When does high performing become highly damaging?

When does high performing become highly damaging?

I’ve spent the last 15 years in recruitment, working with companies across many sectors helping them find the best sales and marketing talent, and in the last few years, I have seen the topic of high performance talked about more than ever before. A growing number of tech companies are consumed by the concept of high performance, and people clamour to join these companies but do they really expect what they get?

Now, of course, high performance is super important and a fascinating subject, just ask Jake Humphreys and Damian Hughes, and if you can, then read their book and listen to the podcast, they’re excellent. What concerns me is the other side of high performance, the side that people don’t talk about, what are the side effects of striving to create this culture in a business and how damaging are they?

In the last 3 – 4 years I have spoken to more and more people working in environments which from an external perspective are held up as being paragons of high performance, but when you dig into it many of these people are leaving because of all the negative aspects that a high-performance environment brings. In a world where mental health is rightly talked about and valued so highly, it is concerning to hear that the demands placed on individuals and teams are leaving some with seriously damaging side effects and that worse still nobody is talking about it.

Now for the naysayers, there will be the talk of the snowflake generation, of Gen Z not having the resilience of their previous generations but resilience isn’t about doing the same thing again and again without learning from your mistakes, it’s doing the exact opposite to this, learning from the mistakes and doing the same thing again but having learnt how to do it better. There will be references to environments such as investment banking, corporate law etc whose grad programs have long had reputations for brutality and spitting those out who can’t “hack it”, but we know about these environments, they’re talked about and written about lots.

The article below references this exact point

https://www.ft.com/content/2f5d2587-d9a7-4cd5-ac84-e36d75b13a24 check out this quote “One senior banker noted that other industries, such as technology and private equity, now offer graduates similar salaries but with a better lifestyle.”

To summarise the point of this post, isn’t it interesting that tech is being viewed as a place where people can achieve the same levels of success and wealth as other more historical sectors but that they get all of this whilst also having a wonderful and balanced lifestyle?

From what I hear this just isn’t the case, and people need to be talking about it more.