“Red Light-Green-Light”
In business, sports, or even car racing, performance is often focused on “more” of something. More productivity, more efficiency, more wins, more speed, more downforce. Then again, sometimes “less” of something does pop up now and again. Things like less swing count in a golf game, less drag on a race car, less accidents on a job site, less turbulence on your flight. “More” and “less” live in a bit of contention, somewhat binary, and they can find themselves in opposition. Typically, you want one or the other depending on the specific context.
These are very helpful concepts but sometimes when we consider the performance of people, and the ways in which people serve as the actual engine of organizations, we can fall into a people performance thinking trap. People are not as binary as we think they are and that can lead to “people work”, like leading and managing talent, becoming very messy.
A popular dichotomy in business, life, love, and war is the framework of “zero-sum” thinking. This means that there is always a “winner” and a “loser”. This works well for the team playing in a championship game or an Olympic competitor swimming the 1500 Freestyle. These are competitions designed to reward first place, and maybe second and third place, but not last place. You make that second date or sometimes you don’t. You win the battle that helps win a war. These variations are all about control and execution with a finite outcome that goes one way or the other. This practice often becomes an anti-pattern to collaboration, effective communication, and ironically, the kind of actual productivity that teams and organizations want and need.
I want to offer another perspective on a performance mindset for consideration when it comes to leading, managing, and especially developing people. How do we architect the success of people, teams, and the cumulative benefits to entire organizations? Most organization face real challenges each year during performance reviews because they typically target raking and classifying people for compensation and bonus distributions. A common and widely accepted practice but experience and research highlight that this process has little impact on developmental and professional success. You are either ranked “Ok” or “Not OK” with some falling on the fence of “OK Enough”. This is great for tagging people with labels but does not offer any leverage toward growth other than indicating a “red light” or “green light” to do less of a thing or do more of a thing. I’ve never seen a leader hold a mentoring or coaching conversation on how to turn red lights into green lights.
Performance rankings are lagging indicators pointing backwards. They tell you more about a manager’s subjective, observational, historical experience, and perception of value and much less about actual developmental potential, movement, or drive role growth looking forward. We frequently reward talent based on “the more” of something or “the less” of something else. It may be an unintended consequence, but we put people in competition for limited resources. This makes most performance reviews a competition fostering event not a competency and growth fostering event.
In people development terms, performance is not about "winning" or “losing” in a competition. People performance is more authentically about becoming better and improving in terms of personal and professional growth, development, opportunity realization, and value contribution. Performance is not a zero-sum game. Performance should be about amplifying existing strengths and making great use of them in new and impactful ways.
Agency is a priority over efficiency. Meaningful impact is a priority over productivity. Performance is the outcome of a dedicated focus on BEING more, not simply doing more. A performance approach free of the common action bias will become the oxygen for a people-first performance architecture. It will enable the release of maximized talent impact that likely falls outside the bell curve of averages and norms. Becoming better is a different definition of success that is a fundamental requirement for the future development and growth of individuals, teams, and organizations.