become silent rather than speak up, or fall back on familiar work patterns rather than try something new. We thus run into this weird scenario where the goal of feedback-to-performance-improvement can actually decrease this ratio.
Timing causes another major problem.
The annual or semi-annual performance review is the norm in many organizations. By the time the manager and employee gather to discuss an employee’s work, the events in question may have transpired months earlier.
Human brains are not wired to learn from events distant in the past; details, along with context, are lost, and emotions often overlay objective observation. Instead of an opportunity for improvement, the performance review turns into a historical document, and changing one’s behaviour yesterday is impossible. The more employees can effectively influence their behaviour tomorrow, the higher the quality of their outcomes will be. That is why organizations around the world are shifting from treating feedback as an event to treating it as a process.
Gallup, for example, asserts that feedback has an expiration date: the closer it comes to the event it is about, the more helpful and actionable it is. Employees who receive frequent meaningful feedback are significantly more engaged than those who receive it only once a year.
Sense & Direction – another common mistake involves turning feedback into a one-way street.
The manager delivers the feedback, the employee receives it, neither party is certain whether they understood each other, and the meeting ends.
As it should be obvious, learning doesn’t tend to work this way. Employees have to ask questions, be sure expectations are clear, reflect on their own point of view, and discuss the desired results; otherwise, assumptions, not clarity, will prevail.
Emotion (or lack thereof).
Nobody likes to feel that they have done something wrong. When feedback intended to encourage development is interpreted as evidence of incompetence, recipients’ defenses go up. People are more likely to work on solutions when they are not afraid of being judged by their manager. Ultimately, the purpose of feedback is to help the person grow, not to prove the manager was right.
Moving beyond evaluation and toward development is the first step in feedback, and, ironically, one factor has proven more valuable than anything else: stop thinking about the past and begin planning for the future.
The Science Behind Feedback That Actually Works
If bad feedback does not lead to performance improvement, the immediate thought is, what does?
As shocking as this may be to some readers, the answer is not, in fact, “more feedback.”
What happens in a lot of instances is that companies, when bad feedback doesn’t produce positive results in the organization, try giving more feedback, more feedback check-ins, reviews, or telling people the managers should provide feedback more regularly.
Although this would naturally spring up from good intention, more feedback won’t do any good as the problem isn’t frequency. Bad feedback is still bad feedback, however much you try and disguise it or apply layers of make-up over it. The crux of the problem lies in how we conduct a feedback conversation.
One of the very fascinating results of the studies being carried out into feedback research is that conversations that deal with past activities may result in managers obtaining just the reverse result. The objective of the discussion about a failed outcome seems to be to identify what exactly the problem was, to address why the results of a certain output did not quite match the standards, and to allocate blame.
So, if it is to make us understand the exact reasons behind a specific issue, it is surely easier to avoid its repetition? Well, most of the time it isn’t so.
Research conducted in 2020 found that conversations that focus solely on addressing the output from the previous stage can cause issues between a manager and employee regarding why it is likely not up to the mark. Quite contrary to creating a shared mindset, it becomes an act of making the employees defenseless towards their conduct and a tendency to self-assess the positive sides and look for external explanations for failure, increasing this discrepancy in their minds, which leads them to accept less and be less likely to adopt the feedback given to them.
If we want to have a better grasp of such findings, we need to ask ourselves: how do performance review meetings start most of the time?Do any of these lines sound familiar?
“Let us discuss this past performance and rectify the shortcomings.”
“Why was this project a failure?”
“Explain to me why you were not up to par with your deliverables.”
“What could you have done differently to achieve better results?”
“Can you explain why your performance did not meet expectations?”
“Let’s go over the areas where you fell short and discuss how to improve.”
Even though these are not bad questions, they place the focus of attention on proving oneself, not on learning in context. Once one starts doing that, they can only move their focus from learning towards showing themselves to others; in proving that they are competent or to explain their actions. After all, that’s the way one’s brain is formed.
The interesting thing, though, from this research is that managers do not need to withdraw this kind of feedback completely, but rather should aim to move their focus to discussions of the subject matter & its progress. What mostly determines whether employees accept and intend to change through a feedback process is a forward-focused discussion.
When an employee feels that a feedback discussion about their performance pertains to the future course rather than past failures, they become more receptive (also, this encourages the employee’s intention to implement the changes). So the subtle alteration could have immense significance.
To better illustrate this, ponder upon the following options:
“Your presentation lacked engagement, and the audience became unenthusiastic.“
Vs
“What steps can we take to enhance the presentation to fully capture the attention of the audience right till the end of the presentation?”
Whereas the previous sentence will attempt evaluation, the other one, in contrast, would be development. One is backward-leaning, whereas the other is forward-facing. The one that is toward a bright future focuses the discussion on the future, not only on issues or deficiencies of the past.
The reason many leaders emphasize the need for managers to become coaches is that coaches develop and coach people. Managers, rather than just criticizing a situation, can ask the following questions: “What is the thing that we learned here?“, “What will we try this time round differently?“, “Is there any assistance or resource required to have an impact this time?“, “How can we make our future attempt a successful one?”
Effective Feedback Is About Behaviour, Not Personality
What’s another key element common to all great feedback?
It addresses observable behaviours, not a person’s inner traits.
That may sound obvious enough that you wonder if we need to say it out loud, but the two often get tangled into one in the real world. Here are a few examples:
“You aren’t a great communicator.”
“You’re disorganized.”
“You don’t take ownership.”
The problem is you’ve now just defined who the person is, what their traits are, which are often deeply ingrained or even impossible to alter in real time. Think about trying to tell someone they “aren’t” good at communication; how would you even begin to prove that statement wrong? How can you work on what such a statement wants from you?
Now let’s think about how such assertions could be changed:
“During today’s client meeting, several key questions weren’t addressed before moving to a decision. Next time, I’d like you to pause and invite additional perspectives before wrapping up.”
“The report was submitted two days after the agreed-upon deadline. Let’s take a look at what might have been standing in your way and figure out what we can do differently for the next project.”
Actual change occurs when we use the right words and the right amount of words, to boot. Using both the right words and the proper amount requires going in-depth and pinpointing particulars. When we do that, you’re going to want to pinpoint things that can actually be changed, because behaviour is observable, measurable, replicable, and above all else, changeable.
Personality isn’t what needs improving – performance is. In other words, great feedback doesn’t make judgments about character or intent; instead, it describes what they did, explains why it mattered, and offers suggestions for what to do next & how to achieve it.
No employee should leave a performance discussion feeling unsure if they can even do their job. They should walk away with a clear understanding of exactly what success looks like the next time around. This is the key difference between criticism and coaching, and the key reason why the most effective feedback possesses characteristics that elevate it far beyond simply being “honest.“
Five Characteristics of Effective Feedback
Hopefully by now you’re noticing one thing fairly plainly: feedback isn’t so much about constructive versus damaging feedback. That is nonetheless a relevant difference and an important one to keep in mind, but feedback, what it should be at its core, means facilitating higher conduct from others.
However, if that is the case, we then have to think about another aspect: what makes one bit of feedback more likely to be seen and acted upon as an alternative, rather than met with quiet resentment and forgetfulness?
Though the precise context in every workplace may differ, researchers agree there are five elements more likely to have success.
1. It’s Timely
Feedback is time-sensitive.
The longer a manager waits to engage on a particular topic, the less valuable that conversation becomes. Details and context are lost, and both parties have to recall facts relying on hazy memory. As a coach, would you wait until the end of the season to give one piece of advice on positioning to one player? As a drama teacher, would you wait until a child’s annual recital to mention a few words of advice for playing correctly?
While these examples seem silly, there is a grain of truth there: we don’t learn that way.
Small adjustments in experience improve performance the most effectively when they occur as experience is unfolding. In light of this, some of the best-performing organizations have increasingly embraced the notion of “ongoing” rather than “formal” feedback practices.
They have shifted from the expectation that feedback primarily occurs in quarterly, bi-annual, and annual reviews to encouraging short check-ins on a daily and weekly basis. A five-minute chat between a team leader and report following an interaction with a client, a project kickoff, or the completion of a key milestone often adds far more value than a lengthy review two months later.
To this, we should mention an added benefit of timely feedback: it has an effect beyond improving recall – it impacts momentum too.
2. It’s Specific
One of the quickest ways to make feedback useless is to keep it too vague. Statements such as “You need to work on your communication” or “Be more proactive” may seem like they convey information but are highly unlikely to provide an employee with the specific behaviour they need to adjust.
Specific feedback defines behaviours that are observable and concrete. Instead of saying,”Your communication could use some work,” you can rephrase it in a manner that actually carries realistic improvement capability:
“In today’s client meeting, you did an excellent job answering their specific questions. However, you moved to a decision without asking for other stakeholders’ input, and a few people left the meeting with unanswered questions. In future meetings, be sure to pause after asking a question and wait for other people’s questions before making a final decision.“
Now the employee has a clear understanding of what the problem was, why it was a problem, what success looks like, and how they can achieve it. The guesswork is all but removed.
3. It’s Actionable
Identifying a problem doesn’t mean solving a problem. If it worked like that, snipers would make the best doctors.
Think about a personal trainer telling a new client, “You should get in better shape.” This is little more than a truism. Good trainers tell us what exercises to do, when to practice, how often, and what to track over a period of time. The same applies at work, where great feedback will answer the question ”What next?”
It should be noted that this kind of change might involve experimenting with how you run meetings, plan a presentation, ask questions during client discussions, or break projects down into smaller stages.
4. It’s Psychologically Safe
The trick to good feedback is the existence of psychological safety – a space in which feedback can exist without its recipients feeling mortified, culpable, or punitively chastised; if people are convinced that errors are equivalent to accusation or punishment, they will inevitably be either cautious or deceptive.
The key is a framework that does not reduce standards, nor obviate the necessity of conflict (conflict IS good when one understands how & why). It is a framework that signals the desire to develop through the feedback exchange, and in determining this climate, managers are critical.
By their very nature, curiosity offers a better way to communicate than accusation; questions teach more than assumptions; and listening matters more than lecturing. Furthermore, feedback is more effective when recipients believe the purpose is to develop, not to disgrace, so the intention is to learn when the feedback is intended to help you succeed, not to catch you out making mistakes.
5. It’s Future-Focused
As we’ve iterated a few times in this article, effective feedback enables forward progress. You may remember how past failures often create more than one story about why they happened. These can turn a conversation into an argument that quickly spins into finger-pointing and defensiveness, rather than learning.
A future-focused discussion shifts the entire goal.
Instead of asking: “Why did you do that?”
Ask: “What will you do differently next time?”
Instead of saying: “That strategy failed clearly.”
Ask: “How can we approach the next project to achieve a different result?“
This is a much softer approach that moves the conversation from “who” to “what,” and avoids rewriting the past, shaping the future instead. It sets people up for future success, not failure.
Replace Performance Reviews With Performance Conversations
There’s no greater example of the distinction between providing feedback and fostering improvement than the annual performance review at work.
For decades, companies have used an annual check-in to review performance, highlight gaps, pinpoint areas for improvement, and plan for the coming year. The logic is straightforward: gather observations for an entire year, get together for one meeting to rule them all, deliver feedback, and performance improves.
It feels like magic & sorcery, almost surreal…because it is!
At the time of the meeting, events may already be months old, and employees likely don’t recall the circumstances surrounding it. Managers may bring up very recent issues and ignore the whole year’s data. Both parties struggle to draw insights out of situations that have already passed and cannot be changed. Far too often, however, employees anticipate these conversations and prepare to endure them, rather than get anything valuable out of them.
Now compare that to organizations that weave feedback into their daily work. Here, instead of a single meeting a year, managers coach employees on an ongoing basis:
They praise positive performance as it is happening
Make corrections to minor habits before they become significant issues
Provide employees with opportunities to reflect and learn from their experiences
Embed feedback as an integral part of how the team gets things done, not an event that interrupts it.
Now, this is not to say that organizations should eliminate performance reviews wholesale. They do serve important purposes as documentation of employee achievement, conversation points for career growth, and discussions to align expectations and support administrative decisions.
The review, however, should not be the key mechanism for employee development. Instead, true growth occurs through the many minor interactions between formal performance evaluations. The most effective managers don’t merely review work – they actively contribute to its shape.
Final Thoughts
Feedback Doesn’t Change People ➔ Better Conversations Do
Giving feedback is just the first step in a long series up the stairs of improvement.
The real performance increase comes from the next steps.
Did you tell someone their feedback while the context was still clear?
Did you focus on specific behaviour rather than personality judgment?
Did you give the other person something specific they could do to improve?
Did you create a psychologically safe space for conversation?
Did you help the person understand what success actually looks like for them next time around?
If the answer to any of these questions is no then your feedback will not translate into any lasting growth, rather just another conversation that’s lost from memory by Friday afternoon. The best leadership practices not only evaluate but build capacity in people to step up and try to deliver on something new.
Realistically speaking, most people don’t act because somebody just told them they should. Most people grow because somebody shows them how they could become better, and then supported them with the confidence required to get there.
Perhaps a customer service associate started making mistakes.
Mayhaps a project that seemed like it was a winner suddenly tanked.
Perchance a government department that consistently hit its KPIs suddenly started missing them.
Possibly a construction site that was on track suddenly started falling behind schedule.
Presumably a real estate project that looked like a sure success suddenly stopped attracting buyers.
What’s the first question that pops into most organizations’ minds at that very instant?
“What’s wrong with the employee?!”
It can be a myriad of matters, ranging from motivation, discipline, lack of care, or just a rough attitude. It’s an easy question to ask. When things aren’t going well, after all, our first inclination is to examine the person at the center of the work. It feels equally easy to answer, too. Unfortunately, it’s often the wrong question to ask. In our last piece, we examined the oldest myth in performance management – the one about great performers simply being born with more talent. While talent plays a role, it’s not the full picture. You can develop skills, acquire knowledge, improve abilities, and gain experience nowadays more than ever before in the history of humanity. So, if performance isn’t just about raw talent, though, what is it about? The answer is a bit more intricate and poses several interesting questions, more than many people like to admit, because often, questions don’t give answers, but open up more of the same. Performance isn’t created in a vacuum. It’s not the sum total of how smart, hard-working, or driven someone is. Performance is moreso the result of dozens of forces (seen and unseen) acting upon a person on a daily basis. This has been repeated thousands of times, but it’s valuable to look at it from different angles.
For example, think about growing a plant. If a plant isn’t growing well, we don’t assume it’s a “bad plant,” with a “bad attitude” or a “lack of drive.” We examine everything that has to do with the plant: the soil, sunlight, water intake, temperature exposure, and whether anything is getting in its way. However, when an employee isn’t performing well, we tend to examine the person first. Sometimes that’s appropriate; that much is true. Other times, more often than not, the environment has already created the conditions for poor performance, and this is the myth that we aim to bust in this article: employee performance isn’t primarily determined by attitude. All of the internal elements matter: attitude, effort, accountability, and resilience. Yet, in addition to all these, we also have external elements: bosses, peers, organizational systems, cultures, and outside influences. Understanding the role these external forces play doesn’t mean absolving employees of their responsibility, but rather explaining their performance in relation to all of them. Once we can explain performance by taking into account every layer that can sway it one way or another, we can finally do something about improving it.
Layer 1: The Individual – Capability Is Only the Starting Point
You can’t talk about employee performance without talking about the employee (duh). Each employee comes into a workplace with a unique set of knowledge, technical skills, experience, personality, motivation, and natural talents that undoubtedly play a role in how well they perform. To ignore that fact would be as foolish as saying talent doesn’t matter at all…which is where something breaks in a lot of organizations, and the collective thought bubble pops. If someone isn’t performing, the quick assumption becomes the person lacks something, and they need MORE of something else: more motivation, more discipline, more commitment, more resilience, more passion, more energy, more footwork, like the workout videos of old. Now the environment has become a weird gymnastics exercise of jumping through mental hoops to reason something that might be true, but may not, into a definitive state of truth. One of the most surprising findings from recent research on workplace wellbeing is how much of an employee’s performance is affected by things that their manager may never see. Research from Humankind found nearly 73% of employees felt personal stress was hurting their ability to focus, engage, be motivated, make good decisions, and perform well at their job. Whether it was finances, poor sleep, childcare duties, health concerns, or emotional burdens, these personal factors were quietly depleting the cognitive bandwidth individuals have to deploy at work. None of these struggles will ever show up on a performance review.
A manager doesn’t see the parent who spent the night up with a sick child.
A manager doesn’t see the employee who’s losing sleep over bills.
A manager doesn’t see the hours spent in transit to a job, taking care of aging parents, managing relationship drama, or coping with illness.
What a manager does see is work that’s slowing down, deadlines being missed, less enthusiasm, and lower productivity. By the time that these performance indicators appear, the underlying causes may have been developing for weeks or months.
This is not to say organizations should be tasked with fixing every one of a person’s personal challenges (that’s neither realistic nor appropriate), but it does mean that we must stop deluding ourselves into thinking that individuals somehow become different human beings the moment they enter our buildings. Employees don’t leave their lives at the door; they merely get better or worse at hiding them. Even if there’s nothing overtly going on in a person’s life, we fall into another trap when discussing performance. We often assume that if someone has enough talent, performance will automatically follow, but that’s not how real, everyday life functions. We’ve covered previously how Gallup has long pushed for the argument that while natural talent is a relatively stable proclivity, knowledge and skills can be acquired over time, rendering talent-only advantages null.
Thus, while hiring individuals with a high natural ability does increase your chances of having a top performer, it’s far from a guarantee. Likewise, a person with only average natural abilities may exceed expectations if they’re placed in the right role, have the right skills, and work within the right environment. The same principle is emphasized by management professor Morten Hansen in his research of thousands of professionals. Hansen discovered that how people work accounted for more of the difference in performance than almost anything else. While talent mattered, it was far from the single largest differentiator. High performers didn’t simply outwork the competition; often, they were outworking their competitors more strategically, since capability only sets potential; it doesn’t guarantee performance. Two people with very similar backgrounds and intellectual capabilities can perform in vastly different ways. If we’re only focusing on the person, those discrepancies can seem baffling, yet in truth they are being influenced by forces that we have yet to examine. This is because, after the person, perhaps the single biggest factor affecting performance is their manager.
Layer 2: The Manager – The Greatest Performance Multiplier or Subtracter
If you ask someone why they love working for their company, they’re likely to mention their team or their opportunity to learn & grow. If you ask someone why they left, you’ll notice that a very consistent answer emerges: “my manager.“
Oh, the age-old truism that people don’t leave companies, they leave managers. It’s not universally true, of course, but there’s a reason this saying endures. Managers are our window onto the company. They are responsible for our expectations, the feedback we receive, our access to opportunities, the obstacles we must overcome, and the emotional temperature of the place we work each day.
Two employees can be in the same company, earn the same salary, work with the same policies, have the same benefits, and yet have drastically different experiences because they have different managers.
Psychologist Amy Edmondson has devoted decades of research to identifying a critical ingredient of high-performing teams: psychological safety. In a nutshell, it’s the belief that people can be their genuine selves at work without fear of embarrassment or punishment, can take risks without fear of repercussion, and can challenge one another without damaging personal relationships.
Notice what psychological safety is not: it’s not a lowering of standards. It’s not about avoiding accountability. It’s not about making people comfortable all of the time. Instead, it is about enabling them to contribute without fear of appearing incompetent, even if it feels inherently risky. This is a crucial distinction, because fear changes our behaviour. When we’re afraid of appearing incompetent, we stop asking questions. When we’re afraid of being criticized, we stop pitching new ideas. Eventually, our performance begins to dip because fear has begun to eclipse curiosity.
In fact, a well-known Google study called Project Aristotle, which investigated the reason behind their consistently high-performing teams, came to a strikingly similar conclusion. After scrutinizing hundreds of teams, Google’s researchers found that the most important factor in success, more so than any other, was the degree to which teams were psychologically safe. The other factors (dependability, role clarity, meaning, and impact) were all secondary, built on the foundation of safety.
We invest considerable money and effort trying to find and hire exceptional individuals. Yet, very few of us invest the same resources in creating conditions that allow those individuals to actually achieve their exceptional potential. Moreover, psychological safety is just one factor. There are many others, such as recognition, constructive feedback, trust, autonomy, and role clarity, just to name a few.
Employees who have to second-guess priorities, wait days for simple approvals, or are terrified of making small errors spend the bulk of their mental energy protecting themselves rather than doing meaningful work. Good managers work hard to minimize that friction, while bad managers create it.
In short, the management of performance doesn’t just happen in annual performance reviews. It’s influenced every day by the culmination of dozens of seemingly small interactions between a manager and their reports. Eventually, those interactions ripple out beyond individual relationships and shape the team itself.
Layer 3: The Team – Why Great Individuals Can Still Become Average Teams
Consider five of the most exceptionally gifted individuals and gather them together in one room. Common sense would suggest this would inevitably result in an exceptional team. In reality, things get complicated.
We’ve all experienced teams that, while absolutely flush with talented, experienced professionals, somehow stumble from one deadline to the next. Their meetings become an exercise in repetition and good ideas fester in the far corners of their minds, never shared, never discussed. Elsewhere, teams comprised of average employees somehow manage to turn out exceptional results like high-speed conveyor belts.
When the environment that a tight-knit group builds together starts to shape their work experience, performance starts shifting from individual to collective. By the very nature of work in an organization, no team can avoid this, and every one nurtures its culture, willingly or unconsciously. Over time, everyone learns what gets rewarded, what gets ignored, and what gets punished. Most of these lessons don’t make their way into employee handbooks, but they often exert a far stronger influence on behaviour than any formal policies.
Every team has rules, but what’s more interesting is how many were never written down.
Maybe it quickly becomes apparent that it’s not worth disagreeing with the boss.
Perhaps people learn that asking for help is interpreted as a sign of weakness.
Possibly they notice the loudest voice in the room always wins the discussion, regardless of the actual quality of the ideas presented.
Mayhaps people learn that taking risks is celebrated only when they succeed, but punished harshly when they fail.
Perchance it becomes obvious that keeping your head down and avoiding difficult conversations is the safest way to get ahead.
None of this has to be codified in an internal policy. People simply observe it, adapt to it, and then, over time, pass it along to new team members. This is why culture can spread like wildfire. Almost nobody changes because someone announced new values at an all-hands meeting, but everyone changes when they watch how behaviour is rewarded or punished.
Psychologists call this social proof.
People look to those around them to signal how to behave, particularly in times of uncertainty. In workplace settings, that means employees often adopt the norms of their colleagues long before they consider their company’s stated policies.
If everyone in a team talks freely in meetings, then new team members are usually inclined to speak freely as well. If everyone in a team falls silent when something goes wrong, new team members learn that silence is golden.
Another invisible force comes in what researchers call emotional contagion.
Emotions spread, and that affects team performance. If you’ve ever worked in a team environment, you’ve undoubtedly seen it. A perpetually pessimistic person can single-handedly drain the energy of an entire department. Conversely, an optimistically positive and solution-oriented teammate can boost everyone’s motivation during challenging times.
Managers certainly affect the emotional climate of their teams, but the teammates amplify it day by day. A culture of trust or fear becomes a self-reinforcing loop. This leads into another point taken from Project Aristotle.
Google’s Project Aristotle identified dependability right after psychological safety in their findings.
Trusting your teammates goes beyond their ability to emotionally support you; it involves relying on their execution. Few things sink a team’s performance faster than unpredictability. When employees are unsure about whether their teammates will come through on their assignments, they start to contingency plan or hoard information just in case. Self-protection, rather than collaboration, becomes the default.
The reverse is also true: when employees are confident their teammates will come through, coordination is smoother, and meetings are more efficient as trust replaces excessive oversight.
This is perhaps the least understood ingredient in the recipe for high-performance teams: they don’t eliminate conflict – they eliminate unhealthy conflict.
High-performing teams do disagree. They do question assumptions, debate ideas, ask uncomfortable questions, and clash in their value systems. However, they do so in a way where disagreement isn’t a personal affront. Disagreement becomes a function of the problem-solving process.
That’s what psychologist Amy Edmondson found over and over again in her studies as well: teams that had a high level of psychological safety didn’t necessarily commit fewer errors than others; they actually reported more errors because they were way more willing to admit they had made a mistake. The result wasn’t decreased performance; it was faster learning.
Ironically, cultures that punish mistakes foster conditions where mistakes grow costly and become harder to fix. Hidden problems are invariably more dangerous than problems in plain sight.
As you might have noticed, by this point, a pattern is emerging.
So, what does all of this lead to?
Individuals matter. ✔️ Managers matter. ✔️ Teams matter. ✔️
Yet there is something bigger. They all exist within something larger – the organization.
Layer 4: The Organization – The Structures Behind the Results
Companies love to measure outcomes: sales, revenue, productivity, customer satisfaction, profit margins. What companies don’t really love to measure is the systems that drive those outcomes.
Systems
This is an issue because employees don’t operate in isolated moments; they operate within systems, and those are the quiet forces that make succeeding easy or painfully hard.
Think about how many performance issues are actually system issues hiding in plain sight:
An employee misses deadlines.
Is it poor time management?
Or was that employee’s priorities changed three times in a single week?
A project is dragging.
Is the team unmotivated?
Or does every single decision need to go through a four-department approval process?
Innovation has disappeared.
Are your people less creative?
Or have they learned that challenging the status quo is more risky than rewarding?
It’s all too easy to chalk performance problems up to individual accountability because individual behaviour is visible. Systems are much harder to see, but they often exert much more influence.
Management pioneer W. Edwards Deming famously asserted that 95% of organizational problems are systemic in origin. Accountability matters, yes, but he insisted that people cannot perform better than the systems they are asked to work within.
Just think about your local governmental bureaucracy.
It functions chiefly by rulesets. We need rules. Rules are good – they provide consistency, mitigate risk, offer direct A-to-B avenues for solutions, and enable scalability.
However, we reach a tipping point for every added approval, every unnecessary report, every meeting, every administrative layer, every conflicting process. When rules outweigh the necessity for which they exist, they begin creating friction. They shift focus away from delivering value and toward navigating the organization itself. Eventually, the process itself becomes the focus, not the work.
Role Clarity
Very few things sap performance faster than confusion around what’s expected.
Who’s making this decision?
What does successful work look like here?
Which of the two conflicting priorities should I tackle first?
When expectations are unclear, even talented employees will pause before acting for they fear doing the wrong thing. Studies have shown that clear roles correlate strongly with employee engagement, confidence, and overall performance. Role clarity frees employees to focus energy on solving problems instead of figuring out the answers.
Politics & Culture
Life is a series of politics at play, and organizations are part of daily life.
With that in mind, however, issues arise when politically motivated behaviour are more rewarded than productive behaviour.
If a promotion system reliably favors visibility over contribution
If challenging colleagues’ ideas is riskier than agreeing
If employees are incentivized to compete with one another instead of solving problems collaboratively
If protecting your own department is rewarded more than helping the organization as a whole
The organization trains people that success is a result of politics, not formal policy.
This leads to a distortion of culture.
Culture, much like politics and behaviour, is learned. Despite an army of mission statements, posters, core value initiatives, and well-wishing sticky notes, organizational culture isn’t created by what organizations say they are, but what they do.
Culture is built on what organizations repeatedly tolerate, reward, punish, or ignore. That’s why two companies can claim the exact same values, but have wildly different experiences for their employees. Organizational culture isn’t the motto on the wall; it’s what happens when no one’s watching. These hidden structures influence performance daily, often without managers’ awareness, since they are felt & lived, rather than examined in a performance sheet.
Yet, even organizations with excellent managers, healthy cultures, and efficient systems have one final, insurmountable challenge: people are, at heart, human beings who exist long after clocking out.
Layer 5: The World Outside Work – The Part Performance Reviews Never Measure
There is one last layer to performance, which organizations know conceptually, but often fail to account for realistically: life. It almost seems self-evident, yet, a pervasive, almost subconscious bias exists in the workplace that assumes employees somehow leave their personal lives at the door.
They didn’t – your employees didn’t stop being parents the moment they logged onto Microsoft Teams. They didn’t stop worrying about a sick loved one just because it was Monday morning. Financial worries don’t cease at 9 AM. Anxiety, grief, burnout, sleep deprivation, relationship troubles, and the many other stresses of being human don’t simply fade away as business hours commence.
The point is that people don’t perform in a vacuum; they perform as people. Recent research from places like the Harvard Business Review underscores the impact of external stresses. Studies have demonstrated a direct link between personal stress and difficulties with focus, decision-making, motivation, and engagement.
By the time an employee’s performance visibly dips, mental energy needed for problem-solving, collaboration, and creative thinking may have already been diverted to managing these personal issues for weeks or months. Of course, this doesn’t mean employers need to become therapists or feel personally responsible for their employees’ personal problems. Boundaries are important, and so is recognizing that between 9 and 5, we don’t automatically morph into machines.
Organizations that understand this do a better job of not trying to manage people’s lives, and a much better job of not creating undue stress in the workplace.
Flexible work schedules.
Employee assistance programs.
Access to mental health resources.
Realistic workloads.
Predictable schedules.
Empathetic managers.
These aren’t magic cures or arcane sorceries. They simply remove a potential unnecessary source of pressure at work, and they are incredibly important for one specific reason: performance isn’t a flat line.
No one, not even the highest performer, is running at peak capacity every moment of every day for every year. People have seasons, and there are periods where they have tremendous energy, creativity, and focus. Then there are periods where life’s demands briefly require a greater portion of their attention.
High-performing organizations recognize the difference between a temporary dip in performance and a systemic problem. They don’t treat every deviation as a failure; they ask a much more helpful question: “What has changed?”
Sometimes the change is skills or motivation. Other times, it’s work overload. Lastly, on other occasions, it’s just life, and because each of these changes requires a different solution, differentiating is critical.
Treat every issue as an attitude problem, and you won’t fix very many things. Treat every issue as a systems problem, and you’ll neglect individual responsibility. Effective performance management sits somewhere in between. It acknowledges accountability for an employee’s work, while simultaneously recognizing that no work exists in a void because when you zoom out, you see that every layer impacts the other.
A talented employee will be limited by poor management.
A brilliant manager will be hampered by a dysfunctional system.
A great system will see reduced productivity when the people within it are struggling with overwhelming personal challenges.
No one element creates performance alone, rather it’s the interplay of an entire ecosystem that creates it.
Final Thoughts
Organizations have sought the silver bullet for performance for decades: hire better people, pay more, set big goals, measure everything, and reward the top performers.
All of those things count, but they’re only one part of the picture. Performance isn’t a function of talent alone, nor is it just a product of attitude or effort. Performance emerges from the interaction between an individual and their environment.
The individual
The manager
The team
The organization
The outside world
Every one of these levels either builds on an individual’s potential or subtly works to undermine it. This is why explaining poor performance simply as employee error is so incomplete. If a garden doesn’t grow, we don’t just blame the seeds. We look at the soil, the light, the water, the environment.
Organizations should be willing to ask the same questions not because employees shouldn’t be held accountable (they most certainly should be) but because blame without understanding never results in sustained change. The most effective leaders don’t ask, “Who caused this?” They ask, “What conditions created this result?”
Changing your perspective from who did it to what created it changes everything. It shifts performance management from blame to removal of obstacles and turns the manager from an evaluator to a coach. Moreover, it prompts organizations to build systems for employee success instead of relying on individual grit to overcome the odds, and most important of all, it reminds us that performance isn’t usually an individual effort but a collective one at that.
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Performance problems rarely have a single cause. Learn to examine the people, managers, teams, and systems behind the results. Build a more complete approach to performance management with Certified Employee Performance Management.
