Perhaps a customer service associate started making mistakes.
Mayhaps a project that seemed like it was a winner suddenly tanked.
Perchance a government department that consistently hit its KPIs suddenly started missing them.
Possibly a construction site that was on track suddenly started falling behind schedule.
Presumably a real estate project that looked like a sure success suddenly stopped attracting buyers.
What’s the first question that pops into most organizations’ minds at that very instant?
“What’s wrong with the employee?!”
It can be a myriad of matters, ranging from motivation, discipline, lack of care, or just a rough attitude. It’s an easy question to ask. When things aren’t going well, after all, our first inclination is to examine the person at the center of the work. It feels equally easy to answer, too. Unfortunately, it’s often the wrong question to ask. In our last piece, we examined the oldest myth in performance management – the one about great performers simply being born with more talent. While talent plays a role, it’s not the full picture. You can develop skills, acquire knowledge, improve abilities, and gain experience nowadays more than ever before in the history of humanity. So, if performance isn’t just about raw talent, though, what is it about? The answer is a bit more intricate and poses several interesting questions, more than many people like to admit, because often, questions don’t give answers, but open up more of the same. Performance isn’t created in a vacuum. It’s not the sum total of how smart, hard-working, or driven someone is. Performance is moreso the result of dozens of forces (seen and unseen) acting upon a person on a daily basis. This has been repeated thousands of times, but it’s valuable to look at it from different angles.
For example, think about growing a plant. If a plant isn’t growing well, we don’t assume it’s a “bad plant,” with a “bad attitude” or a “lack of drive.” We examine everything that has to do with the plant: the soil, sunlight, water intake, temperature exposure, and whether anything is getting in its way. However, when an employee isn’t performing well, we tend to examine the person first. Sometimes that’s appropriate; that much is true. Other times, more often than not, the environment has already created the conditions for poor performance, and this is the myth that we aim to bust in this article: employee performance isn’t primarily determined by attitude. All of the internal elements matter: attitude, effort, accountability, and resilience. Yet, in addition to all these, we also have external elements: bosses, peers, organizational systems, cultures, and outside influences. Understanding the role these external forces play doesn’t mean absolving employees of their responsibility, but rather explaining their performance in relation to all of them. Once we can explain performance by taking into account every layer that can sway it one way or another, we can finally do something about improving it.
Layer 1: The Individual – Capability Is Only the Starting Point
You can’t talk about employee performance without talking about the employee (duh). Each employee comes into a workplace with a unique set of knowledge, technical skills, experience, personality, motivation, and natural talents that undoubtedly play a role in how well they perform. To ignore that fact would be as foolish as saying talent doesn’t matter at all…which is where something breaks in a lot of organizations, and the collective thought bubble pops. If someone isn’t performing, the quick assumption becomes the person lacks something, and they need MORE of something else: more motivation, more discipline, more commitment, more resilience, more passion, more energy, more footwork, like the workout videos of old. Now the environment has become a weird gymnastics exercise of jumping through mental hoops to reason something that might be true, but may not, into a definitive state of truth. One of the most surprising findings from recent research on workplace wellbeing is how much of an employee’s performance is affected by things that their manager may never see. Research from Humankind found nearly 73% of employees felt personal stress was hurting their ability to focus, engage, be motivated, make good decisions, and perform well at their job. Whether it was finances, poor sleep, childcare duties, health concerns, or emotional burdens, these personal factors were quietly depleting the cognitive bandwidth individuals have to deploy at work. None of these struggles will ever show up on a performance review.
A manager doesn’t see the parent who spent the night up with a sick child.
A manager doesn’t see the employee who’s losing sleep over bills.
A manager doesn’t see the hours spent in transit to a job, taking care of aging parents, managing relationship drama, or coping with illness.
What a manager does see is work that’s slowing down, deadlines being missed, less enthusiasm, and lower productivity. By the time that these performance indicators appear, the underlying causes may have been developing for weeks or months.
This is not to say organizations should be tasked with fixing every one of a person’s personal challenges (that’s neither realistic nor appropriate), but it does mean that we must stop deluding ourselves into thinking that individuals somehow become different human beings the moment they enter our buildings. Employees don’t leave their lives at the door; they merely get better or worse at hiding them. Even if there’s nothing overtly going on in a person’s life, we fall into another trap when discussing performance. We often assume that if someone has enough talent, performance will automatically follow, but that’s not how real, everyday life functions. We’ve covered previously how Gallup has long pushed for the argument that while natural talent is a relatively stable proclivity, knowledge and skills can be acquired over time, rendering talent-only advantages null.
Thus, while hiring individuals with a high natural ability does increase your chances of having a top performer, it’s far from a guarantee. Likewise, a person with only average natural abilities may exceed expectations if they’re placed in the right role, have the right skills, and work within the right environment. The same principle is emphasized by management professor Morten Hansen in his research of thousands of professionals. Hansen discovered that how people work accounted for more of the difference in performance than almost anything else. While talent mattered, it was far from the single largest differentiator. High performers didn’t simply outwork the competition; often, they were outworking their competitors more strategically, since capability only sets potential; it doesn’t guarantee performance. Two people with very similar backgrounds and intellectual capabilities can perform in vastly different ways. If we’re only focusing on the person, those discrepancies can seem baffling, yet in truth they are being influenced by forces that we have yet to examine. This is because, after the person, perhaps the single biggest factor affecting performance is their manager.
Layer 2: The Manager – The Greatest Performance Multiplier or Subtracter
If you ask someone why they love working for their company, they’re likely to mention their team or their opportunity to learn & grow. If you ask someone why they left, you’ll notice that a very consistent answer emerges: “my manager.“
Oh, the age-old truism that people don’t leave companies, they leave managers. It’s not universally true, of course, but there’s a reason this saying endures. Managers are our window onto the company. They are responsible for our expectations, the feedback we receive, our access to opportunities, the obstacles we must overcome, and the emotional temperature of the place we work each day.
Two employees can be in the same company, earn the same salary, work with the same policies, have the same benefits, and yet have drastically different experiences because they have different managers.
Psychologist Amy Edmondson has devoted decades of research to identifying a critical ingredient of high-performing teams: psychological safety. In a nutshell, it’s the belief that people can be their genuine selves at work without fear of embarrassment or punishment, can take risks without fear of repercussion, and can challenge one another without damaging personal relationships.
Notice what psychological safety is not: it’s not a lowering of standards. It’s not about avoiding accountability. It’s not about making people comfortable all of the time. Instead, it is about enabling them to contribute without fear of appearing incompetent, even if it feels inherently risky. This is a crucial distinction, because fear changes our behaviour. When we’re afraid of appearing incompetent, we stop asking questions. When we’re afraid of being criticized, we stop pitching new ideas. Eventually, our performance begins to dip because fear has begun to eclipse curiosity.
In fact, a well-known Google study called Project Aristotle, which investigated the reason behind their consistently high-performing teams, came to a strikingly similar conclusion. After scrutinizing hundreds of teams, Google’s researchers found that the most important factor in success, more so than any other, was the degree to which teams were psychologically safe. The other factors (dependability, role clarity, meaning, and impact) were all secondary, built on the foundation of safety.
We invest considerable money and effort trying to find and hire exceptional individuals. Yet, very few of us invest the same resources in creating conditions that allow those individuals to actually achieve their exceptional potential. Moreover, psychological safety is just one factor. There are many others, such as recognition, constructive feedback, trust, autonomy, and role clarity, just to name a few.
Employees who have to second-guess priorities, wait days for simple approvals, or are terrified of making small errors spend the bulk of their mental energy protecting themselves rather than doing meaningful work. Good managers work hard to minimize that friction, while bad managers create it.
In short, the management of performance doesn’t just happen in annual performance reviews. It’s influenced every day by the culmination of dozens of seemingly small interactions between a manager and their reports. Eventually, those interactions ripple out beyond individual relationships and shape the team itself.
Layer 3: The Team – Why Great Individuals Can Still Become Average Teams
Consider five of the most exceptionally gifted individuals and gather them together in one room. Common sense would suggest this would inevitably result in an exceptional team. In reality, things get complicated.
We’ve all experienced teams that, while absolutely flush with talented, experienced professionals, somehow stumble from one deadline to the next. Their meetings become an exercise in repetition and good ideas fester in the far corners of their minds, never shared, never discussed. Elsewhere, teams comprised of average employees somehow manage to turn out exceptional results like high-speed conveyor belts.
When the environment that a tight-knit group builds together starts to shape their work experience, performance starts shifting from individual to collective. By the very nature of work in an organization, no team can avoid this, and every one nurtures its culture, willingly or unconsciously. Over time, everyone learns what gets rewarded, what gets ignored, and what gets punished. Most of these lessons don’t make their way into employee handbooks, but they often exert a far stronger influence on behaviour than any formal policies.
Every team has rules, but what’s more interesting is how many were never written down.
Maybe it quickly becomes apparent that it’s not worth disagreeing with the boss.
Perhaps people learn that asking for help is interpreted as a sign of weakness.
Possibly they notice the loudest voice in the room always wins the discussion, regardless of the actual quality of the ideas presented.
Mayhaps people learn that taking risks is celebrated only when they succeed, but punished harshly when they fail.
Perchance it becomes obvious that keeping your head down and avoiding difficult conversations is the safest way to get ahead.
None of this has to be codified in an internal policy. People simply observe it, adapt to it, and then, over time, pass it along to new team members. This is why culture can spread like wildfire. Almost nobody changes because someone announced new values at an all-hands meeting, but everyone changes when they watch how behaviour is rewarded or punished.
Psychologists call this social proof.
People look to those around them to signal how to behave, particularly in times of uncertainty. In workplace settings, that means employees often adopt the norms of their colleagues long before they consider their company’s stated policies.
If everyone in a team talks freely in meetings, then new team members are usually inclined to speak freely as well. If everyone in a team falls silent when something goes wrong, new team members learn that silence is golden.
Another invisible force comes in what researchers call emotional contagion.
Emotions spread, and that affects team performance. If you’ve ever worked in a team environment, you’ve undoubtedly seen it. A perpetually pessimistic person can single-handedly drain the energy of an entire department. Conversely, an optimistically positive and solution-oriented teammate can boost everyone’s motivation during challenging times.
Managers certainly affect the emotional climate of their teams, but the teammates amplify it day by day. A culture of trust or fear becomes a self-reinforcing loop. This leads into another point taken from Project Aristotle.
Google’s Project Aristotle identified dependability right after psychological safety in their findings.
Trusting your teammates goes beyond their ability to emotionally support you; it involves relying on their execution. Few things sink a team’s performance faster than unpredictability. When employees are unsure about whether their teammates will come through on their assignments, they start to contingency plan or hoard information just in case. Self-protection, rather than collaboration, becomes the default.
The reverse is also true: when employees are confident their teammates will come through, coordination is smoother, and meetings are more efficient as trust replaces excessive oversight.
This is perhaps the least understood ingredient in the recipe for high-performance teams: they don’t eliminate conflict – they eliminate unhealthy conflict.
High-performing teams do disagree. They do question assumptions, debate ideas, ask uncomfortable questions, and clash in their value systems. However, they do so in a way where disagreement isn’t a personal affront. Disagreement becomes a function of the problem-solving process.
That’s what psychologist Amy Edmondson found over and over again in her studies as well: teams that had a high level of psychological safety didn’t necessarily commit fewer errors than others; they actually reported more errors because they were way more willing to admit they had made a mistake. The result wasn’t decreased performance; it was faster learning.
Ironically, cultures that punish mistakes foster conditions where mistakes grow costly and become harder to fix. Hidden problems are invariably more dangerous than problems in plain sight.
As you might have noticed, by this point, a pattern is emerging.
So, what does all of this lead to?
Individuals matter. ✔️ Managers matter. ✔️ Teams matter. ✔️
Yet there is something bigger. They all exist within something larger – the organization.
Layer 4: The Organization – The Structures Behind the Results
Companies love to measure outcomes: sales, revenue, productivity, customer satisfaction, profit margins. What companies don’t really love to measure is the systems that drive those outcomes.
Systems
This is an issue because employees don’t operate in isolated moments; they operate within systems, and those are the quiet forces that make succeeding easy or painfully hard.
Think about how many performance issues are actually system issues hiding in plain sight:
An employee misses deadlines.
Is it poor time management?
Or was that employee’s priorities changed three times in a single week?
A project is dragging.
Is the team unmotivated?
Or does every single decision need to go through a four-department approval process?
Innovation has disappeared.
Are your people less creative?
Or have they learned that challenging the status quo is more risky than rewarding?
It’s all too easy to chalk performance problems up to individual accountability because individual behaviour is visible. Systems are much harder to see, but they often exert much more influence.
Management pioneer W. Edwards Deming famously asserted that 95% of organizational problems are systemic in origin. Accountability matters, yes, but he insisted that people cannot perform better than the systems they are asked to work within.
Just think about your local governmental bureaucracy.
It functions chiefly by rulesets. We need rules. Rules are good – they provide consistency, mitigate risk, offer direct A-to-B avenues for solutions, and enable scalability.
However, we reach a tipping point for every added approval, every unnecessary report, every meeting, every administrative layer, every conflicting process. When rules outweigh the necessity for which they exist, they begin creating friction. They shift focus away from delivering value and toward navigating the organization itself. Eventually, the process itself becomes the focus, not the work.
Role Clarity
Very few things sap performance faster than confusion around what’s expected.
Who’s making this decision?
What does successful work look like here?
Which of the two conflicting priorities should I tackle first?
When expectations are unclear, even talented employees will pause before acting for they fear doing the wrong thing. Studies have shown that clear roles correlate strongly with employee engagement, confidence, and overall performance. Role clarity frees employees to focus energy on solving problems instead of figuring out the answers.
Politics & Culture
Life is a series of politics at play, and organizations are part of daily life.
With that in mind, however, issues arise when politically motivated behaviour are more rewarded than productive behaviour.
If a promotion system reliably favors visibility over contribution
If challenging colleagues’ ideas is riskier than agreeing
If employees are incentivized to compete with one another instead of solving problems collaboratively
If protecting your own department is rewarded more than helping the organization as a whole
The organization trains people that success is a result of politics, not formal policy.
This leads to a distortion of culture.
Culture, much like politics and behaviour, is learned. Despite an army of mission statements, posters, core value initiatives, and well-wishing sticky notes, organizational culture isn’t created by what organizations say they are, but what they do.
Culture is built on what organizations repeatedly tolerate, reward, punish, or ignore. That’s why two companies can claim the exact same values, but have wildly different experiences for their employees. Organizational culture isn’t the motto on the wall; it’s what happens when no one’s watching. These hidden structures influence performance daily, often without managers’ awareness, since they are felt & lived, rather than examined in a performance sheet.
Yet, even organizations with excellent managers, healthy cultures, and efficient systems have one final, insurmountable challenge: people are, at heart, human beings who exist long after clocking out.
Layer 5: The World Outside Work – The Part Performance Reviews Never Measure
There is one last layer to performance, which organizations know conceptually, but often fail to account for realistically: life. It almost seems self-evident, yet, a pervasive, almost subconscious bias exists in the workplace that assumes employees somehow leave their personal lives at the door.
They didn’t – your employees didn’t stop being parents the moment they logged onto Microsoft Teams. They didn’t stop worrying about a sick loved one just because it was Monday morning. Financial worries don’t cease at 9 AM. Anxiety, grief, burnout, sleep deprivation, relationship troubles, and the many other stresses of being human don’t simply fade away as business hours commence.
The point is that people don’t perform in a vacuum; they perform as people. Recent research from places like the Harvard Business Review underscores the impact of external stresses. Studies have demonstrated a direct link between personal stress and difficulties with focus, decision-making, motivation, and engagement.
By the time an employee’s performance visibly dips, mental energy needed for problem-solving, collaboration, and creative thinking may have already been diverted to managing these personal issues for weeks or months. Of course, this doesn’t mean employers need to become therapists or feel personally responsible for their employees’ personal problems. Boundaries are important, and so is recognizing that between 9 and 5, we don’t automatically morph into machines.
Organizations that understand this do a better job of not trying to manage people’s lives, and a much better job of not creating undue stress in the workplace.
Flexible work schedules.
Employee assistance programs.
Access to mental health resources.
Realistic workloads.
Predictable schedules.
Empathetic managers.
These aren’t magic cures or arcane sorceries. They simply remove a potential unnecessary source of pressure at work, and they are incredibly important for one specific reason: performance isn’t a flat line.
No one, not even the highest performer, is running at peak capacity every moment of every day for every year. People have seasons, and there are periods where they have tremendous energy, creativity, and focus. Then there are periods where life’s demands briefly require a greater portion of their attention.
High-performing organizations recognize the difference between a temporary dip in performance and a systemic problem. They don’t treat every deviation as a failure; they ask a much more helpful question: “What has changed?”
Sometimes the change is skills or motivation. Other times, it’s work overload. Lastly, on other occasions, it’s just life, and because each of these changes requires a different solution, differentiating is critical.
Treat every issue as an attitude problem, and you won’t fix very many things. Treat every issue as a systems problem, and you’ll neglect individual responsibility. Effective performance management sits somewhere in between. It acknowledges accountability for an employee’s work, while simultaneously recognizing that no work exists in a void because when you zoom out, you see that every layer impacts the other.
A talented employee will be limited by poor management.
A brilliant manager will be hampered by a dysfunctional system.
A great system will see reduced productivity when the people within it are struggling with overwhelming personal challenges.
No one element creates performance alone, rather it’s the interplay of an entire ecosystem that creates it.
Final Thoughts
Organizations have sought the silver bullet for performance for decades: hire better people, pay more, set big goals, measure everything, and reward the top performers.
All of those things count, but they’re only one part of the picture. Performance isn’t a function of talent alone, nor is it just a product of attitude or effort. Performance emerges from the interaction between an individual and their environment.
The individual
The manager
The team
The organization
The outside world
Every one of these levels either builds on an individual’s potential or subtly works to undermine it. This is why explaining poor performance simply as employee error is so incomplete. If a garden doesn’t grow, we don’t just blame the seeds. We look at the soil, the light, the water, the environment.
Organizations should be willing to ask the same questions not because employees shouldn’t be held accountable (they most certainly should be) but because blame without understanding never results in sustained change. The most effective leaders don’t ask, “Who caused this?” They ask, “What conditions created this result?”
Changing your perspective from who did it to what created it changes everything. It shifts performance management from blame to removal of obstacles and turns the manager from an evaluator to a coach. Moreover, it prompts organizations to build systems for employee success instead of relying on individual grit to overcome the odds, and most important of all, it reminds us that performance isn’t usually an individual effort but a collective one at that.
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Performance problems rarely have a single cause. Learn to examine the people, managers, teams, and systems behind the results. Build a more complete approach to performance management with Certified Employee Performance Management.
There’s one at every workplace. That employee everyone describes as a “natural.”
“They just have it,” “They’re born for this,” “They’ve always been a high performer.”
The John XBox or Jane Hollywood of a company. Somehow, they never falter nor waver. When someone is landing everything perfectly, it’s natural to focus on an inherent quality like talent, intelligence, discipline, a strong work ethic, or an ineffable X factor the rest of us apparently weren’t born with. Just as it’s natural to attribute struggle to a lack of those qualities, such as “They’re just not cut out for the job” or “They don’t have what it takes.”
It sounds like it makes sense. Oftentimes, too much sense, and in this case, that is right on the money, for this is one of the most prevalent myths of performance management.
Talent exists, undeniably, but performance alone seldom comes close to telling the full story. Consider this – have you ever seen an incredibly strong performer jump teams and inexplicably become mediocre? Or someone who struggled under a manager excel under a different one? To go even further, maybe an entire department magically improved after the head of the department changed, yet all of the people in that department were the same?
Those kinds of scenarios simply shouldn’t happen if performance were just an inherent personality trait. Yet they do, and they happen in almost every single company there is.
Why?
Well, because performance doesn’t travel with employees inside their briefcases. It’s a consequence of continuous interplay between an individual and the ecosystem in which they work, and in this, too, too many companies get it wrong.
The Dangerous Habit of Labeling People as “High Performers”
We love our labels. We stick them on people as if they’re goods on a shelf:
High performer.
Low performer.
Top talent.
Underachiever.
They’re very handy mental shortcuts which allow us to compartmentalize humans into well-defined categories. The difficulty is that humans aren’t quite as easy to define as rows on a spreadsheet. To say someone is a high performer is to implicitly attribute performance to their stable characteristics, akin to eye color. However, performance isn’t a static characteristic but a dynamic and conditional one.
A software engineer who is performing wonderfully in a dynamic startup may be flailing in a large, monolithic organization where there are six layers of approval for any change.
A world-class salesperson may be a dismal failure when asked to sell a product they don’t believe in.
A competent project manager can completely underperform in an environment where they are constantly being micromanaged.
A highly creative designer may seem average in an organization that values strict adherence to templates over original thinking.
An experienced leader can look surprisingly ineffective when placed in a team that lacks trust and psychological safety, making honest communication impossible.
Did all of these people suddenly lose their abilities just like that? Were their skills Thanos-snapped?
Absolutely not, but their environments definitely were, and herein lies an extremely expensive error on the part of organizations: they consistently seek to fix underperformance by replacing people rather than fixing the environment people work in. Now, this is not to say that any person can be made to perform well in any job. Certain jobs will require certain interests or native abilities; therefore, hiring the right person still matters. With that said, once a person has been hired well, we are still very much left with the task of setting up the right environment to let them succeed. Now, these aspects are two very different issues.
Talent Matters, But Not in the Way We Usually Think
Perhaps one of the more thought-provoking differences comes from Gallup’s work in talent. According to them, talent is “any relatively natural pattern of thinking, feeling, or behaving.” Skills and knowledge can be developed or trained.
Often, we bundle it all together into one word: “talent”
Someone is great at giving speeches? “They’re talented.”
Someone effortlessly builds strong relationships wherever they go? “People person.”
Yet that doesn’t seem to answer the actual questions that arise regarding talented people:
What % of that is actually talent?
What % is built through years of experience?
What % is deliberate practice?
What % is confidence through success and repetition?
What % is working in the right kind of environment to allow those things to flourish?
When you begin to ask those questions, the cause of high performance is far less simplistic and turns out to be a multi-faceted phenomenon. Talent clearly affects potential, can make some tasks seem easier, speeds learning, allows faster progress compared to peers, etc, but potential isn’t performance. Potential still requires a certain amount of opportunity, environment, instruction, and practice to consistently lead to excellent performance.
Words Shape the Way We Manage People
Here’s an interesting tidbit: a 2023 study published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes found that just labeling an attribute as “talent” rather than “skill” caused people to frame that attribute differently. Namely, when managers and HR personnel referred to a trait as talent, it seemed more fixed and less malleable. This made them more skeptical about whether an employee would improve over time and more prone to hire someone else than develop their existing employee.
Let us ponder these findings for a moment: if we believe top performance is largely something that you either have or you don’t, coaching feels futile, does it not? Training feels like an expense rather than an investment. Development feels like a nice-to-have, an optional extra. After all, why work with someone who “just doesn’t have it”?
This is little more than a small tweak to language, but a large tweak with significant effects on the management systems we build, and maybe that’s the problem with the “natural” performer story: not that it recognizes great performance, but that it silently suggests it cannot be built.
Employee Performance Is an Outcome, Not a Personality Trait
Here’s a thought experiment that feels relevant for our subject. Suppose two companies hire exactly the same employee: same background and education, same amount of experience, same personality profile, same motivation to succeed, and same range of abilities and aptitudes. For all intents and purposes, the employees feel the same. Six months later, one company believes he has leadership potential and expects a great deal more. The other company has already put him on a performance improvement plan.
So what has changed? What has led us to this particular conclusion? ➡️ The environment around the employee. ⬅️
This is not a hypothetical scenario either, since organizations experience it every day. Employees move to other companies, and suddenly they flounder, or flourish if the environment is right. A team that was failing under one leader suddenly soars under another. Organizations undergo reorganizations, and productivity simultaneously improves, or gets worse, when it’s pretty much the same set of people doing the same set of jobs. There would be no way to account for such phenomena if performance was wholly inherent in the individual. Once we recognize performance as a resulting variable, however, these phenomena become easily understandable. We are tempted to look for performance within the individual as though it were a stable attribute or personality characteristic. That’s not really how this works, since performance is more like the solution to an equation, while the individual is one element of the equation. An individual’s skills, knowledge, experience, and desire contribute an element that can be measured and can fluctuate or grow or shrink over time. The individual’s “potential” contributes an element, too, but the conditions within the environment contribute other elements.
Removing these external obstacles to performance, you can watch even ordinary people exceed all your expectations. Adding them, you can watch even outstanding individuals fail miserably. This is not to suggest that everyone can perform optimally in any role, nor that organizations are responsible for every failure of an individual’s performance. However, this mindset suggests that looking only at the individual rarely tells the full story. Unfortunately, that’s all many organizations bother with.
The Best Employees Don’t Just Work Hard: They Work in Better Conditions One of the most enduring myths about high-performing businesses is that they’re just full of talented people. Their hiring departments simply don’t miss. Somehow, they manage to fish the best possible recruits out of the entire hiring pool every single time, without fail.
Obviously, hiring is important; in many ways, it’s the most crucial decision a business can make. That’s where the similarities end, though, between all these companies.
Here’s a practical example: think of a Formula 1 racing team.
Even if they have the best driver in the world behind the wheel, that team isn’t winning races with a faulty engine, slow pit stop crew, worn-out tires, and an uncertain strategy. The fastest car alone won’t make an average driver a winner because performance arises from the interaction between the individual and the environment they work in.
Work in any company, SMEs or large corporations, is no different. An exceptional employee with uncertain goals, conflicting objectives, out-of-date processes, and frequent interruptions will not perform at their highest potential.
However, an employee who may not be as extraordinarily skilled could nonetheless excel when clarity of expectations, quick decisions, and mutual trust prevail. This also explains some of the misunderstandings surrounding high-performance teams: at first glance, these groups operate effortlessly; projects move quickly, people naturally collaborate, problems get sorted out before they snowball into full-blown crises. It is understandable, thus, to conclude that these teams are simply packed with more talented individuals than other groups.
In the majority of cases, this is simply not true. Rather, these groups have something else going for them: trust.
Information flows faster, errors are caught earlier, knowledge is shared, conflicts are resolved, and the team progresses quicker not due to rash behaviour, but rather because they spend less time questioning each other’s work.
Talent drives individual contributions, but trust determines the overall performance of those contributions as a team.
The Talent Trap: Why We Love Simple Explanations
Humans are great storytellers and even better simplifiers.
Does someone succeed? OH, they’re talented.
Does someone falter? Oh, they’re lazy.
Such bare-bones reasoning takes the pressure off of having to tackle more complex motives.
Yet simple stories don’t often describe how the workplace operates.
Meet Bill, an individual sales representative whose quarterly sales goals have started to consistently fall short. Now why is that? What is the real reason that Bill went from hero to zero?
Maybe it’s poor performance, but then again, the organization DID implement a new CRM and no one knows how to operate it.
Maybe it’s due to marketing changing their process for qualifying leads.
Maybe it’s a shift in pricing that made their products less competitive.
Maybe their sales territory was reconfigured, and that caused it.
Maybe they have a new manager.
Maybe the demands of their customers have changed.
Maybe it’s everything, everywhere, all at once.
Performance is often the outcome of numerous causes all working on each other simultaneously. Labeling a person as a good or bad employee can hardly ever capture a realistic, useful picture.
Research that Morten Hansen has conducted over several years examined the variables of individual employee performance and led to the same conclusions. He found that an individual’s performance has much more to do with how they perform – their habits, practices, and attitude toward the work – than with any other variable, like demographics, job tenure, or merely working more hours. This suggests performance is neither haphazard nor fixed; instead, performance is the result of countless decisions, many of which an organization is making all the time.
What Great Managers Understand That Others Don’t
One of the largest differentiating factors between average and high-performing managers is not necessarily the way they measure performance, but the way they conceptualize it. When an employee is performing poorly, average managers may jump to, “What’s wrong with this employee?” Great managers are likely to ask something else first: “What’s getting in the way of this employee performing well?”
One assumes that the problem lies in the employee, while the second assumes that there might be something to explore before concluding that. This “something else” could be capability, motivation, fit for the role, training, lack of clear expectations, the leader assigned to them, or any of a multitude of factors. It may be that someone is put in a position in which their talents rarely get a chance to make a difference. High-performing managers know that those other factors aren’t excuses; they are variables.
Ignoring them will never solve them.
In fact, if the purpose of performance management is indeed better performance (rather than simply better documentation), a manager would be wise to learn the impact of all the variables.
Stop Looking for Perfect Employees. Start Building Better Performance.
Organizations grow performance; they don’t just hire it. Talent, experience, and skill are all equally important for different facets of a job or task.
However, they all matter within a larger ecosystem. Brilliant hires can lose motivation just as easily as unexceptional people can rise to exceed all expectations. A great team working cohesively will often eclipse a collection of equally brilliant individual players. This situation has been witnessed time and time again, and proven through decades of research into organizational behaviour, yet somehow, organizations almost always resort to the same diagnosis when perceiving any shortfall in performance: “We need to hire better people.”
On the one hand, sometimes, this is true. There is no denying that on more than one occasion, you simply need a better person for that job. On the other hand, every now and then, the truly right person has been put in the wrong job, and no amount of mentoring or coaching can compensate for fundamental misalignment.
If hiring the “right people” becomes the standard operating procedure for addressing performance gaps, organizations risk skipping over a much more complex (and, truthfully, a much less convenient) question:
“Have we actually created an environment in which talented individuals have the chance to flourish?”
Performance Management Starts Long Before the Performance Review
One of the supreme ironies in the business world is that we approach performance management as a process that starts when an employee receives their annual performance appraisal. By then, the decision has already been made.
Performance management starts when you hire the employee, then continues through onboarding, expectations, communications, coaching, trust, leadership, learning, rewards, and all the microinteractions that never make it to the appraisal form. Simply put, the review doesn’t create performance; it just reports it, and that’s a crucial difference because it transforms performance management from a judgmental process into a growth one, and these are two almost completely different things.
One process asks, “How did you perform?” and the other asks, “What do we need to do to help you perform better?” The second question is almost always the more helpful one, because the primary purpose of any organization is to improve performance. Accountability is an essential part of a healthy ecosystem, but simply performing measurements in relation to it is not enough.
The companies that consistently outperform all others recognize this intuitively. They aren’t focused on identifying that mythical, perfect, Herculean employee; rather, they are focused on systems that can help average employees excel, and excellent employees stay excited.
The Biggest Myth Was Never About Talent
We began our foray into this article’s main topic with a counterintuitive notion:
“High performers are born, not made.“
As a collective, humanity has had the Maybelline “Maybe she’s born with it” mentality since we could pick ourselves up from the ground. There are, of course, natural strengths people bring that help them succeed in certain roles, and it would be a disservice to ignore those as much as it would be to discount the importance of talent altogether. Yet, in the grand scheme of things, talent is but a sliver of a larger system. Performance is an intersection of people and the context in which they perform. It depends on leadership, trust, learning opportunities, quality feedback, role clarity, and systems that clear a path versus those that silently raise obstacles.
It’s no surprise, then, that the term “high performer” is somewhat of a red herring. The label invites us to view performance as an identity instead of an output. As soon as we typecast somebody, we ask questions less about what led to that result and more about whether that person is indeed a high performer.
Was it a great insight?
Great leadership?
Decades of training?
An inspiring colleague?
A set of clear objectives?
All of these combined?
Organizations that continue to pose the question invariably get better; organizations that have stopped get better at chasing talent.
Final Thoughts
If performance isn’t simply a matter of talent, then the obvious question follows: what determines employee performance?
The leaders in our organizations? The company culture? Trust? Motivation? Training? Workload? Autonomy?
In reality, as we’ll discuss in the next installment of this series, many “unknown forces, often self-inflicted by the organizations that employees inhabit,” play an enormous role.
Identifying and understanding those forces is the initial stage for creating the conditions for superior performance, rather than something that occasionally appears for high performers. Once organizations stop asking “who are our highest performers,” they can then turn their attention to a more pressing and important question: “What kind of organization helps average people do excellent work?”
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The real estate industry pulsates with the rhythm of performance. From agents closing deals to property managers ensuring optimal occupancy, individual and team success directly translates to organizational growth. In this high-stakes environment, a well-implemented Performance Management System (PMS) emerges as the conductor, harmonizing individual efforts and driving the symphony toward desired outcomes.
A PMS is more than just a goal-setting exercise. It is a comprehensive framework designed to establish clear, measurable objectives, track progress against those objectives, and evaluate individual and team performance throughout the journey. It fosters a culture of accountability and continuous improvement, ensuring that all efforts are aligned with the organization’s broader strategic vision.
The symphony of benefits in real estate
The implementation of a PMS in real estate unlocks a multitude of benefits, allowing organizations to:
Empower individuals and teams: By setting SMART goals(specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) and providing regular feedback, the PMS empowers individuals and teams to strive for excellence.
Make data-driven decisions: The PMS serves as a reliable source of objective data on performance, allowing for informed decisions regarding resource allocation, marketing strategies, and talent development.
Drive client satisfaction: A PMS aligns individual performance with customer satisfaction metrics to deliver exceptional service and exceed client expectations.
Cultivate strong talent management: Identifying strengths and weaknesses through performance evaluations allows for targeted training and development opportunities, leading to a more skilled and motivated workforce.
Adapting PMS for diverse roles
While the core principles of a PMS remain consistent regardless of the industry, it is crucial to tailor the system to address the specific needs of diverse real estate roles.
Real Estate Agents:Some important indicators are # Listings closed, $ Average selling price, # Customer satisfaction score.
Property Managers:Crucial areas for evaluation include % Occupancy rate, $ Maintenance costs, % Tenant retention rate, and % Adherence to regulations.
Brokers: For overall portfolio performance, organizations can use % Return on Investment (ROI) and % Growth Rate. For team productivity, they can consider # Time spent per task completion, # Average time to close a transaction, % Tasks completed without errors, and % Lead conversion rate.
Appraisers:The key metrics to consider are % Accuracy of valuations, % Timely report delivery, % Client satisfaction.
Mortgage Loan Officers: Organizations can look into # Loan origination volume, % Loan approval rate, and % Customer satisfaction.
Leasing Agents:A few important evaluation points to consider are # Leases signed, % Lease renewal rate, and % Tenant satisfaction.
Facility Managers:The major points for measurement are # Maintenance response time, % Budget adherence, and % Tenant comfort level.
Building a sustainable performance culture
Implementing a successful PMS requires commitment and careful planning. Here are some key steps:
Define roles and responsibilities: Clearly outline expectations for each position within the organization, such as property managers focusing on tenant relations and leasing agents prioritizing property marketing strategies.
Develop clear and measurable goals: Ensure that goals are SMART and aligned with the organization’s strategic objectives, such as setting targets for property occupancy rates and rental income growth over specific time frames.
Choose the right tools and technology: Consider implementing dedicated software solutions to streamline the process, such as CRM systems tailored for real estate to manage client interactions and property databases efficiently.
Foster open communication: Provide regular feedback and encourage open communication to facilitate continuous improvement, such as conducting monthly team meetings to discuss performance metrics and address any challenges or successes in property management.
Adapt and evolve: Regularly review and update the PMS to ensure its relevance to evolving business needs and industry trends, such as incorporating new regulations or market demands into performance evaluation criteria and adjusting goal-setting accordingly. Moreover, companies can utilize real-time data analytics tools to monitor market trends and adjust strategies accordingly.
In conclusion, a PMS is not just a tool; it is the foundation for a thriving performance culture in the real estate industry. By aligning performance with desired outcomes, real estate companies can unlock their full potential and ensure long-term success in this dynamic and competitive landscape.
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About the Author
This article is written by Rami Al Tawil, the General Manager of Organizational Excellence at Al Saedan Real Estate Company. He holds a master’s degree in industrial engineering from Jordan University of Science and Technology. With 19 years of expertise spanning strategy planning, performance management, business improvement, and more, he excels in aligning employees with strategic visions for consistent performance improvement.
Nowadays, effective workforce management is essential to success in the corporate world. In a time of swift technological progress, changing demographic patterns, and changing workplace dynamics, companies prioritizing workforce management stand to benefit greatly. To achieve sustainable development and competitiveness, the strategies and best practices for workforce management are examined in this article, focusing on their significance. There are two main categories for the workforce management, and they are:
Strategic workforce planning: Workforce management that considers the organization’s long-term goals and objectives is known as strategic workforce management. It entails coordinating the workforce with the strategy of the organization, projecting future labor requirements, and creating talent pipelines to satisfy those requirements.
Forecasting the demand requires understanding the full strategy picture so that organizational goals are properly measured. At the same time, to ensure that strategic workforce planning is effective, it needs to be measured against key performance indicators.
Operational workforce planning: Operational workforce planning enables the organization to achieve short-term outcomes. This level of workforce planning involves keeping track of day-to-day operations, assigning people, and addressing ad-hoc changes.
Analyze the current workforce: This involves assessing the workforce’s current level of skill and capabilities as well as any gaps and the skills required to accomplish the organization’s long-term objectives.
Identify target needs: This includes a strategic analysis of the company, market forecasts, and industry trends. The organization can determine the precise skills and competencies needed to satisfy those objectives once it has a clear picture of what it will need in the future.
Develop strategies: Developing strategies involves filling up the gaps and preparing the workforce for the organization’s future demands. This entails creating targeted initiatives and programs. Programs for training and development, recruiting drives, and succession planning are a few examples of this.
Implement strategies: This entails implementing the identified techniques and assessing their effectiveness. To ensure the tactics are producing the intended effects, it is critical to regularly review and monitor them. The tactics can be modified as needed to increase their effectiveness. Workforce planning is an ongoing process that needs to be included into the organization’s larger operational management and business planning initiatives. Organizations can ensure they have the appropriate people with the right skills in the right location at the right time to fulfill their goals by proactively approaching workforce planning.
Monitor and evaluate: Workforce planning must include both monitoring and evaluation. Organizations may determine what is effective and what needs to be improved by tracking and assessing the workforce strategy’s effectiveness, efficiency, and appropriateness.
In a case study featured on AIHR addressing the strategic workforce challenges faced by ProRail Traffic Control, the main concern revolved around the imminent transformation of jobs for 700 Train Traffic Controllers and 150 operational planners due to increased automation. In response, the organization developed a 10-year vision named “Digital Vision” to digitize the traffic control process and accommodate projected capacity growth. To assess the workforce impact of these changes, the management initiated Strategic Workforce Planning (SWP).
Guided by principles such as business continuity, re-schooling, turnover, cost-effective growth, and technology integration, the SWP approach involved a data-driven analysis by a core team comprising HR and external consultancy experts. The quantitative model generated insights, including the anticipated retirement-driven employee departures, a natural turnover exceeding the reduction in required operators, and the feasibility of adjusting workstation numbers over time to align with technological advancements, ensuring operational continuity and job security. The study emphasizes the importance of aligning workforce planning with technological advancements to achieve long-term sustainability and adaptability.
Conclusion
Growth is ultimately fueled by a workforce that is aligned and can carry out the organization’s strategic goals. Organizations may create a culture of innovation and continuous development as well as react to the changing business environment by taking a proactive approach to workforce planning.
In essence, ensuring growth in an organization requires a workforce that is aligned with the appropriate skills and competencies. For organizations to achieve their objectives, strategic workforce planning ensures that the appropriate people with the right skills are in the right place at the right time. This encompassing method of managing the workforce fosters long-term success and flexibility in the dynamic organization setting.
An aligned workforce with the skills and capacities to carry out the organization’s strategic goals and objectives is a workforce that drives business growth.
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Nawaf Al Omari boasts over a decade of experience in optimizing teams and driving project management success. He excels at forecasting staffing needs, resource management, and fostering collaborations, with a 40% increase in stakeholder satisfaction. Prioritizing data-driven decision-making, he is adept at mitigating risks, tracking KPIs, and achieving cost reductions. Nawaf is strongly committed to delivering results and operational excellence.
Outstanding performance that can sustain positive results in the future is one of the key elements of organizational excellence.
Considering organizational excellence as what can drive organizations to a brighter future in terms of more profits, cost reduction, more customer satisfaction, referrals, better net promoter score; it is important to highlight the three pillars of the excellence model from the EFQM model 2020; direction, execution and results.
Having this in mind, the model stresses the need for methodological approach where we develop practices and processes, integrate them into the organization towards agile, effective, and efficient execution, in order to achieve better performance results internally (strategic and operational) and externally as perceptions from stakeholders (customers, citizens, and beneficiaries), which can sustain positively in the future.
The third criterion of the model, namely “Engaging Stakeholders,” focuses on ensuring continuous and positive engagement with all key stakeholders of the organization including employees/public servants. Employees are therefore seen as a key stakeholder, and having them as an integral part of any organizational excellence model emphasizes the need to shift the public sector’s focus from the traditional way of operations, in which public servants are only there to process the requests of citizens, try on their own to be energetic and efficient, awaiting their retirement, to a more competitive way, in which they compete with the private sector’s staff in terms of service excellence.
For this shift to happen, the key players are the employees, who will need to feel the need, accept and change towards a different mindset where they consider themselves not just as public servants but as drivers towards the public sector’s and country’s prosperity.
Leaders need to approve such a shift, align it with organizational purpose, direct it internally and externally, support it with the right values, allow change management to tackle all what needs to change step by step, and catalyze it with motivational culture.
A motivational culture can help public servants create ideas to improve, and innovate in the direction of efficiency and agility, so that they can get recognized internally and externally. Motivate them to be proud ambassadors for the country’s welfare. Motivate them so that they can understand and fully believe that they are the primary drivers of success.
Although motivation is one word, thousands of research papers have talked about it! So, let’s get back to the foundation of human beings without further complications: aren’t we survivors? Haven’t we gone through so many crises and changes in this world and made it safely in 2022? Accordingly, the desire to see what tomorrow holds for us and to consider what we may do now to get a greater return tomorrow is what drives us to get out of bed each morning in search of a better tomorrow.
Finally, I would like to refer to the very significant connection between motivation and sustainability. Motivation is one of the components of sustainability, which ensures that resources are preserved for current generations as well as all future ones.
Will sustainability direction, focus and efforts succeed? It will all depend on whether we, people, feel ourselves part of it and we are motivated enough to invest in it. How to feel this way and how to be motivated? Simply by ensuring our sense of belonging and our ability to effect the necessary change, both for our benefit and the benefit of all future generations.
