Rethinking Performance / Management

Tech companies have been under a lot of pressure in the past year. Under the banner of “doing more with less” (read: create more value with less people), companies like Google, Meta, Microsoft have been seeking ways to significantly increase productivity and performance of their workforce.

These companies face an important challenge: How to raise the performance bar without eroding the relationships of trust, empowerment, and caring they've diligently nurtured with their employees?

Most companies raise the performance bar through top-down pressure and careful incentives (e.g., by tweaking rewards). The unfortunate assumption behind this approach is that performance can only be improved through external manipulation.

Instead, we need to focus on cultivating a business culture where people raise the performance bar for themselves. This is because high performance cultures like those found at Amazon and Netflix have clearly demonstrated that employees are quite capable of actively driving growth for themselves and their companies.

To foster self-determination with regard to performance, we have to go back to “first principles”. What is it that really motivates people to rise to challenges that exceed their existing capabilities and experience? How do they come to take responsibility for growing their own capacity to achieve peak performance?

Neuroscience, wisdom traditions, and employee surveys all tell us that people naturally yearn to learn, grow, and make meaningful contributions. In my own work, I’ve witnessed that when people connect their aspirations to a worthy and important collective purpose, they become inherently motivated to grow—from their own agency. What most corporate environments fail to do is provide the conditions within which these inner yearnings and motivations can be aligned with the company’s strategic imperatives.

The way a company creates these conditions is by:

1.????? Establishing a developmental process and infrastructure that awakens and nourishes the inherent drive to grow and contribute in every employee.

2.????? Providing a framework, usually in the form of clear and compelling business strategy, that gives this creative and expansive energy a focused direction and coherence.

As employees engage at this deeper level, major improvements in performance show up naturally.