What Is Agile Strategy Execution? Definition, Framework, Principles, and Examples

Written by Len on October 19, 2026. Posted in Articles, Strategy

Agile strategy execution is an approach to implementing organizational strategy through flexible planning, timely decisions, regular performance reviews, cross-functional collaboration, and continuous improvement. It helps organizations respond to changes in their business environment while keeping day-to-day activities, projects, and resources connected to strategic objectives.

Traditional strategy plans often establish priorities and targets for a defined period. However, customer needs, market conditions, technology, regulations, and internal capabilities can change before that period ends. Agile strategy execution gives organizations a structured way to review new information, adjust implementation, and maintain focus on the results they need to achieve.

Agility does not mean changing strategic priorities whenever a new challenge appears. It means establishing clear objectives, monitoring progress, and making deliberate adjustments when evidence or circumstances justify them.

This guide covers:

• What agile strategy execution means and why it matters
• The difference between strategy planning and strategy execution
• The five stages of the strategy management framework
• The core principles of agile strategy execution
• How to align and manage strategic initiatives
• Performance measurement, reporting, and strategy review cycles
• The role of leadership, governance, communication, and technology
• Practical examples, common challenges, and frequently asked questions

What Is Agile Strategy Execution?

Agile strategy execution is the process of implementing strategic plans through an adaptable management system that supports timely decisions, access to relevant data, collaboration, and iterative improvement. It connects strategic objectives to organizational activities and allows implementation to be reviewed and adjusted as conditions change.

Strategy execution turns a strategic plan into coordinated action. It requires organizations to assign accountability, allocate resources, manage initiatives, monitor performance, and review whether their actions are producing the intended results.

The agile element introduces flexibility into this process. Instead of relying only on a fixed annual plan and periodic reviews, organizations establish regular opportunities to examine performance, respond to emerging issues, and revise actions when necessary.

The KPI Institute’s Certified Agile Strategy Execution Professional course materials describe strategy management as a process of formulating, implementing, monitoring, and adapting to changes. They distinguish strategy planning, which focuses on formulation, from strategy execution, which puts strategic plans into practice.

Why Does Agile Strategy Execution Matter?

A strategy may be clearly written and supported by ambitious objectives, yet implementation can still encounter obstacles. Teams may pursue conflicting priorities, initiatives may compete for resources, decisions may take too long, or performance information may arrive too late to support corrective action.

Agile strategy execution addresses these challenges through a structured process for translating strategy into coordinated work, monitoring results, and reviewing priorities.

It can help organizations:

• Respond to change. Review strategic assumptions and revise actions when external conditions or internal capabilities change.
• Improve decision speed. Establish clear decision rights so operational issues do not require unnecessary escalation.
• Align teams. Connect departmental plans and cross-functional activities to shared strategic objectives.
• Allocate resources deliberately. Review the strategic contribution of initiatives and adjust resource commitments when priorities change.
• Monitor performance. Use relevant indicators, scorecards, and dashboards to identify progress and emerging problems.
• Focus on outcomes. Evaluate whether projects and initiatives deliver their intended benefits, rather than measuring progress only through completed tasks.
• Support continuous improvement. Use regular reviews to identify lessons, address root causes, and improve subsequent actions.

Academic research provides evidence of a relationship between organizational agility and performance. A systematic literature review published in Management Review Quarterly examined 249 empirical studies on agility and organizational outcomes, covering research from 1998 to February 2024. The review found that 219 studies, or 87.9%, reported a positive relationship between different forms of agility and organizational outcomes. The authors also identified mixed and limited findings in some studies, which means results should be interpreted in context. Read the systematic literature review on the organizational impact of agility.

The evidence supports considering agility as part of organizational management, but it does not guarantee that adopting agile practices will produce the same results in every organization. Leadership, organizational culture, implementation quality, and the nature of the work remain important.

What Is the Difference Between Strategy Planning and Strategy Execution?

Strategy planning and strategy execution are connected, but they serve different purposes.

Strategy planning determines the strategic direction, objectives, priorities, and intended results. It considers the organization’s context, opportunities, threats, and capabilities before deciding what it should pursue.

Strategy execution translates those decisions into coordinated activities. It involves assigning responsibilities, allocating resources, managing initiatives, tracking performance, and addressing obstacles to implementation.

Agile strategy execution connects the two through regular feedback. Monitoring may reveal that an initiative is behind schedule, that a performance indicator is moving in the wrong direction, or that an assumption behind the strategy no longer holds. The organization can then decide whether to correct implementation, revise resource allocation, or reconsider the strategic direction itself.

Neither activity works well in isolation. Planning without execution leaves strategic intentions unrealized. Execution without a clear strategic direction can produce busy teams whose work does not contribute to the organization’s main priorities.

What Is the Strategy Management Framework for Agile Strategy Execution?

The KPI Institute course materials present a five-stage strategy management framework: Plan, Translate, Implement, Monitor, and Recalibrate. The stages connect strategic direction with operational delivery and regular review.

The framework is supported by cross-cutting capabilities such as change management, leadership, stakeholder engagement, communication, and technology.

1. Plan: Establish the Strategic Direction

The planning stage establishes what the organization intends to achieve and why. It includes idea generation, environmental analysis, strategic direction, performance measurement, and the identification of strategic initiatives.

Activities may include:

• Reviewing internal capabilities and external conditions
• Identifying opportunities, threats, and strategic challenges
• Defining strategic directions and objectives
• Establishing performance measures and target levels
• Identifying initiatives that support the strategic objectives

Example: A retail organization identifies customer retention as a strategic priority after reviewing customer feedback, sales patterns, and market conditions. It establishes a retention objective and identifies potential initiatives involving service quality, loyalty programs, and customer communication.

An agile approach does not eliminate planning. It recognizes that strategic assumptions may need to be reviewed as new evidence becomes available.

2. Translate: Connect Strategy to Organizational Work

The translation stage connects strategic objectives to the business units, departments, individuals, and cross-functional teams responsible for implementation.

This involves both vertical and horizontal alignment.

• Vertical alignment connects organizational objectives with departmental, team, and individual responsibilities.
• Horizontal alignment coordinates work between departments and teams whose contributions depend on one another.

Without alignment, departments may pursue targets that conflict with other priorities or launch initiatives without the support of the teams responsible for delivery.

Example: If customer retention is a strategic objective, the sales, customer service, marketing, and IT teams may each have responsibilities that contribute to the outcome. The teams agree on shared measures, clarify dependencies, and coordinate the activities needed to improve the customer experience.

3. Implement: Turn Strategic Priorities into Action

The implementation stage establishes the organizational conditions and management processes needed to deliver the strategy. The course framework includes organizational structure, resource allocation, the strategy execution system, and initiative management.

Key activities include:

• Assigning responsibility and decision rights
• Allocating budgets, people, and other resources
• Establishing governance and escalation processes
• Mapping the processes needed to achieve strategic objectives
• Managing strategic initiatives and dependencies
• Coordinating work across departments

A strategy execution system combines the tools, processes, and responsibilities needed to implement strategic objectives and projects. It should connect performance management with project management and clarify how strategic objectives are achieved through operational processes.

Example: The retail organization assigns an executive sponsor to the retention objective, appoints initiative owners, allocates resources, and defines how customer service, marketing, and IT will coordinate their work.

The focus should extend beyond whether project tasks are completed. Managers also need to examine whether the initiatives are producing the intended benefits.

4. Monitor: Measure Performance and Review Progress

The monitoring stage examines whether implementation is progressing as expected and whether the organization is moving toward its strategic objectives.

The course framework includes performance measurement, performance reporting, and operational performance review meetings.

Monitoring may involve:

• Reviewing key performance indicators (KPIs) against targets
• Examining scorecards and dashboards
• Checking initiative milestones and resource use
• Identifying performance gaps and emerging risks
• Investigating the causes of unexpected results
• Sharing relevant information with the people responsible for action

Different review meetings may serve different purposes. Operational teams may need frequent updates about immediate obstacles, while executives may need periodic reviews of strategic progress and major decisions.

Example: The retail organization reviews customer retention, repeat purchases, customer complaints, and initiative progress. If the retention indicator falls below the expected level, the team investigates the cause instead of assuming that completing planned activities will automatically produce the intended result.

5. Recalibrate: Adjust Strategy and Implementation

Recalibration involves reviewing evidence and deciding whether the organization should change its actions, resource allocation, initiatives, targets, or strategic direction.

It may be appropriate when:

• Performance consistently falls below expectations
• An initiative no longer contributes enough to the strategic objective
• A major assumption behind the plan changes
• New risks or opportunities emerge
• Resources need to be redirected
• Evidence suggests that the original approach is unlikely to achieve the intended result

Recalibration should follow a defined review process. A change should have a clear rationale, an accountable decision-maker, and a plan for communicating its implications.

Example: The retail organization finds that its loyalty program has increased customer registrations but has not improved repeat purchases. After reviewing customer behavior and feedback, the team changes the program’s design and tests the revised approach before expanding it.

The five stages form a continuous cycle. Monitoring provides information for recalibration, while lessons from recalibration feed into the next round of planning and implementation.

What Are the Core Principles of Agile Strategy Execution?

The course materials identify five principles of agile strategy execution: adaptability, quick decision-making, access to data, enhanced collaboration, and continuous improvement.

1. Adaptability

Adaptability is the ability to adjust plans and actions when circumstances change. An organization should be prepared to respond to emerging threats, opportunities, and new evidence without losing sight of its strategic objectives.

Adaptability does not mean that every new development requires a strategic change. The organization needs criteria for deciding which changes justify action and which do not.

Practical application: Define the conditions that trigger a strategy review, such as a material change in customer demand, a major regulatory development, or sustained underperformance against a strategic target.

2. Quick Decision-Making

Quick decision-making relies on clear governance, defined responsibilities, and appropriate employee autonomy. Teams should understand which decisions they can make independently and which require approval from a higher level.

Unclear decision rights can delay implementation even when the relevant information is already available.

Practical application: Establish decision boundaries for project teams, including budget limits, risk thresholds, and conditions that require escalation.

3. Access to Data

Timely access to relevant data allows teams to monitor performance, identify issues, and respond before problems become more difficult to address.

Access alone is insufficient. The information must be reliable, understandable, and relevant to the decisions being made.

Practical application: Provide teams with current performance dashboards, agreed KPI definitions, and access to the operational information needed to investigate performance gaps.

4. Enhanced Collaboration

Agile strategy execution requires coordination across functions, departments, and organizational levels. Cross-functional collaboration helps teams manage dependencies, share information, and address problems that cannot be resolved by one department alone.

Practical application: Hold regular cross-functional reviews for initiatives that depend on several departments. Record decisions, assign owners to actions, and revisit unresolved dependencies at the next review.

5. Continuous Improvement

Continuous improvement involves delivering work in manageable stages, examining results, and using lessons to improve subsequent efforts. It encourages teams to identify problems early rather than waiting until the end of a long implementation period.

Practical application: After each delivery cycle, review what was completed, what outcomes were observed, what obstacles arose, and what should change in the next cycle.

These principles reinforce one another. Adaptability is difficult without timely data, and quick decisions are harder to make without clear governance. Collaboration supports coordinated action, while continuous improvement gives the organization a regular way to learn from implementation.

How Does Agile Strategy Execution Manage Strategic Initiatives?

Strategic initiatives are projects, programs, or coordinated activities intended to contribute to strategic objectives. Initiative management is therefore a central part of strategy execution.

An organization may have many proposed initiatives, but its resources are limited. Agile strategy execution requires managers to review which initiatives deserve priority, how they depend on one another, and whether they are delivering the expected benefits.

Align Initiatives With Strategic Objectives

Each initiative should have a clear connection to one or more strategic objectives. Managers should be able to explain why the initiative matters and how its outcomes will contribute to the intended result.

An initiative that is completed on time may still have limited strategic impact if it does not address an important objective or produce the expected benefit.

Prioritize the Initiative Portfolio

Portfolio management helps organizations compare initiatives and make decisions about their relative priority. Relevant considerations may include strategic contribution, expected benefits, cost, resource requirements, risk, urgency, and dependencies.

The organization should review the portfolio when conditions change, rather than treating the original list of projects as permanently fixed.

Manage Dependencies and Resources

Initiatives often depend on the same employees, systems, budgets, or decisions. If these dependencies are not visible, one delayed initiative can affect several others.

Regular portfolio reviews can help managers identify resource conflicts, adjust sequencing, resolve cross-functional obstacles, and reconsider commitments.

Focus on Benefits Realization

Benefits realization examines whether an initiative produces the outcomes it was intended to deliver.

Project completion measures activities and outputs, such as whether a new system has been installed. Benefits measures examine the results that follow, such as reduced processing time, improved customer retention, or fewer operational errors.

Both types of measures matter, but they answer different questions.

Example: A company completes a customer relationship management system implementation. Completion confirms that the system was delivered. Benefits realization examines whether adoption has improved follow-up, shortened response times, or increased customer retention.

Agile strategy execution places particular emphasis on the relationship between initiatives and strategic outcomes. Managers need to review not only whether the work is progressing, but also whether it remains the right work to pursue.

How Does Performance Measurement Support Agile Strategy Execution?

Performance measurement provides the evidence needed to assess progress toward strategic objectives. It helps managers compare actual results with targets, identify performance gaps, and determine when further investigation or corrective action is needed.

Use KPIs to Track Strategic Objectives

A key performance indicator measures an aspect of performance that matters to an objective. Each KPI should have a clear definition, a measurement method, an owner, and an agreed reporting frequency.

For example, a customer retention objective may be monitored through the customer retention rate, repeat purchase rate, or customer churn rate. The choice depends on the objective and the decisions managers need to make.

A useful performance measurement system distinguishes between:

• Outcome indicators, which measure the result the organization wants to achieve.
• Output indicators, which measure products or services delivered through activities.
• Activity or progress measures, which track whether planned work is taking place.

Activity measures can help monitor implementation, but they should not replace measures of the results that the strategy is intended to produce.

Use Scorecards and Dashboards

Scorecards and dashboards organize performance information so managers can review the indicators relevant to their responsibilities.

A dashboard may display current results, targets, trends, and alerts. A scorecard may organize performance measures around strategic objectives or performance perspectives.

These tools are most useful when the information is current, the indicators are clearly defined, and users know what action to take when results differ from expectations.

Combine Quantitative and Situational Analysis

Quantitative analysis examines numerical data, such as KPI results, costs, completion rates, and trends. Situational analysis considers contextual factors that may help explain a result, including changes in customer behavior, operational constraints, stakeholder feedback, or new external conditions.

Both approaches can be necessary. A KPI may reveal that performance has declined, but numerical data alone may not fully explain why. Managers may need to examine operational processes, speak with relevant teams, or investigate changing conditions.

The goal is to move from identifying a performance gap to understanding its possible causes and deciding what to do next.

What Is an Agile Strategy Review Cycle?

An agile strategy review cycle is a recurring process for examining strategic progress, making decisions, and adjusting implementation. It connects performance reporting with action rather than treating reports as an end in themselves.

The appropriate frequency depends on the decision being reviewed. A project team may need weekly progress meetings, operational managers may review performance monthly, and executives may conduct quarterly strategy reviews. These are examples of possible cadences, not universal requirements.

A practical review cycle includes the following activities:

1. Prepare the evidence. Gather current performance results, initiative updates, risk information, and relevant changes in the business environment.
2. Compare results with expectations. Identify which objectives are progressing as planned and which show significant gaps.
3. Investigate important differences. Examine possible root causes rather than relying on assumptions or a single indicator.
4. Make decisions. Determine whether to continue, correct, reprioritize, pause, or stop an initiative.
5. Assign follow-up actions. Identify owners, deadlines, resources, and expected results.
6. Communicate the decisions. Share relevant changes with teams and stakeholders affected by the decisions.
7. Review the outcome. At the next meeting, assess whether the actions addressed the problem and whether further adjustments are needed.

The course materials also discuss single-, double-, and triple-loop learning as ways to think about organizational review and learning.

• Single-loop learning focuses on correcting an action or process to improve results while keeping the existing objective or underlying assumptions.
• Double-loop learning examines whether the policies, objectives, or assumptions behind an action should change.
• Triple-loop learning examines how the organization learns, makes decisions, and improves its overall approach to learning.

These concepts help distinguish between correcting implementation, reconsidering strategic assumptions, and improving the organization’s wider learning process.

What Capabilities Support Agile Strategy Execution?

Agile tools and review meetings are not enough on their own. Organizations also need leadership, governance, communication, stakeholder engagement, technology, and a culture that supports learning and adaptation.

Leadership and Governance

Leadership establishes strategic priorities, clarifies accountability, allocates resources, and resolves conflicts between competing objectives. Governance defines how decisions are made, who has authority, and when issues must be escalated.

A workable governance model provides control over important decisions without requiring senior approval for every operational adjustment.

Organizational Culture and Employee Autonomy

Teams need to understand strategic priorities and have appropriate authority to make decisions within their responsibilities. They also need an environment where people can raise concerns, discuss poor results, and report risks without unnecessary delay.

An organization that promotes agility in its procedures but discourages open communication may struggle to identify problems early.

Stakeholder Engagement and Communication

Strategy execution often affects employees, customers, partners, suppliers, and other stakeholders. Communication helps these groups understand changes, responsibilities, and expected outcomes.

Stakeholder engagement also provides information about practical implementation issues that may not be visible in performance dashboards alone.

Technology and Information Systems

Technology can support performance reporting, project management, collaboration, and access to current information. However, technology should support a coherent strategy execution system rather than become a separate collection of disconnected tools.

The organization needs consistent data definitions, clear reporting responsibilities, and systems that help teams coordinate their work.

Change Management

Change management is particularly important when strategic priorities, organizational structures, processes, or ways of working must change significantly.

Employees need to understand why a change is necessary, how it affects their responsibilities, and what support is available. Communication, training, stakeholder involvement, and regular feedback can help address implementation barriers.

Research published in Management Research Review examined strategy implementation in an automotive company through 39 semi-structured interviews. The study identified challenges involving meeting coordination, processes, integration, strategic mindset, communication, and information quality, and proposed an agile framework for strategy deployment. Its findings illustrate how strategy execution depends on more than project tools alone. Read How Can Strategy Implementation Become Agile?.

The study examined one company’s context, so its findings should not be treated as a universal checklist. It nevertheless highlights practical issues that organizations can examine when reviewing their own implementation processes.

What Are Examples of Agile Strategy Execution in Business?

The following examples are illustrative scenarios showing how the framework can be applied across different business functions.

In each case, agile strategy execution connects strategic objectives with operational work and regular review. The organization does not change course simply because results fluctuate. It examines the evidence, identifies the significance of the issue, and decides whether an adjustment is justified.

What Are Common Challenges in Agile Strategy Execution?

Organizations may adopt agile project practices yet struggle to apply them across strategy management. Common challenges include:

• Unclear strategic priorities. Teams cannot align their work when objectives are vague or competing priorities are unresolved.
• Poor alignment across departments. Teams optimize their own activities without considering dependencies or shared outcomes.
• Slow decision-making. Unclear decision rights and unnecessary approval steps delay implementation.
• Limited access to reliable data. Managers cannot respond effectively when performance information is incomplete, outdated, or difficult to interpret.
• Too many initiatives. The organization spreads resources across more projects than it can support.
• Focus on activity rather than outcomes. Teams report completed tasks without checking whether the intended benefits have been achieved.
• Irregular or ineffective reviews. Meetings produce reports but fail to result in decisions, assigned actions, or follow-up.
• Resistance to change. Employees may not understand the reason for new priorities or may lack the support needed to work differently.
• Agile tools without an agile mindset. Processes become more frequent or iterative, but leadership, governance, and culture continue to discourage adaptation.

These challenges require more than additional meetings or new software. Organizations need clear objectives, appropriate decision authority, reliable performance information, coordinated initiative management, and a review process that leads to action.

How Can Organizations Get Started With Agile Strategy Execution?

Organizations can begin by reviewing how strategy currently moves from planning into operational work. The following steps provide a practical starting point.

1. Review the existing strategy management process. Identify how objectives are translated into initiatives, how resources are allocated, and how performance is monitored.
2. Clarify strategic objectives and accountability. Confirm what the organization intends to achieve and who is responsible for each objective.
3. Review the initiative portfolio. Assess whether current initiatives support strategic priorities and whether resources are spread too thinly.
4. Establish relevant performance measures. Define KPIs, targets, owners, and reporting requirements.
5. Clarify decision rights. Determine which decisions teams can make independently and which require escalation.
6. Set a regular review cycle. Establish meetings and reporting frequencies suited to the decisions being made.
7. Introduce structured recalibration. Define how performance gaps, new risks, and changing conditions trigger a review of actions or priorities.
8. Build collaboration and learning into the process. Encourage cross-functional problem-solving and review whether agreed actions have produced the intended results.
9. Assess and improve the system. Use experience from implementation to refine governance, reporting, communication, and resource allocation.

Organizations do not need to transform every process at once. They can start with a strategically important objective, test the review process, and use the lessons to improve implementation elsewhere.

Frequently Asked Questions About Agile Strategy Execution

What is agile strategy execution?

Agile strategy execution is an approach to implementing organizational strategy through adaptability, timely decisions, access to data, cross-functional collaboration, and continuous improvement. It connects strategic objectives to operational work and supports regular reviews of performance and changing conditions.

What are the five stages of agile strategy execution?

The strategy management framework presented in The KPI Institute’s course materials includes five stages: Plan, Translate, Implement, Monitor, and Recalibrate. Together, these stages connect strategic planning with implementation, performance review, and adjustments based on evidence.

What are the five principles of agile strategy execution?

The five principles covered in the course materials are adaptability, quick decision-making, access to data, enhanced collaboration, and continuous improvement. They help organizations respond to change while maintaining coordination and focus on strategic objectives.

How is agile strategy execution different from traditional strategy execution?

Agile strategy execution places particular emphasis on regular feedback, timely decisions, cross-functional collaboration, and the ability to adjust actions when conditions change. It still relies on strategic objectives, governance, resource allocation, and performance measurement. The difference is how the organization uses feedback to review implementation and make adjustments.

Does agile strategy execution mean changing the strategy frequently?

No. Agility does not require constant changes to strategic priorities. It requires a structured way to determine when evidence or changing conditions justify an adjustment. Some situations call for changes to operational activities, while others may require a review of strategic assumptions or objectives.

What is the role of KPIs in agile strategy execution?

KPIs help organizations assess progress toward strategic objectives. They provide evidence for identifying performance gaps, reviewing trends, and deciding whether further investigation or corrective action is necessary. KPIs should be linked to objectives and supported by clear definitions and reporting responsibilities.

Why is initiative management important for agile strategy execution?

Initiative management helps organizations prioritize projects and activities according to their strategic contribution, resource requirements, risks, and expected benefits. It also helps managers coordinate dependencies and redirect resources when priorities or conditions change.

How often should an organization review its strategy?

There is no single review frequency suitable for every organization. Operational issues may require weekly meetings, performance reviews may take place monthly, and strategic reviews may occur quarterly. The frequency should reflect the speed of change, the importance of the decision, and the availability of reliable information.

Can agile strategy execution work outside the IT sector?

Yes. Its principles can be applied to strategic initiatives across functions such as operations, finance, human resources, customer service, and sales. The specific methods should fit the organization’s work, governance requirements, and operating context.

What capabilities are needed for successful agile strategy execution?

Key capabilities include strategic planning, initiative and portfolio management, performance measurement, data analysis, decision-making, communication, leadership, stakeholder engagement, and change management. An organizational culture that supports collaboration, accountability, and learning is also important.

Professionals seeking a structured approach to strategy implementation can explore The KPI Institute’s Certified Agile Strategy Execution Professional course presentation.

The course materials cover the strategy management framework, strategy execution prerequisites and systems, initiative management, performance measurement and reporting, adaptation to change, and the capabilities needed to support strategy execution.

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Editor’s Note: This guide draws on The KPI Institute’s Certified Agile Strategy Execution Professional course. The external academic references provide research context on organizational agility and strategy implementation.

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High Performance Does Not Mean Giving 100% All the Time

Written by Andrei Costea on October 9, 2026. Posted in Articles, Employee Performance, Organizational Performance

There’s a popular idea about high performance that sounds really good, but it’s actually completely wrong when you look closely: if you want to do your best, you have to do your best. 

Every day, every project, every deadline, push harder, stay focused, raise the bar, give 110%. It all sounds so good in theory, and it sounds so disciplined and high-performing and like the mantra of someone who is a cut above the rest. 

The rub is that nothing is designed to operate at 100% all day, every day. 

• Your PC overheats if you leave it at max power for too long
• The battery dies if you leave it draining
• Your muscles need rest and recovery time
• Your motivation needs a boost 

Even the most disciplined people have down days, where they aren’t at their best, and their focus and motivation just aren’t there. Yet, somehow, at work, we are often judged as if these aren’t down days. It is almost as if, because you produced your best yesterday, today is no excuse for being less than perfect. 

Because you got through that hectic week in May, this week is no excuse to dial things back, and if you’re especially good for a while, people, including yourself, start to expect it to be the norm. We start to expect peak performance, since everything was peak performance for a while. That’s where the rub starts to become really bothersome.

Peak Performance is a Peak, not a Permanent State

We tend to think about performance as a sliding scale. You’re doing 60%, or 80%, or 100%. The more you can push towards 100%, the better. 

However, real performance isn’t about getting to 100% and staying there. Some days you can push, sprint, and run at maximum capacity; other days, you need to hold steady, slow down, breathe for a bit, and take stock. It’s a matter of the ebb and flow of performance. 

The mistake is seeing peak performance as the maximum and assuming that maximum performance is sustainable. Maximum performance is a peak, just like the name suggests. That doesn’t mean it can’t last long. It just means it can’t last forever. 

For example, you may be able to work ten hours straight at an amazingly high level during a crisis, but that doesn’t mean that ten hours of work is now your new standard. You may be able to pull off an amazing presentation after a few nights of poor sleep, but that doesn’t mean sleep deprivation is somehow good for you. You may be able to handle weeks of non-stop deadlines, meetings, and interruptions, but that doesn’t mean your brain can function at peak capacity under those conditions. A peak is valuable, precisely because it’s a peak – it shows you where your ceiling, your upper limit is, when all the conditions are right to achieve it. If everything is a peak, nothing is.

If your company always expects you to have your best week, then eventually your best week will be the week that ruins everything for you. That’s where the myth that high performance comes from high pressure falls apart. 

Pressure can create urgency or generate focus. It can help push through challenges when things really matter. What it cannot be is a productivity strategy. It simply doesn’t make for a sustainable workplace. That’s why the research into the effects of work demands and performance is so interesting. Some demanding jobs are energizing when the demands feel meaningful and manageable, but other demands, particularly ones that are unnecessary or obstructive, lead to exhaustion. 

That means it’s not a matter of getting rid of all demanding situations, but more so a matter of realizing that more pressure will stop giving you returns at some point. You will eventually reach a point where, instead of pushing you forward, it’s holding you back. 

This leads to the problem companies have with high-performance employees: the difference between getting people to work hard and getting people to work beyond sustainable levels. They may look similar on paper, but they’re very different in practice.

Your Workload Is Not a Test of Your Discipline 

If performance doesn’t mean operating at 100% all the time, then the next question is obvious:

What is actually getting in the way of sustainable performance?

It is rarely a lack of discipline. It is actually the design of the work required of people.

We tend to measure workload in fairly simple terms: hours worked, deadlines met, tasks completed, targets achieved. That’s the visible part of the workload, but it’s only part of the picture. There is also the invisible workload of constantly deciding what deserves your attention:

• Which email needs an answer? 
• Which meeting matters? 
• Which project has suddenly become urgent? 
• Who needs a response? 
• What can wait? 
• What did you forget? 
• What happens if you don’t get to it today?

Additionally, we combine these two parts with the dreaded interruptions: a message arrives while you’re writing, a notification appears while you’re analyzing something, someone asks a “quick question” while you’re trying to solve a complicated problem.

You move from the presentation > email > slack > meeting > presentation.

Technically speaking, you have been working the entire time, but working is not the same as concentrating.

Being Busy Can Look Like Performance

One of the stranger things about modern work is how easy it is to confuse activity with progress.

• A full calendar looks productive
• A constantly active inbox looks productive
• Being available all day looks productive
• Answering immediately looks productive
• Working late looks productive

None of these things necessarily produce valuable work; in fact, they can make valuable work harder, since deep work requires continuity & focus. Complex problems need enough uninterrupted attention for the brain to build connections, test ideas, build the mental box in which it will work, and hold several pieces of information in mind at once. Every interruption adds another demand on that limited attention, pulling our focus out of the box.

This is why a day filled with meetings, messages, questions, inquiries, and small requests can leave you exhausted without giving you the satisfying feeling that you actually accomplished anything.

You weren’t doing nothing; you were just spending your energy on switching, and switching has a cost. Modern workers often carry several streams of cognitive and emotional work simultaneously while constantly toggling between them. The problem isn’t the number of tasks, but the mental energy required to change priorities and modes of thinking repeatedly.

This is an important difference to keep in mind, because if the problem is workload, the obvious solution is to become more efficient. However, if the problem is fragmented attention, efficiency will not solve it.

You can become extremely efficient at being interrupted. You will still be interrupted.

Your Brain Needs Some Space to Do Its Best Work

This is where deep work becomes more than another productivity trend. If you have important work that requires judgment, creativity, analysis, or sustained concentration, it needs protected space. This isn’t due to some weird ingrained ideas of “fragility”, but because the work itself demands it.

• A complicated problem cannot always be solved in the gaps between notifications
• A good strategy rarely appears because someone answered 47 emails before lunch
• Creative thinking doesn’t necessarily improve when your calendar is full of meetings or bombarded with additional tasks

Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is make yourself temporarily unavailable. That might mean different things to different people: 45 minutes with notifications turned off, a meeting-free morning, closing your inbox while you work on something important, or batching email instead of reacting to it every five minutes. 

The exact method matters less than the principle: you don’t have to be available for everyone, every time, all at once. 

There is an important detail to add here regarding expectations, because they matter, and every organization differs. Some are better at understanding what expectations are and how to forge them, and some aren’t.

• If an organization says it values deep work but rewards instant responses, deep work will lose.
• If leaders say people should disconnect but send messages at midnight, people will notice which instruction is real.
• If managers say priorities matter but continue adding new priorities without removing old ones, employees eventually learn that everything is urgent.
• If an organization says quality matters but consistently rewards whoever delivers fastest, people will learn to optimize for speed.
• If leaders say employees are trusted to manage their own workload but constantly monitor when, where, and how they work, autonomy quickly becomes another word for surveillance.

You cannot solve a structural problem with a motivational speech. Actions matter more than words.

When Everything Is Important, Nothing Is Prioritized

Another pressure mechanism hides in plain sight, and is tied to the aforementioned expectations: that people should somehow fit every new demand into the existing workload.

• A new client comes in.
  • A deadline moves forward.
    • Another meeting is added.
      • A new reporting requirement appears.
        • A project that was already important becomes even more important.

Now what happens to the old work? To the previous task that was the main task up until a moment ago?

Usually, nothing. It simply moves, but not laterally, vertically, or horizontally, but in a list. It gets placed into a list, and it stays there. This creates an impossible equation comprised of 3 variables: more priorities, the same amount of time, and an expectation that performance should remain unchanged.

Eventually, people compensate by extending the workday: they answer messages at night, work through lunch, catch up on weekends, or borrow energy from tomorrow to finish today’s workload.

Since the deadline gets met, the system concludes that the workload was manageable. This is one of the most dangerous feedback loops in high-performance environments, because successful overextension gets mistaken for sustainable capacity.

Example Scenario

Someone stays late and saves the project ➜ the organization learns that the project can be delivered.

Someone answers messages over the weekend and prevents a delay ➜ the organization learns that weekend availability works.

A high performer absorbs three people’s workload for a quarter ➜ the organization learns that one person can apparently handle it.

The same person keeps doing it because they are praised for being “reliable” ➜ exceptional effort becomes part of their reputation.

The next deadline arrives with the same unrealistic timeline ➜ instead of changing the timeline, everyone assumes they will find a way again.

They do ➜ the organization gets another successful outcome and receives even more evidence that the system is working.

The workload quietly becomes the new normal ➜ what was once exceptional is now simply expected.

Eventually, the person starts taking fewer breaks, working longer hours, and recovering less ➜ their available capacity shrinks.

Since they are still delivering ➜ nobody sees a problem.

Until the performance finally drops, and then the story can become: “What happened to them? They used to be so good.”

The individual may even reinforce the story themselves, internalizing it by thinking, “I can handle it.”

Perhaps they can. For now, at least. However, capacity isn’t infinite simply because someone has demonstrated exceptional capacity once.

This is how the vicious cycle reinforces itself: exceptional effort produces a successful outcome, the successful outcome becomes a new expectation, the new expectation requires more exceptional effort, and eventually the effort that once exceeded capacity becomes the baseline.

Sustainable Performance Requires Pacing

Think about almost any activity where performance matters over time. Take sports for example. Sports don’t work by asking an athlete to sprint at maximum speed from the beginning of the season to the end. Their training, recovery, crunch, and competitions all have cycles. Intensity changes according to the objective. So why should work be expected to look identical every day, too?

Some periods will require extraordinary effort for a major launch. There will be periods when a difficult problem demands intense concentration. There will be moments when the right thing really is to push. The problem comes when the exception becomes the operating model.

• A crisis becomes the normal workflow.
• A deadline becomes the permanent pace.
• The “temporary” late nights become less temporary and more like the expected late nights.
• The sprint becomes the marathon.
• Eventually, people stop recovering between efforts.

That is when pressure stops being useful and starts consuming the very capacity the organization needs. It is also why sustainable performance isn’t about finding a magical level of effort and holding it forever like a dragon’s hoard. It is about pacing effort intelligently, where some days will be stronger than others & some weeks will produce extraordinary output. In contrast, other periods will be quieter or more focused on maintenance, learning, and recovery.

When we witness this type of variation in the workload, it isn’t evidence that performance has disappeared; rather, it is evidence that performance is human. Organizations that understand this can start designing work differently:

• Protecting focus rather than glorifying availability
• Clarifying priorities rather than continually adding them
• Reducing unnecessary meetings and interruptions rather than expecting employees to “manage their time better“
• Creating genuine boundaries around communication
• Stop treating recovery as something employees earn after they have finished everything, because they will never finish everything

There will always be another email, another project, another target, another thing to improve. If rest only begins when the work is finished, rest never begins, and without recovery, the organization eventually starts spending tomorrow’s performance to pay for today’s output.

The Best Performers Know When to Push and When to Recover 

So, if sustainable performance isn’t about 100%, what is?

The answer isn’t as flashy as it seems, or as some gurus would have you believe. In fact, the people who sustain high performance across years are often not the ones who push relentlessly whatsoever.

They can concentrate intensely when the moment calls for it, disengage when concentration is a liability, balance intensely demanding work with more routine work, have a draining week without every week being draining, and, most importantly, know how to quit.

A lot of people are under the (misguided) impression that quitting is the easiest part.  As any high performer will tell you, quitting can sometimes be quite uncomfortable, to the point where you feel it physically, for what is otherwise a mental task.

If doing a good job is a part of your identity, having a less useful self feels like falling short. Yet quitting is not true renunciation, but recovery, and recovery isn’t the opposite of performance – it is its enabler.

There are studies about psychological detachment from work, and large-scale reviews show the benefits of switching off from work: better wellbeing and less exhaustion, linked to improved sleep and work performance. Therefore, recovery can come in without depriving you of performance. Conversely, it can add to your performance.

Recovery Has to Be Part of the Design

This is where organizations get it wrong, since they usually tell people to recover when the work is done.

“Take your holiday after the big project.”, “Rest after the deadline.”, “Switch off after being caught up.”, “Take a breather after we’re done here.”

The problem is work is never done, and there is always another project waiting. Consequently, recovery has to play second fiddle to work and has to be seen as an input rather than an output.

Sleep matters, breaks matter, time away from screens matters, a lunch that isn’t dedicated to answering messages matters, an evening where nobody expects a response from you matters, and even having enough space between demanding tasks for a reset before the next one matters. None of that requires turning the workplace into a wellness retreat, just a recognition that people can’t spend attention and energy endlessly without recharging them.

Even small interruptions in the cycle can help and are better than nothing: walks in between meetings, ten minutes of no notifications, a real lunch break, a protected block for focused work, an end to the working day. All of these things seem insignificant compared to a quarterly target, but performance is made up of small conditions that repeat over time.

The same holds for the other direction: small amounts of unmanaged pressure repeated every day ultimately add up to a very large amount of exhaustion.

Boundaries Are a Performance Tool

The boundaries between work and life are often seen as just about employee wellbeing. They are, make no mistake, but they are also about performance. If work follows you everywhere, your working day never really ends. You might not be at your desk, but part of your attention is expecting the next notification.

• Did the client reply?
• Did the manager send something?
• Is there another issue waiting?
• Should I check email?

All this background monitoring incurs a cost. This is especially taxing for remote and hybrid work, which can make it harder still to create psychological boundaries between work and everything else.

A simple transition ritual can help: shut the laptop, take a walk, change clothes, leave the workspace, and decide the day is over. The ritual itself is not important (it can be anything feasible for you); the separation is. Then, leaders compound this effect.

If the person at the top sends emails at midnight, people notice. If managers work through every holiday, people notice. If someone tells you “you don’t have to respond tonight” but then follows up ten minutes later asking why nobody has responded yet, people are very aware of it.

Culture isn’t what the handbook says; it’s what people learn they are actually expected to do:

• If you want people to recover, make it visible
• If you want boundaries, be them yourself
• If you want deep work, protect it
• If you want sustainable performance, stop rewarding people for secretly extracting energy from them

The Organization Has to Stop Spending Tomorrow’s Performance Today

This is ultimately about more than just the individual. An employee can turn off notifications, plan their day, take a walk, and use a focus block. All of that helps, but no productivity tool can compensate for an organization that continually demands more work than the people can handle.

• Too many priorities?
  • Someone needs to kill some priorities.
• Meetings eat the day?
  • Some meetings need to vanish.
• Is every request urgent?
  • The organization needs to learn what actually is urgent.
• Not enough people to do the work?
  • The organization needs to address the capacity gap instead of expecting existing employees to absorb it.

When a high performer is carrying the workload of three people, telling them to “manage their stress” or “deal with it” is outsourcing a management problem to the person living it. This is why sustainable performance has to become a work-design issue: leaders need to ask better questions.

It is fine for them to ask “How much did we get done?”, but they should also ask “What did it cost us to get it done? Did the team have time to think? Did quality suffer? Did people stop taking breaks? Did decision-making become rushed? Did employees lose patience with each other? Did everyone finish the quarter exhausted? Can we do this again?”

If the answer is no to such questions, what you achieved might have been impressive, but it wasn’t sustainable performance; it was extraction, much like how we’d rapidly deplete an ore mine by mining 24/7, and then wondering what happened when it dried out.

A team that achieved an extraordinary result and then spent the next three months recovering from it won’t have outperformed a team that delivers strong results repeatedly over time.

The first team might have had a higher peak, but the second has a higher baseline, and that wins out in time.

Final Thoughts

High performance doesn’t require relentless, unmitigated pressure; it doesn’t require maximum effort every day, or people to live permanently at their personal peak. That’s not how humans work. People simply don’t function optimally under such circumstances.

Performance has rhythms; there are peaks and troughs, intensely demanding days and days where recovery is needed, days where the brain is sharp and days where it is not, projects that require everything you have and ordinary days where a steady performance is what good performance looks like.

The goal isn’t to remove those fluctuations, but to work with them rather than pretending they don’t exist. That means realistic workloads, protecting attention, reducing unnecessary interruptions, creating space for deep work, setting expectations, making boundaries real, and recovering to enable future performance.

For leaders, it also means resisting a tempting but dangerous equation: more pressure equals more output. Sometimes it does, until it doesn’t. Until someone breaks and the pieces can no longer be put back together, which is how you can easily lose a star employee.

The organization that continually pushes its people towards maximum capacity might win impressive numbers for a while, but the costs will eventually appear elsewhere: poorer decisions, weaker relationships, lower creativity, disengagement, turnover, and exhaustion.

The smarter question isn’t “how do we get everyone to perform at 100%,” but “how do we create the conditions in which people can perform well, recover, and do it again tomorrow?“

A 100% effort might win a sprint, but business is rarely a sprint, and sustainable excellence doesn’t come from staying at the peak but knowing when to climb, when to push, when to slow down, and most importantly, when to recover so you can climb again.

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The Manager Effect: How Leadership Can Make or Break Team Performance

Written by Andrei Costea on October 8, 2026. Posted in Articles, Organisational performance

A certain type of employee seems to appear in every company. These are the people who never seem to meet deadlines, who always have to be pushed to get their work done, who make the same mistakes over and over again, who don’t seem to do much on their own, and who never seem to try very hard.

At some point, it seems, every manager has decided, “Well, this employee just isn’t performing,” and sometimes, they may well be right. This begs the question, though: How much of this poor performance was actually caused by the manager?

This has the potential to be a wildly uncomfortable question, since managers are, by definition, responsible for judging performance. They set standards, determine who is doing the best and worst jobs, decide who gets promoted and who gets fired. They evaluate and judge. They decide what’s acceptable and what isn’t.

Yet here’s the thing: management comes before performance.

Managers decide what’s important, what gets done and what doesn’t, what gets approved and what gets dismissed, what gets rewarded and what gets punished. Managers decide how much autonomy employees have, how much freedom they have, how much leeway is allowed, how quickly problems are solved, and how much employees understand what they’re supposed to be doing.

In short, managers don’t just evaluate performance; they have tremendous influence over it. They may be standing in the control room, but they’re also often the ones pushing all the buttons.

The Employee & Manager Slices of the Problem Pie

• A 2024 NBER study sought to identify the causal effect of managers on their teams’ performance. 

The paper’s authors experimented with repeated reallocations of managers, controlling for differences in the skill sets of the teams. The purpose of the experiment was to quantify the effect of a simple managerial change, and the results were astounding.

The study found that good managers improved their teams’ performance by approximately double the number of “good workers” would have. The paper uses the phrase “good manager” to denote someone who consistently drove better-than-expected results from their team. 

N.B.: The cited results do not mean managers are twice as productive as employees. Far from it – both the phrasing and the findings suggest the opposite.

The findings suggest that if you hire a good manager, you cannot simply lay off half your staff in favour of the manager and expect double the performance. Neither do they suggest that employees are fungible or that an outstanding manager would be able to extract twice the performance from any arbitrary set of subordinates.

What the study does suggest is that the people managing your team can affect your team’s performance by a surprisingly wide margin. It suggests that both your employees and your managers matter, and that the combination of the two matters even more.

• Another NBER study of transfers between stores in two large retail chains found that, given the consistency of management practices across the businesses, studying how individual managers affected the performance of their new teams gave a less distorted view of the contribution to productivity that a manager can reasonably be expected to provide.

Both these studies suggest not that employees are unimportant, but that “the team is underperforming” is a dangerously incomplete diagnosis. Your team may be underperforming because your employees lack the experience, skill, or commitment to do the job well. It may be that your employees are entirely appropriate for the task, but they are, in fact, being managed poorly – either at the level of individual contributors or individual executives. It may also be that your employees are being managed by an ineffective manager, an ineffective system, or a combination of the two.

Consider the following scenario: 

1. Your manager changed your team’s priorities on Monday. 
2. You spent all of Tuesday prioritizing the newly prioritized project. 
3. On Wednesday, an emergency cropped up, and you had to change priorities again. 
4. On Thursday, your manager asked you why the first project wasn’t getting done. 
5. On Friday, you found out the delivery date for the first project had slipped because of something that happened in another department. 

When you go into your performance review, your manager tells you that you need to be more organized, take more ownership, and all the usuals. Maybe you do need to be more organized, but have you considered that it may not be your responsibility to rearrange your entire workload when priorities change?

This is why management should not be considered an optional part of the performance system – because it is an integral part of the performance system. It has to be. Research on role ambiguity shows that when there is insufficient clarity about what’s expected of you, your performance tends to suffer. 

This does not mean that every underperforming employee is necessarily being managed badly. However, it does mean that we can no longer think of clarity of expectations as an employee competency. That kind of clarity is frequently the responsibility of managers, which, again, puts it squarely in the realm of managerial responsibility. Using this framework to understand performance issues can help you recognize some “bad” behaviours as the result of years of poor management.

• An employee who is afraid to make decisions may have learned that decisions are rarely wrong. 
• An employee who asks permission constantly may have learned that acting without permission makes them look foolish. 
• An employee who is disengaged and cynical may have learned that no matter how hard they try, nothing changes. 
• An employee who misses priorities may have been given too many changing priorities. 
• An employee who always works right up to a deadline may have learned that nothing gets done before one. 
• An employee who can’t do anything without their manager may, in fact, have been taught that by their manager.

This brings us to one of the most damaging management practices: managerial interference.

When managers interfere with the day-to-day responsibilities of their direct reports, they train those direct reports to deal with everything at a level two steps below their actual level of responsibility. It doesn’t matter whether they are “helping,” “teaching,” “managing,” or “holding accountable.” Interference creates inconsistency, confusion, and the impression that the manager can’t handle anything without stepping in. Employees managed this way may always present problems at the executive level. 

• They may be unable to own problems or solutions. 
• They may always need their manager’s help or approval. 
• They may fear making mistakes without knowing their manager’s input. 
• They may have become unreasonably rigid in their approach to their responsibilities.

Micromanagement Can Manufacture the Dependence It Complains About

Micromanagement is typically defined as a practice that is detrimental to employees because it limits their freedom of action. This is partially true, but it is also a consequence of a much larger effect. Micromanagement can actually cause behavioural changes in people.

🔄 For example, suppose that you have hired a competent person to do a competent job. They make a decision you wouldn’t have made. You tell them they’re wrong. The next time they’re faced with a similar decision, they ask you what to do. You tell them, they do it, and you correct them again. The next time they’re faced with a similar decision, they ask you what to do. You tell them, they do it, and you correct them again. The next time they’re faced with a similar decision, they ask you what to do. You tell them, they do it, and you correct them again. 🔄

See where this loop is going? Eventually, they stop making decisions and simply ask you for instructions. You give them more detailed instructions. They ask you for more detailed instructions. You decide that they simply don’t have the initiative to do their job, and you start watching them more carefully.

🎉 Congratulations! You’ve just created the employee you were originally complaining about! 🎉

For those scoffing at this example, this is not just theory. A meta-study of 72 studies, 83 samples, and more than 32000 people found that employees who perceived their leaders as acting in an autonomy-supportive manner had more positive work outcomes. This includes positive associations with work performance, engagement and proactive work behaviours, and negative associations with turnover intentions.

Autonomy-supportive leadership is not being completely uninvolved. It provides freedom in action and decision-making, takes their input into account, and encourages self-initiative without hindering them, which is an extremely important difference.

Good management is not telling people to do whatever they want, or to do exactly what you would do; rather, it is telling them what you want them to accomplish and letting them do it, while intervening when they cannot accomplish their goals without assistance and helping them when they can. This results in much more competent employees, who are much less reliant on their managers.

This is especially important because a manager’s job is not to process every single decision that their employees make. If you have to answer every question they have, you’re not managing effectively, and you’ll likely end up with a queue of people waiting to hear from you, rather than competent employees who can handle most things on their own.

The irony is that managers often fall into this trap precisely because they want to be effective. They feel like they are doing their job by answering every question, but they are actually defeating their purpose.

Managers are accountable for their team’s performance, so it can be tempting to take responsibility for everything they do, but it is far more effective to let them handle things on their own and intervene only when absolutely necessary.

This is the difference between a manager who is simply a bottleneck for decision-making, and a manager who actually manages. 

This is also where the myth of the manager as a performance evaluator falls apart: a manager does not simply determine whether someone can perform; they determine how much opportunity they have to perform.

That is not to say that a manager is not accountable for performance; it means that they have much less opportunity to affect performance, and much more opportunity to create poor performance by failing to provide the resources, freedom, and feedback necessary to actually perform.

If someone is consistently underperforming, even when given the resources, freedom, opportunities, and feedback they need, then they are likely to be a poor performer, but if they are not, then they may not be the problem, and it may be the system that is failing them.

Right now, ten thousand manager voices cried out in agony, objecting virulently because they are often expected to be the ones who determine whether or not someone can perform, and therefore they feel like they need to control everything in order to make that determination.

The Meaning of Management

A manager should not try to determine whether someone can perform; they should create an environment in which they can perform, then evaluate whether they are performing, rather than trying to determine whether they can perform.

This is also the point where many managers will start to see the flaws in their own management practices. The manager who is constantly changing priorities, rewarding the wrong people, avoiding difficult conversations, and putting out fires is not doing so out of malice or incompetence, but rather out of a desire to manage effectively.

They are trying to create an environment in which their employees can perform, but they are failing to do so; as a result, they constantly have to intervene to prevent employees from failing. Such a method is not an effective way to manage, and it is a sign that the manager is not administering matters effectively.

It is important to remember that management is a process, and that there are many different ways to achieve its goals. Some managers are better at it than others, and some managers are simply better at certain aspects of it than others.

However, there are some fundamental principles that all managers should follow, and one of them is providing their employees with the freedom of action and decision-making, taking their input into account, and encouraging self-initiative, while not hindering them.

The Behaviours You Reward Become the Behaviours You Get

One of the easiest ways for a manager to destroy performance is to reward the wrong thing, and this is rarely because they are evil. They are usually just rewarding the most obvious things.

• Someone stayed up late to finish a project – that’s dedication. 10 points for Gryffindor! 
• Someone dropped everything at 7 pm to help out with an urgent customer problem – that’s heroism. 20 points for Gryffindor!
• Someone responds to my Slack messages within 30 seconds – they are committed. 30 points for Gryffindor!
• Someone worked over the weekend to meet a deadline – let’s give them a round of applause. 40 points for Gryffindor!

Meanwhile, someone quietly fixed the processes that would have stopped the weekend crisis from happening in the first place, but they have gone unnoticed. No points for Ravenclaw!

Alas, that is how companies end up rewarding people for making fires rather than putting them out. 

One of the most interesting things about organizational performance is that the market value of various workplace behaviours often bears little relation to what the company says it values. 

A company can say that it values planning, quality and sustainable performance, but if the people being promoted are the ones who work the longest hours and save the day at the last minute, the rest of the company will quickly learn that last-minute heroics are the most important thing. They are not dim in any way whatsoever; they simply observe their colleagues’ behaviours and learn from them.

A manager’s actions are effectively a set of behavioural coaching cues for the whole team. 

• If you reward people for being available to your team at all times, you can expect availability to become a key performance indicator.
• If you reward speed of response regardless of errors, you’ll get speed of response.
• If you reward people for taking all decisions up the chain of command, you’ll get a company that cannot make decisions.
• If you reward people for preventing problems, you’ll get people who prevent problems.
• If you reward people for being “a bit of a pain but getting things done”, you’ll get people who get things done but are “a bit of a pain”.

That is why recognition is such a powerful tool. Beyond making people feel good, it sends market-value signals to the team about what is and isn’t important.

Studies on management practices have found that goals, monitoring and feedback can have a major impact on productivity. In field experiments on airline captains, management practices such as performance monitoring, feedback, target-setting and prosocial incentives all led to significant improvements in targeted fuel-saving behaviours and, in some cases, increases in overall job satisfaction.

Now, this does not mean that managers should monitor everything. That would simply proliferate the very thing we want to see less of. What it does mean is that monitoring is part of the feedback loop. What you measure, discuss, and reward affects performance. So does what you allow to continue without correction, and most importantly, what you repeatedly rescue.

If a manager has a team that misses every deadline and responds to every problem by throwing the manager into the fray to “sort it out”, they should ask themselves what they have taught the team. They may believe they have taught the team to do better, but the team has actually learned that the manager will always rescue them when things go wrong. They learn to avoid responsibility and expect the manager to take over when things get tough. Meanwhile, the manager learns that the best way to deal with recurring problems is to rescue people rather than fix systems.

They have all been conditioned to act that way, without anyone intending to, and that is one of the fundamental problems with management.

Managers are powerful role models, and everything they do sends behavioural signals to the team. When it comes to busyness, managers don’t have to tell people to work long hours; they model it. 

• If they work 12-hour days, people will notice. 
• They will also notice if someone leaves at 5 pm every day and quietly works from home in the evenings.
• They will notice if someone is praised for working 80-hour weeks and taking no breaks.
• They will notice if working from home is seen as a perk and taking holidays is presented as selfish.

They will all learn different lessons about busyness and productivity, adjusting their actions and becoming incredibly busy without actually doing much useful work.

The difference between busyness and productivity is often invisible to the people involved. 

• Preventing problems before they occur rarely seems as important as putting out fires. 
• Processes and procedures are often seen as less exciting than dramatic actions. 
• Careful decision-making seems less impressive than “thinking on your feet”. 
• A team that learns to solve its own problems without constantly escalating them to the manager will make the manager feel less important.

It can make the manager feel redundant, which is why effective managers often feel their contributions are less valued by executives than they should be. They are busy people, making important decisions, solving problems, and rescuing the company from disasters, but those actions do not have the same impact on the bottom line as preventing those disasters from happening in the first place.

That is the real value of a good manager: they make the company less reliant on them, which makes the company more successful. It also makes the manager less valued by the people at the top.

Avoiding Problems Doesn’t Keep the Peace – It Changes the Team

There is a certain kind of management mistake that feels reasonable in the moment:

• There is a certain employee who doesn’t perform.
  • You think to yourself, “Well, I’ll give them a little time. Maybe they are just having a rough week. I’ll bring it up at their next review. It’s probably not worth creating a scene over.“

A year later, everyone except the person in charge understands that the employee isn’t performing, but no one has addressed it because, really…who has the time? 

This mistake is often called avoidance, but it can also be seen as a type of management decision. You’re deciding that this behavior is acceptable, and the rest of your team sees it. You should care because if they are not performing, it impacts the performance of others. It affects your own performance and your team’s culture.

A team’s culture is not defined by the individuals that make it up, but by the standards they share. People look around and think about what it means to be a good member of their team. What does it mean to miss a deadline, to be rude to a coworker, to be chronically underperforming, to do consistently incredible work?

Answers to these questions aren’t written anywhere, but they can be found in managers’ actions. If you tolerate one employee who routinely misses deadlines, conscientious employees will start to ask themselves why they are putting in extra effort. They might not think, “Oh, I’m so glad that [slacker] has more flexibility with their schedule,” but they might think, “Maybe I’m working too hard.” This is an example of a single performance issue affecting others’ performance.

Such instances are why it’s not that difficult actually to have a good conversation and why such conversations should be actively encouraged. A good manager does not have to enjoy difficult conversations, but they should be willing to have them. You don’t have to shame employees or turn every minor performance issue into a morality play, but you should be willing to address issues clearly and directly. You should hold people to standards, because they hold you to standards.

The research on manager-employee relationships also points to the importance of strong working relationships. In particular, a huge meta-analysis on Leader-Member Exchange Theory highlights the value of positive, supportive relationships between managers and employees. Trust, empowerment, and motivation all lead to positive behaviours like increased performance and citizenship behaviours.

This isn’t suggesting that managers should be best friends with their reports, but it does highlight the importance of working relationships. You can’t have trust without mutual respect and the feeling that each party is acting in good faith. That applies to both sides of the relationship. Employees have to trust that their manager will support them, but managers also have to trust that their employee will deliver. Neither side gets to demand loyalty or goodwill from the other. They have to earn it by showing up reliably and doing the right thing.

That’s why inconsistent standards from one employee to the next are so corrosive. 

• If you promise flexibility to one person because you like them, but deny the same flexibility to another employee who asked, you create distrust on your team. 

• If you hold one person to consistently lower standards than everyone else, you’re creating similar distrust. 

• If you tell people that the priorities are one thing, but you change them when it’s convenient for whoever is asking, you’re creating a toxic workplace. 

It’s easy to dismiss these issues as unfair, but they shouldn’t be dismissed as unimportant. They effectively erode the trust between manager and employee, and once that trust is gone, you can lose your ability to manage effectively.

Management has a responsibility to set standards. If you’re not enforcing standards, it becomes much harder to enforce standards later. It’s one reason why management is so much harder than employees think. 

You aren’t walking into a clean slate each morning. You are always working with an existing culture that you help shape, and that helps shape you. 

• You can make it easier or harder depending on the decisions you make. 
• You can make problems more visible or more hidden. 
• You can make employees self-thinking or dependent on you. 
• You can make excellent performance commonplace, or you can make extraordinary acts the norm. 

Then, after all is done, when you get caught in the middle of it all, you can think, “Why is my team underperforming?“

Who knows, maybe you’re right, but maybe you’re not. They might be underperforming, but it might stem from a source or reason where they are giving you honest feedback on your management system.

So, if you’re thinking about firing them, consider whether firing them would actually solve the problem.

Final Thoughts

Sometimes the issue really is the person. Some people are just slovenly, consistently underperforming, and then failing to meet expectations despite your help, guidance, opportunity, and clear communication. 

Managers aren’t superheroes, and your employees are adults. However, managers bear responsibility for the conditions in which their people work.

Before moving on to judgment, consider asking yourself a few tough questions:

• • Were expectations clear? 
  • Did your reports have the information, authority, and resources they needed to fulfill the requirements of the position? 
  • Did you address issues before they became problems? 
  • Did you allow failures to dominate conversations, or withhold feedback and opportunities for advancement? 
  • Did you fail to delegate, and take over tasks that were rightfully the responsibility of your people?

• Would this person be a different performer under a different manager?

This is not an indictment, but an assessment, since research on managerial impact shows a clear conclusion: managers are often powerful predictors of the performance of the people they lead. 

So when we find ourselves thinking about firing one of our reports, it’s worth remembering that we may not have maximized the conditions for their success to begin with. 

This is not to suggest that we can turn poor performers into strong ones by simply changing their managers or through sheer willpower. Nor is anyone arguing that the solution to every personnel problem is to replace the manager. What matters for memory is that people are often products of their circumstances.

This reframes the conversation from “how do I get more out of these people?” to “what is getting in the way of their success?“

• Maybe the issue is unclear priorities. 
• Perchance the real root problem is an unhealthy dependency on approvals. 
• Perhaps your people have been rewarded for putting out fires, and are consequently avoiding the larger issues. 
• Mayhaps conversations are consistently put off until after months of mounting tension. 
• Possibly you’re not delegating enough and are always solving problems for people who need to learn how to handle them on their own. 

These are the sorts of things good management can address: removing roadblocks and creating conditions for success.

The most effective managers aren’t the ones who provide the most resources or information, but the ones who create an environment where their people feel empowered and supported. They promote autonomy, mastery, a sense of purpose, and belonging.

To the untrained eye, the result may often look like the manager isn’t doing much of anything at all. When done well, management is a gruelingly difficult job that is completely invisible, because their role is to ensure everyone else’s role runs smoothly. When done correctly, management creates the conditions for performance rather than extracting performance through brute force of will.

Often the most important questions aren’t about who is to blame for poor performance, but about who is most responsible for improvement. That doesn’t always make it the manager’s fault, but it does mean there’s always a right answer.

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Why Great Employees Don’t Stop Working Hard – They Stop Believing It Matters

Written by Andrei Costea on October 2, 2026. Posted in Organizational Performance

Motivation Is More Fragile Than We Think 

For decades, companies have been trying to find a way to get employees to be more motivated.

Some have tried to raise salaries, others have tried bonuses, employee-of-the-month plaques, team-building exercises, pizza Fridays, wellness programs, flexible schedules, or free coffee in the office (and the coffee is the cheapest one imaginable). 

Every few years, a new management theory comes along, promising to revolutionize the workplace and unlock the secrets to engaged employees. Despite all this, it seems disengagement is still the norm and burnout is rampant. People are leaving well-paying jobs for seemingly little reason, while at the same time, refusing to budge from lower-paying ones.

What gives? What does it all mean?

The popular answer is simple: money is the most important motivator.

On paper, it makes intuitive sense. People need money to survive, and more money usually means more luxuries. Seems logical, seems good. The problem is it’s only half true! 

Money is an important motivator, surely, but it’s a motivator for getting a job, not for doing a good job. This is an outstanding distinction, because most companies don’t have trouble finding people willing to do the work. Getting people through the door is the easy part.

Finding people willing to go above and beyond, solve problems, hone their skills, help out their coworkers, and really care about the job – now there…THERE’s your real challenge. Those things can’t be bought, and no, the old adage of “everyone has their price” doesn’t actually work.

You’ll soon find out that as you increase the salary to keep up the good work & dedication, it goes up and up and up, becoming unsustainable. Then, sensing a shiver down your spine and a feeling of dread, you will quickly realize it was never about the money…but now you’re in the red.

Money Isn’t the Villain, and It Never Was

Before diving into the subject matter, it is important to dispel a common misconception that often surrounds discussions of motivation. In many cases, articles on the topic present the premise as a choice between paying employees well and providing them with motivation at work.

In some cases, they go so far as to list “ways to motivate employees without spending money.” This is not an accurate perspective, however, as fair compensation is a necessity, and not a variable that should be bargained with.

• If someone has to pay rent, cover utilities, feed their children, and buy groceries, motivation is most definitely not a priority.
• If people are aware that they are significantly underpaid in comparison to their peers, motivation is not a priority.
• If salaries barely see an increase from year to year, while workloads and expectations remain steady, motivation is not a priority.

In all of these cases, money is the determining factor in an employee’s attitude and performance. It is an obvious point, but one that is often overlooked by management in favour of other, less effective, motivators.

Money may not solve every problem, but it certainly helps in many cases. Few other motivators hold as much power when it comes to financial concerns. Therefore, it is plain to understand that fair pay is the foundation upon which motivation is built, rather than the other way around.

Or, to put it in less academic terms: you cannot simply replace a raise with a pizza party.

The Difference Between Showing Up and Caring

One reason this myth was born is that compensation really does change behaviours.

Pay someone more, and they will be more inclined to join your company. Offer someone a substantial bonus, and they will be motivated to perform better so that they can receive it. This is known as extrinsic motivation, and it works. Extrinsic motivation is real, and it is important. Without it, few individuals would willingly commit to forty hours of unpaid work each week. 

However, once a person’s most basic needs are met, additional increases in compensation motivate them less and less. That’s where intrinsic motivation comes into play. 

Think about it:

• Why is it that some people always seem to seek out better ways of doing their jobs while others are quite happy to do the tasks that are simply required of them? 
• Why do some teams manage to stay enthusiastic about their work while others burn out at the same salary? 
• Why do some talented individuals choose to stay in their current position at a lower wage rather than move to a new company? 
• Why do some employees remain deeply committed to an organization despite receiving offers with higher salaries elsewhere?
• Why do people willingly go above and beyond for one manager, yet do only the bare minimum for another?

This is the motivation that comes from within. Once people stop thinking about how money affects them, they start to think about how their work affects them. 

People will rarely change their behaviours for a different paycheck if they feel that there is no impact beyond whether or not they can afford the food on the table and a roof over their head. 

If they do not feel that their work has meaning, that they are contributing to something bigger than themselves, that they matter, then they are unlikely to put in extra effort.

Motivation Is Not a Transaction

Perhaps the easiest mistake to make when it comes to motivating employees is thinking it can be bought. It can’t.

Companies often act as if motivation is something they can hand out like another type of compensation: raises, bonuses, employee recognition, wellness programs, benefits packages.

Now, to be clear, all of these are important, but none of them are motivation. Motivation comes from somewhere else. It comes from the relationship between what employees put in and what they feel they get out: trust, opportunity, recognition, respect, growth, autonomy, fairness, meaning.

It all adds up when you think about it. When employees feel as if they are no longer getting what they believe they deserve in return for their efforts, it doesn’t just affect their opinions of the company. It has a direct impact on their willingness to put in that effort in the first place.

It happens gradually, almost imperceptibly at first.

• People stop trying to contribute.
  • They stop experimenting.
    • They stop advocating for their ideas.
      • They stop caring.

None of these things occur because they’ve decided the work itself isn’t worth it, but because they no longer feel it is.

That, in the end, is the real reason for any drop in performance: not a change in the work itself, nor a shift in the challenges they face, but a feeling that the effort it takes for the rewards isn’t worth it.

A far easier way to think of it is that people rarely stop working because they’re doing something hard. They stop working because they’ve decided the rewards for getting it done aren’t worth it.

What Actually Keeps People Motivated?

If fair payment is the basis, what else is missing?

This is a question many psychologists and economists have asked for decades. Their main focus has been on finding the correlation between motivation and pay. The different perspectives have led to different conclusions. However, almost every theory boils down to one main idea, which, funnily enough, is also true for almost every aspect of human life:

People will only stay motivated if their work continues to satisfy certain criteria.

One of the theories, which has some strong points, is the Self-Determination Theory, or SDT for short. It focuses a lot on the quality of motivation. 

Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, the psychologists who came up with it, believe that researchers should not think about motivation being high or low. Instead, the emphasis should be on the type of motivation a person is showing.

Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation Aren’t Opposites

Most people have heard of the concepts of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.

To keep matters brief, the former refers to one’s inner drive to engage in an activity, whereas the latter is one’s desire to engage in an activity to gain some reward from outside.

While the ideas behind this division are not wrong, they are often misinterpreted since those who promote this view suggest that intrinsic motivation is good and that one should only strive for it. In contrast, extrinsic motivation is presented as bad, and one should even go so far as to actively shun it. 

In reality, the truth, like people, is more nuanced and multifaceted. Few people are driven purely by one factor alone, and their motivational factors are usually intertwined and cannot be easily decoupled.

• If one wants to become a competent software developer, one has to study and learn the subject matter regardless of any rewards that society offers. However, most developers choose this career solely because of rewards and benefits, such as high pay, opportunities to work remotely, and job stability.

• Similarly, few nurses engage in their work purely for personal satisfaction, and most are motivated by the desire to help others, coupled with the ability to earn a comfortable income.

• While some salespeople might love what they do and find fulfillment in building relationships with clients, most aim for career growth and the additional income that comes with it.

• Likewise, many teachers enter the profession because they genuinely enjoy educating others and making a difference in young people’s lives, but they also expect stable employment, career progression, and compensation that reflects the importance of their work. 

From an employer’s perspective, the best course of action is to make sure that their employees’ extrinsic motivations are well taken care of so that their work does not become a chore and they can continue bringing their best performance on the job.

Autonomy Creates Ownership

One of the most effective ways to predict long-term motivation is surprisingly simple: people want some level of control over how they work.

Autonomy does not mean having no accountability or being completely independent in all aspects of work, but rather, having enough freedom from a controlling force to feel trusted in making decisions without being dictated at every step.

Think about the difference between two contrasting office environments.

1. A well-oiled machine; everyone knows their place, what is expected of them, and how to do it.
2. A loosey-goosy environment, with laid-back guidelines, but more trust & confidence in their employees to figure out how to get the work done, even in a crisis.

Both have equally competent workers, but which one do you think has the potential to create truly motivated employees?

Well, let’s answer this question by saying ownership breeds motivation. People who have a sense of ownership in their work are more likely to think beyond what is asked of them and how they can make a difference. They see a problem before it is brought to them and take initiative in fixing it. They think beyond their job title and do the work because they want to, not because they are told to.

As can be seen, this has absolutely nothing to do with accountability or lack thereof, but rather the feeling that they have a personal investment in what they do.

Trust fosters a sense of ownership, and that leads to motivation, or in a more modern-worded take: people want to feel that they have a say in how they do their work.

Mastery Makes Improvement Rewarding

Think of any skill that you’ve learned over the past weeks, months, or years: driving, cooking, programming, writing, teaching, or playing an instrument.

At first, you were most likely, probably not very good. You must have made lots of mistakes, and the work was hard, but THEN…then something magical happened. You started to get better. Things that were once hard became easy, and problems that seemed impossible became doable.

This stoked a warm feeling deep inside, and your brain got hit by wave after wave of dopamine as you neared the solution to your challenges. The feeling only got greater as you saw yourself improving. Psychologists call this urge to improve mastery.

Many companies fail to realize how important mastery is. Most people don’t just want a job. Some do, but eventually, after many dreary eves pass, even such individuals crave more.

• They want a career
• They want to learn and grow
• They want to be challenged
• They want to become experts in their field
• They want to get better every day

If you stop challenging your employees, you’ll start to see a drop in curiosity. They’ll still be putting in the hours, but they’ll feel like they aren’t really accomplishing anything, and your ambitious employees will get hit much harder by this than the average staff member. 

That’s why companies that invest in making sure their employees are constantly learning and improving usually see much more than just an increase in technical skills. They send a message to their employees that they care about their future.

In other words, employees are much more likely to stick around if they feel like they’re constantly improving.

Purpose Gives Effort a Reason

There is this phrase that most people never actually get to experience and is uttered in almost every mission statement: “Our people are our greatest asset!” 

(If good taste would allow it, they’d add 3 !!!, and then the next company would do 4, and soon it would turn into an !-measuring contest)

Purpose, as a concept, has followed suit much in the same way, sadly. It has become one of those hollow words that is overused in the corporate world, to the point it has become a meme.

It is lamentable because a sense of purpose is one of those things that can be incredibly motivating for people. Purpose doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re doing something that will change the world. It just means that you know why you’re doing what you do.

• A customer service rep who helps angry customers return products
• An engineer who makes the widgets that people use every day
• An accountant who keeps the company’s finances in order 
• A janitor who ensures that the hospital is a clean environment for its patients
• An IT technician who keeps the systems running so hundreds of colleagues can do their jobs without interruption
• A warehouse worker who ensures that products reach customers accurately and on time

They might not all be earth-shattering jobs, but they all have value, a sense of purpose, meaning, and impact on the world. What’s important is to realize that the thing they’re doing isn’t just something that they do for the sake of it. It needs to be something that they do for a reason, a purpose – that’s when it becomes transactional: do this for me, and I’ll give you that.

It’s not a bad system, and there’s nothing wrong with it. For some people, that’s all they need. For many people, though, eventually, it becomes dissatisfying. They stop caring about doing the thing and start caring about why they should do the thing. That’s when the “I just want more money” becomes a problem. That’s also when people stop thinking about the task at hand and start thinking about why they should even care about it.

It’s much harder to answer that question with a raise because money can’t achieve that. It can’t tell you why you should care about what you do. It can give you a reason to do it, but not a reason to care.

Money talks to your wallet. Purpose talks to your soul.

The Hidden Motivators Organizations Overlook

By now, you should already know that motivation is not produced by a single source. It is generated through a multitude of interactions, and it can be created or destroyed by hundreds of tiny occurrences. Pay and perks matter, as does autonomy, professional development, and purpose.

However, there are additional factors that have a significant impact on an employee’s motivation and engagement in the workplace in the long run. The crucial point is that these factors are rarely mentioned during job interviews: they are usually discussed in exit interviews.

Fairness Builds Trust

Imagine two similar employees: same salary, similar-ish work, equivalent ratings. Yet, out of the two, one always seems to get the plum assignments, public praise, endless cheer, and opportunities for promotion. 

Now, the question at hand becomes: how long until the other begins to ask pungent, uncomfortable questions? Not long, I’d wager.

This is due to the fact that one factor stands out as an extremely powerful motivator: the perception of fairness.

Fairness in the workplace goes far beyond pay, as important as that is. It is the great equalizer, and it also entails consistency in how decisions are reached for things such as promotions, assignments, workload, kudos, mistakes, and communication.

People may be willing to accept outcomes they do not like, but they are much less tolerant of confusing circumstances. When it comes to explaining a decision, transparency seems to have an enormous impact on whether people will accept it. Give people enough information that they can understand a choice, even if they are not happy about it, and they will be much more likely to accept it than if they are in the dark and suspect something negative might be lurking.

When employees begin to feel as if they are getting less than they deserve, it is rarely productive to argue the point directly. Compensation issues, for example, are often emotional affairs, in which employees are apt to ask themselves not only how much they are being paid, but whether they are being treated fairly. By that, they often mean, how does my employer feel about my contributions?

Compensation is one of those tell-tale signals of how much value a company feels like it is getting out of its employees. The company is constantly sending out signals via compensation levels, and the truth is often hard to disguise, even when no one is discussing it openly.

Recognition Validates Contribution

Recognition is one of the most misunderstood concepts in modern management.

Many companies have turned it into a token, almost-jokey gesture: a monthly award, a thank-you note, an article in the company newsletter, a gift card.

While all these things may have their value, they fail to address the most important aspect of recognition: the simple fact that people care whether what they do matters. Recognition is valuable because it reassures employees that their work has not been in vain.

It is a response to the question “did what I do actually make a difference?” which is especially important when talking about demanding, difficult jobs. 

“If I put my heart and soul into a challenging task and, when it finishes, nothing is said about it, does it mean it was not worth doing? Maybe it does not matter to me, but most likely, it will affect my motivation to do similarly demanding work in the future.”

Recognition is valuable because it reassures employees that someone has noticed and that what they do matters to somebody. It should be noted, however, that recognition, in many ways, is a tool that can only be used effectively in a good workplace.

If the company culture is unhealthy, and employees feel like their work is not valued, recognition gestures will do little to reassure them. They will see them as hollow tokens, attempts to manipulate them.

Recognition cannot fix rotten foundations. It cannot compensate for constant underpayment or lack of appreciation. It should not be used in bad faith, as a way to cover up management’s mistakes.

In simple, clear terms: pizza parties don’t fix broken workplaces.

Progress Is One of Motivation’s Strongest Fuels

Think about the last time you went all out trying really hard on some project. Now imagine there are two possible outcomes:

• You see results. Things are coming together. You are improving. Things are getting done.

• Despite your best efforts, things seem to get nowhere. One week seems much like the next. Problems arise, often in the same places. Goals appear ever distant, and your efforts seem to vanish up the memory hole, never to be remembered again.

Which would make you feel better? Which would make you want to keep working? How do we feel when we are reminded that too many workplaces are inadvertently creating the second situation for their employees?

Too many of us are working without the benefit of seeing the value of our efforts. Studies on worker motivation have shown that a sense of making progress is one of the most important factors in influencing positive emotional reactions toward work. That doesn’t mean we should expect huge leaps forward or giant achievements. 

It means that people need to see some form of forward movement to feel good about what they do. It could be small steps. It could be baby steps, but people need reassurance that they’re actually getting somewhere. Some progress makes people feel their work has value. Without it, everything seems pointless.

That’s why effective leaders acknowledge and celebrate progress all the time, not just when people reach the end goal. It’s not that people don’t need goals or don’t care about rewards, but because forward movement answers the silent question, “Are we really getting somewhere?“

As long as the answer is “Yes,” then people can remain motivated. When the answer starts to sound more like “I’m not sure,” then well…that can be demotivating.

People don’t need to finish the race each and every week. They just need to know they are still running towards the finish line.

Burnout Isn’t a Motivation Problem

Burnout is often attributed to something that happens when employees “just lose their motivation.” That’s a reductive view of what it means to experience burnout. It isn’t that sudden; it usually results from a slow process of exertion with decreasing perceived psychological return. 

The workload increases, or the rewards for said work decrease, and the worker’s relationship with their work deteriorates. People begin to feel ineffective, powerless, unable to accomplish the things they think are important, even if their work itself doesn’t change. 

People who suffer from burnout continue to perform their tasks because they feel like they have to, not because they feel like it has meaning or value. Most people can handle hard projects, long working hours during important periods, unexpected problems, and high levels of responsibility. What they can’t handle is feeling like all of their hard work is wasted, stagnant, irrelevant, or unnoticed. 

When companies have people who are burned out, the default question is rarely “how can we incentivize these people to perform better?” but rather “what made them feel so devalued in the first place?” These are two completely different lines of inquiry with very different solutions. 

Final Thoughts

This article started with a simple myth: money is the greatest motivator.

Like many myths, this one has a grain of truth. Money does matter – it satisfies basic needs, reduces stress, attracts people to the organization, and indicates whether the company cares about its employees. In other words, ignoring the importance of money would be foolish.

However, it is only one factor influencing workers’ motivation. A more critical source of motivation is an individual’s perception of their work and how they are treated within the workplace. 

Employees are more likely to be motivated if they realize their efforts make a difference, they improve themselves, their performance is valued, they can rely on their colleagues, and they are not stuck doing the same tasks. Such motivation is fragile, as it takes care to create the aforementioned circumstances.

Many people think of motivation as a binary indicator: either individuals are motivated to work, or they are not. In reality, motivation is more of a continuum. This is why people need to feel their contributions are worthwhile, and they can rely on their colleagues. Organizations should focus more on nurturing a culture in which employees understand that their work matters. It will enable them to achieve greater productivity as motivated individuals will be more likely to go above and beyond.

In today’s exceptionally modern times, there is no reason organizations shouldn’t strive to make employees feel that both money and non-monetary aspects of work are adequate. After all, people are unlikely to quit doing their tasks because they do not enjoy them. They are more likely to leave if they perceive no value in their efforts. People only experience dissatisfaction when their efforts do not provide them with rewards they want. Therefore, an organization should ensure that employees feel rewarded both intrinsically and extrinsically.

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Motivation is more complex than a paycheck. Build the knowledge and skills to manage employee performance with a broader understanding of what drives people at work through Certified Employee Performance Management

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Why Feedback Doesn’t Improve Performance (Until It’s Done Right)

Written by Andrei Costea on September 28, 2026. Posted in Organizational Performance

The Myth: Feedback Automatically Improves Performance

We’ve been told for decades that feedback is an agent for improved performance. If that were true, annual reviews would produce high-performing teams, generic comments would influence behaviour, and being told you “need to do more communication” would make you communicate better. 

None of that has been shown thus far to work in any capacity. Furthermore, organizations don’t appear to be starved for feedback. In most, performance reviews happen annually, managers talk to people one-on-one regularly, there are post-project discussions, and feedback is “offered” in casual conversations. Employees continue to rack up “satisfactory” performances with write-ups, and employees’ careers are littered with commentary in the vein of “needs development in A, B, and C,” yet continue to repeat their same errors and get stuck in the same traps. The issue stems from the inability to give people the kind of feedback they might be receptive to. 

This in particular is a really crucial distinction: feedback, on its lonesome, is just information.

Information becomes development in four areas:

1. Understanding
2. Acceptance
3. Retention and Translation to Behaviour 
4. Action

Fail any of these four, and feedback may have been delivered, but it hasn’t been useful. This is where a deeply cherished organizational myth crumbles. So many leaders believe that they have “delivered the feedback” and thus have “done” the change development side themselves; the remainder is up to the employee. 

Research clearly shows it does not work that way. In 1996, research conducted by Avraham Kluger and Angelo DeNisi undertook a meta-analysis of hundreds of studies of feedback interventions. While many feedback interventions were helpful, the research found that nearly a third of feedback interventions actually caused people to do worse.

This then begs the question: if feedback was so good for people’s performance, why would it be negative one-third of the time?

Such a realization clarifies why simply giving feedback isn’t the issue; rather, it’s the quality of that feedback across these different areas, as only good feedback develops behaviours.

Why Most Feedback Fails to Improve Performance

Unfortunately, most workplace feedback is not very useful. If you’re in a managerial position, think about what your employees hear every day:

• “You need to be more strategic.”

• “Improve your communication skills.”

• “Take more ownership.”

• “That didn’t turn out well.”

On the surface, these are all well-intentioned pieces of feedback. They acknowledge that something needs to change, but they don’t answer the most important question:

What, precisely, do I need to do differently?

Without this question, feedback is mere judgment and becomes an exercise in frustration.

Imagine telling a person to “do a better job of taking care of their health.” Should they get more sleep? Exercise? Eat differently? Reduce stress? Drink more water? 

The advice is not wrong; it is simply so broad that it is impossible to act on and will just be taken as something given in bad faith. 

The same is true of workplace feedback. Telling your employee to “communicate better” leaves them with no direction on what behaviour to modify, when & how it needs to change, and how success will be assessed. Employees typically end such meetings knowing they didn’t meet expectations, but still unclear on what “different” looks like.

1. Clarity gives people confidence while vagueness makes them hesitate, and hesitation has a cost. 

Employees unable to see what “good” is may second-guess their decisions, delay taking action, become silent rather than speak up, or fall back on familiar work patterns rather than try something new. We thus run into this weird scenario where the goal of feedback-to-performance-improvement can actually decrease this ratio.

1. Timing causes another major problem. 

The annual or semi-annual performance review is the norm in many organizations. By the time the manager and employee gather to discuss an employee’s work, the events in question may have transpired months earlier. 

Human brains are not wired to learn from events distant in the past; details, along with context, are lost, and emotions often overlay objective observation. Instead of an opportunity for improvement, the performance review turns into a historical document, and changing one’s behaviour yesterday is impossible.

The more employees can effectively influence their behaviour tomorrow, the higher the quality of their outcomes will be. That is why organizations around the world are shifting from treating feedback as an event to treating it as a process. 

Gallup, for example, asserts that feedback has an expiration date: the closer it comes to the event it is about, the more helpful and actionable it is. Employees who receive frequent meaningful feedback are significantly more engaged than those who receive it only once a year.

1. Sense & Direction – another common mistake involves turning feedback into a one-way street. 

The manager delivers the feedback, the employee receives it, neither party is certain whether they understood each other, and the meeting ends. 

As it should be obvious, learning doesn’t tend to work this way. Employees have to ask questions, be sure expectations are clear, reflect on their own point of view, and discuss the desired results; otherwise, assumptions, not clarity, will prevail.

1. Emotion (or lack thereof). 

Nobody likes to feel that they have done something wrong. When feedback intended to encourage development is interpreted as evidence of incompetence, recipients’ defenses go up. People are more likely to work on solutions when they are not afraid of being judged by their manager. Ultimately, the purpose of feedback is to help the person grow, not to prove the manager was right. 

Moving beyond evaluation and toward development is the first step in feedback, and, ironically, one factor has proven more valuable than anything else: stop thinking about the past and begin planning for the future.

The Science Behind Feedback That Actually Works

If bad feedback does not lead to performance improvement, the immediate thought is, what does? 

As shocking as this may be to some readers, the answer is not, in fact, “more feedback.” 

What happens in a lot of instances is that companies, when bad feedback doesn’t produce positive results in the organization, try giving more feedback, more feedback check-ins, reviews, or telling people the managers should provide feedback more regularly.

Although this would naturally spring up from good intention, more feedback won’t do any good as the problem isn’t frequency. Bad feedback is still bad feedback, however much you try and disguise it or apply layers of make-up over it. The crux of the problem lies in how we conduct a feedback conversation. 

One of the very fascinating results of the studies being carried out into feedback research is that conversations that deal with past activities may result in managers obtaining just the reverse result. The objective of the discussion about a failed outcome seems to be to identify what exactly the problem was, to address why the results of a certain output did not quite match the standards, and to allocate blame.

So, if it is to make us understand the exact reasons behind a specific issue, it is surely easier to avoid its repetition? Well, most of the time it isn’t so. 

Research conducted in 2020 found that conversations that focus solely on addressing the output from the previous stage can cause issues between a manager and employee regarding why it is likely not up to the mark. Quite contrary to creating a shared mindset, it becomes an act of making the employees defenseless towards their conduct and a tendency to self-assess the positive sides and look for external explanations for failure, increasing this discrepancy in their minds, which leads them to accept less and be less likely to adopt the feedback given to them.

If we want to have a better grasp of such findings, we need to ask ourselves: how do performance review meetings start most of the time? Do any of these lines sound familiar?

• “Let us discuss this past performance and rectify the shortcomings.” 

• “Why was this project a failure?” 

• “Explain to me why you were not up to par with your deliverables.” 

• “What could you have done differently to achieve better results?”

• “Can you explain why your performance did not meet expectations?”

• “Let’s go over the areas where you fell short and discuss how to improve.”

Even though these are not bad questions, they place the focus of attention on proving oneself, not on learning in context. Once one starts doing that, they can only move their focus from learning towards showing themselves to others; in proving that they are competent or to explain their actions. After all, that’s the way one’s brain is formed. 

The interesting thing, though, from this research is that managers do not need to withdraw this kind of feedback completely, but rather should aim to move their focus to discussions of the subject matter & its progress. What mostly determines whether employees accept and intend to change through a feedback process is a forward-focused discussion.

When an employee feels that a feedback discussion about their performance pertains to the future course rather than past failures, they become more receptive (also, this encourages the employee’s intention to implement the changes). So the subtle alteration could have immense significance. 

To better illustrate this, ponder upon the following options:

“Your presentation lacked engagement, and the audience became unenthusiastic.“

Vs 

“What steps can we take to enhance the presentation to fully capture the attention of the audience right till the end of the presentation?” 

Whereas the previous sentence will attempt evaluation, the other one, in contrast, would be development. One is backward-leaning, whereas the other is forward-facing. The one that is toward a bright future focuses the discussion on the future, not only on issues or deficiencies of the past. 

The reason many leaders emphasize the need for managers to become coaches is that coaches develop and coach people. Managers, rather than just criticizing a situation, can ask the following questions: “What is the thing that we learned here?“, “What will we try this time round differently?“, “Is there any assistance or resource required to have an impact this time?“, “How can we make our future attempt a successful one?” 

Effective Feedback Is About Behaviour, Not Personality

• What’s another key element common to all great feedback?
  • It addresses observable behaviours, not a person’s inner traits. 

That may sound obvious enough that you wonder if we need to say it out loud, but the two often get tangled into one in the real world. Here are a few examples:

• “You aren’t a great communicator.”

• “You’re disorganized.”

• “You don’t take ownership.”

The problem is you’ve now just defined who the person is, what their traits are, which are often deeply ingrained or even impossible to alter in real time. Think about trying to tell someone they “aren’t” good at communication; how would you even begin to prove that statement wrong? How can you work on what such a statement wants from you?

Now let’s think about how such assertions could be changed: 

• “During today’s client meeting, several key questions weren’t addressed before moving to a decision. Next time, I’d like you to pause and invite additional perspectives before wrapping up.” 

• “The report was submitted two days after the agreed-upon deadline. Let’s take a look at what might have been standing in your way and figure out what we can do differently for the next project.”

Actual change occurs when we use the right words and the right amount of words, to boot. Using both the right words and the proper amount requires going in-depth and pinpointing particulars. When we do that, you’re going to want to pinpoint things that can actually be changed, because behaviour is observable, measurable, replicable, and above all else, changeable.

Personality isn’t what needs improving – performance is. In other words, great feedback doesn’t make judgments about character or intent; instead, it describes what they did, explains why it mattered, and offers suggestions for what to do next & how to achieve it.

No employee should leave a performance discussion feeling unsure if they can even do their job. They should walk away with a clear understanding of exactly what success looks like the next time around. This is the key difference between criticism and coaching, and the key reason why the most effective feedback possesses characteristics that elevate it far beyond simply being “honest.“

Five Characteristics of Effective Feedback

Hopefully by now you’re noticing one thing fairly plainly: feedback isn’t so much about constructive versus damaging feedback. That is nonetheless a relevant difference and an important one to keep in mind, but feedback, what it should be at its core, means facilitating higher conduct from others. 

However, if that is the case, we then have to think about another aspect: what makes one bit of feedback more likely to be seen and acted upon as an alternative, rather than met with quiet resentment and forgetfulness? 

Though the precise context in every workplace may differ, researchers agree there are five elements more likely to have success.

1. It’s Timely

Feedback is time-sensitive.

The longer a manager waits to engage on a particular topic, the less valuable that conversation becomes. Details and context are lost, and both parties have to recall facts relying on hazy memory. As a coach, would you wait until the end of the season to give one piece of advice on positioning to one player? As a drama teacher, would you wait until a child’s annual recital to mention a few words of advice for playing correctly?

While these examples seem silly, there is a grain of truth there: we don’t learn that way. 

Small adjustments in experience improve performance the most effectively when they occur as experience is unfolding. In light of this, some of the best-performing organizations have increasingly embraced the notion of “ongoing” rather than “formal” feedback practices.

They have shifted from the expectation that feedback primarily occurs in quarterly, bi-annual, and annual reviews to encouraging short check-ins on a daily and weekly basis. A five-minute chat between a team leader and report following an interaction with a client, a project kickoff, or the completion of a key milestone often adds far more value than a lengthy review two months later. 

To this, we should mention an added benefit of timely feedback: it has an effect beyond improving recall – it impacts momentum too.

2. It’s Specific

One of the quickest ways to make feedback useless is to keep it too vague. Statements such as “You need to work on your communication” or “Be more proactive” may seem like they convey information but are highly unlikely to provide an employee with the specific behaviour they need to adjust. 

Specific feedback defines behaviours that are observable and concrete. Instead of saying,”Your communication could use some work,” you can rephrase it in a manner that actually carries realistic improvement capability: 

“In today’s client meeting, you did an excellent job answering their specific questions. However, you moved to a decision without asking for other stakeholders’ input, and a few people left the meeting with unanswered questions. In future meetings, be sure to pause after asking a question and wait for other people’s questions before making a final decision.“

Now the employee has a clear understanding of what the problem was, why it was a problem, what success looks like, and how they can achieve it. The guesswork is all but removed.

3. It’s Actionable

Identifying a problem doesn’t mean solving a problem. If it worked like that, snipers would make the best doctors.

Think about a personal trainer telling a new client, “You should get in better shape.” This is little more than a truism.  Good trainers tell us what exercises to do, when to practice, how often, and what to track over a period of time. The same applies at work, where great feedback will answer the question ”What next?”

It should be noted that this kind of change might involve experimenting with how you run meetings, plan a presentation, ask questions during client discussions, or break projects down into smaller stages.

4. It’s Psychologically Safe

The trick to good feedback is the existence of psychological safety – a space in which feedback can exist without its recipients feeling mortified, culpable, or punitively chastised; if people are convinced that errors are equivalent to accusation or punishment, they will inevitably be either cautious or deceptive. 

The key is a framework that does not reduce standards, nor obviate the necessity of conflict (conflict IS good when one understands how & why). It is a framework that signals the desire to develop through the feedback exchange, and in determining this climate, managers are critical.

By their very nature, curiosity offers a better way to communicate than accusation; questions teach more than assumptions; and listening matters more than lecturing. Furthermore, feedback is more effective when recipients believe the purpose is to develop, not to disgrace, so the intention is to learn when the feedback is intended to help you succeed, not to catch you out making mistakes.

5. It’s Future-Focused

As we’ve iterated a few times in this article, effective feedback enables forward progress. You may remember how past failures often create more than one story about why they happened. These can turn a conversation into an argument that quickly spins into finger-pointing and defensiveness, rather than learning.

A future-focused discussion shifts the entire goal. 

• Instead of asking: “Why did you do that?” 
  • Ask: “What will you do differently next time?” 

• Instead of saying: “That strategy failed clearly.” 
  • Ask: “How can we approach the next project to achieve a different result?“

This is a much softer approach that moves the conversation from “who” to “what,” and avoids rewriting the past, shaping the future instead. It sets people up for future success, not failure.

Replace Performance Reviews With Performance Conversations

There’s no greater example of the distinction between providing feedback and fostering improvement than the annual performance review at work. 

For decades, companies have used an annual check-in to review performance, highlight gaps, pinpoint areas for improvement, and plan for the coming year. The logic is straightforward: gather observations for an entire year, get together for one meeting to rule them all, deliver feedback, and performance improves.

It feels like magic & sorcery, almost surreal…because it is!

At the time of the meeting, events may already be months old, and employees likely don’t recall the circumstances surrounding it. Managers may bring up very recent issues and ignore the whole year’s data. Both parties struggle to draw insights out of situations that have already passed and cannot be changed. Far too often, however, employees anticipate these conversations and prepare to endure them, rather than get anything valuable out of them.

Now compare that to organizations that weave feedback into their daily work. Here, instead of a single meeting a year, managers coach employees on an ongoing basis: 

• They praise positive performance as it is happening
• Make corrections to minor habits before they become significant issues
• Provide employees with opportunities to reflect and learn from their experiences
• Embed feedback as an integral part of how the team gets things done, not an event that interrupts it.

Now, this is not to say that organizations should eliminate performance reviews wholesale. They do serve important purposes as documentation of employee achievement, conversation points for career growth, and discussions to align expectations and support administrative decisions. 

The review, however, should not be the key mechanism for employee development. Instead, true growth occurs through the many minor interactions between formal performance evaluations. The most effective managers don’t merely review work – they actively contribute to its shape.

Final Thoughts

Feedback Doesn’t Change People ➔ Better Conversations Do

Giving feedback is just the first step in a long series up the stairs of improvement.

The real performance increase comes from the next steps. 

• Did you tell someone their feedback while the context was still clear? 
• Did you focus on specific behaviour rather than personality judgment? 
• Did you give the other person something specific they could do to improve?

• Did you create a psychologically safe space for conversation?

• Did you help the person understand what success actually looks like for them next time around? 

If the answer to any of these questions is no then your feedback will not translate into any lasting growth, rather just another conversation that’s lost from memory by Friday afternoon. The best leadership practices not only evaluate but build capacity in people to step up and try to deliver on something new.

Realistically speaking, most people don’t act because somebody just told them they should. Most people grow because somebody shows them how they could become better, and then supported them with the confidence required to get there.

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