Stop Calling Them “Natural Performers”: The Biggest Myth in 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 is a shrewd negotiator? “Natural talent.”
- Someone consistently solves tough problems? “Gifted.”
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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:
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What % of that is actually talent?
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What % is built through years of experience?
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What % is deliberate practice?
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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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Move beyond labeling employees as high or low performers and learn how to build the conditions for better performance. Explore the systems and practices behind effective employee performance management with Certified Employee Performance Management.
