“Performance versus Trust”

This year I received support from a Management and Leadership Guru Simon Sinek who is respected by me and millions of others. He travels the world with his speech "performance versus trust". What he has to say can also be found in his books but actually comes down to the fact that it is primarily about who you are as a human being.

We need a different kind of employee:

Times change, and so does the need for the kind of person you hire. We used to have mostly mechanical labor. Assemble the car, build that machine, or draw that logo. You have a skill, and you're good at something. You can do it faster than someone else, so it's worth more money.

When we entered the knowledge economy, the landscape largely changed. It was no longer a question of who could get that engine running the fastest, but who knew the most about it. Knowledge became the new pillar for your market value as an employee. Unfortunately, your education was also immediately linked to this. If you had graduated as a Ph.D. student X, you would have had market value and could ask for a considerable amount per month from the start of your career.

Of course, this never works, because if you are good at absorbing information during your studies, this does not mean that you are also good at processing, analyzing, or sharing information. Nobody benefits from the fact that only you know something and nobody benefits from it.

Measuring what we know became the norm when evaluating employees:

To make matters worse, HR employees started to try to provide insight into the so-called "output" of an employee. By drawing up KPI's, the knowledge and skills of the employee in relation to the other employees could be measured, and a salary could be determined.

This, of course, took into account familiarization time, market conditions, working years, and such like. But unfortunately, all based on the old mechanical labor industry way of thinking.

In the US Navy Seals Army, they look at the value of a team member in a different way:

Simon Sinek explains it; we learn to understand how the US army looks at the value of a team member. He's worked a lot with the US Navy Seals. An elite force in which working together to achieve a result under sometimes very threatening circumstances is crucial. He researched how they choose their people who have to be the best of the best.

In the explanation he received, they drew a horizontal and vertical line with on the left the word performance and at the bottom the word trust. As they explained, the word performance was linked to the actions and outcomes during a military operation. The word trust was linked to your actions and outcome in your spare time with your team or friends.

The US Army’s person quoted: "I could trust you with my life, but can I trust you with my money and my wife?"

Nobody wants someone with minimal performance you can't trust. Preferably, everyone wants someone who performs to the maximum and can be trusted beyond bounds.

But what the Navy seals have learned is that someone who sits on the axis of maximum performance but minimal confidence is not ok. That's what they call disease and poison within the team.

If they have to choose, they prefer someone who scores very high on trust, but less on performance.

Using the wrong measuring instruments

What Simon Sinek painfully exposes here is that we have an inverse matrix in business. Thanks to all the effort made by HR employees, we can demonstrate what someone is doing with an infinite number of matrices and various KPIs in a seemingly simple way. But there are almost no matrices that reveal the level of trust and what someone contributes to the team.

Simon Sinek goes a step further by making the statement that the business community promotes the adoption and retention of toxic team members through their bonus system and hiring policy. We reward performance without looking at how someone within the team operates as a human being and what that brings in.

People who only perform well or perform above average are very easy to find. There are also a lot of them. Just step into a team and ask who the devil within the team is... Everyone will give you the same answer. The same goes for when you ask who will always be there for you and also when things get difficult.

These last-mentioned people who are always there for you are the naturally born leaders who create an environment in which everyone can learn, flourish, and excel. An environment in which everyone can grow and make mistakes. They may not be the people who show maximum performance, but they are invaluable to the company that wants to continue to exist in the longer term.

Select the right people and invest in their skills

If you look first at who people are when hiring, you create and maintain a culture in which people can develop and flourish. You can learn almost all the skills you need. Remember that unlearning to be a devil is much more difficult.

By selecting the right person when hiring and investing in their skills, you develop a united and invincible team. A team that will outperform the performance of the performance-only individual.