How to build a high performance culture without culling the herd

I have several friends who work at high levels in large enterprise companies. Without fail, they all describe their culture the exact same way: cutthroat. The only way to get ahead is to “crush it” relentlessly. And the only way to maintain your position and salary is to continue to “crush it” assuming you don’t burn out. To top it all, if you do let your foot off the gas just a bit, you become a candidate for the annual (or bi-annual) layoff cycle. In a recent conversation with them on this topic we agreed that this was unsustainable and also “the way it is.” How, then, do we build a high-performance corporate culture that avoids this?

No matter how hard you work, you lose

One of the fascinating takeaways for me from this conversation was that, no matter how hard my friends and their peers and teams work, they still lose. If they don’t work hard enough they’re candidates for the layoff list. If they do work hard enough, they avoid the layoff until their performance slips. Every athlete will tell you that it’s impossible to sustain peak performance forever. If you’re damned either way, why work hard at all? Culturally, everyone ends up doing just enough to try not to get fired, the company stagnates and the true high performers go work where they’re appreciated.

My first observation was how individualistic this approach to management is. Admittedly these are all US-based organizations, but there was no concept of team. Evaluations were specific to an individual.

No one works alone. And no one’s success is determined solely by their own behavior. Individual goals and performance management criteria create a kill or be killed culture. I have to do better than you, no matter what, or I get fired.

Annual layoffs only increase mediocrity

During my conversation with my executive friends, I remembered that when I worked at AOL (about 1000 years ago) we had a similar culture. Yet, there were clearly low and mid performers there who had lasted years. How did they do it? They hid. Literally. They did just enough work to meet basic requirements, never too much to draw attention, never complained and just punched their time card every day. The organization was bloated with folks like this. They never went out of their way or innovated or pushed the company forward. They just maintained, and so did the mediocrity of the work the organization produced.

Their goal wasn’t to do good work or serve the customer. It was to not get laid off. There was almost a sense of pride in successfully avoiding the annual ax. And, in the end, it was the customer who suffered with subpar products and services.

High performance cultures need support, not fear

Cultures of fear produce mediocre organizations bloated with teams doing just enough work to not get fired. Building a high performance culture requires trust in the people you’ve hired. It requires incentives that reflect the work these people want to do. Finally, it requires leadership that is willing to learn and adapt to a rapidly changing world rather than insisting it’s “their way or the highway.” Let’s take a quick look at each of these 3 tactics:

1. Trust in the people you hire means hiring the right people. It means understanding what skills you need and what skills you can teach. It means providing the folks you hire with the space to do their job, the way they know how to do it. It means defining an objective and letting the team decide how it’s going to get there.
2. The people you hire need proper incentives — ones that reflect both the world they can influence and the support they should expect from the rest of the organization. Rather than promising not to fire them, set incentives that encourage teamwork, collaboration and an ability to adapt based on changes in the world.
3. High performers appreciate leaders they can learn from. They want to get better and they want to see that their leaders can get better. If you want your teams to do great work, model that behavior for them. Show them was adaptive, servant leadership is about. Enable their growth and their learning and they will do the same.

I had a boss once who used to walk the cubicle aisles of the office literally saying out loud, “What are you doing? I’m going to fire you!” Guess what happened? We all quit. Surprise. No one wanted to work for that guy, at that company nor do good work. The culture was toxic and as soon as new opportunities opened up, people left. The high performers went first. The company ultimately lost its market leadership position. The corporate hustle doesn’t have to be at the expense of a great team. Consider trusting the folks you hire, incentivizing them to work for the customer and show them how to lead by doing it yourself. It’s not a silver bullet but it’s a step in the right direction.