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.
Every organization remembers its numbers: revenue, profit margins, cost of customer acquisition, employee utilization, defect rates, NPS scores, or average resolution times.
Pull open any dashboard, and you’ll see hundreds of highly selective data points meticulously tracking almost everything happening within the business. Organizations today are astoundingly adept at capturing data. However, they often can’t answer simpler questions.
Why is this team performing so well when they are tracking only average productivity metrics?
Why are customers loyal to this account manager?
Why did our innovation efforts grind to a halt when our key engineer left, even though the KPIs remained unchanged?
What, beyond hitting deadlines, contributed to that project’s success?
Some of the most crucial assets any organization holds cannot be conveniently pinned on a dashboard. As conversations naturally become centered around measurable outputs, organizations gradually risk developing a kind of “KPI memory loss” – an inability to recall the details that fail to fit within a given metric.
This is not a criticism of KPIs. Not at all, quite the contrary! Businesses must have these metrics to measure performance, diagnose issues, understand thresholds, and make decisions. The issue starts when metrics become less tools for observing the world and increasingly the world itself.
When Metrics Become Memory
Picture a brand-new manager being hired to run a thriving customer service department. They’ve taken over a fantastic dashboard, their average response time has dropped, customer tickets are being resolved faster than ever, and overall productivity is growing each month. From their perspective, they’ve inherited a picture-perfect operation.
Six months down the line, customer churn is on the rise.
But why? What gives?
After interviewing veteran staff members, the manager learns that agents have stopped investing a few extra moments to build rapport with their customers. All the targets were being met; everything looked fantastic on the dashboard, but they had slowly let the human side of it all slide: those little interactions that helped customers feel like they mattered. There was nothing in the dashboard to indicate this.
Nothing in the dashboard was accounting for this. This is one of the greatest strengths (and biggest weaknesses) of performance measurement: KPIs can highlight things we would otherwise never know, yet they also narrow our attention to an unhealthy degree, turning focus into horse blinders.
As much as an organization obsesses over what it can measure, it begins to overlook everything that it cannot. When people start aiming for a metric specifically, that metric eventually fails to reflect what it was intended to reflect.
You’ve almost certainly seen this play out in a large organization:
A sales team prioritizes quick-close deals over long-term customer value because its quarterly target emphasizes sales volume.
A call center has reduced the Average Handle Time (AHT) by ending calls abruptly, leading to more inbound repeat calls from irate customers.
A software team has achieved a high number of resolved tickets while allowing technical debt to fester in the codebase silently.
An HR team fills open positions faster by prioritizing speed-to-hire, but the quality of new hires drops, leading to higher turnover within the first year.
A manufacturing plant reduces production costs by using cheaper materials, only to see warranty claims and customer complaints increase months later.
The metrics look good, but the underlying reality does not. This often has nothing to do with bad motives or intentions, but more with incentives.
Incentives have been at the basis of human behaviour since the dawn of time. Therefore, if success is defined by what appears on a dashboard, people will focus their attention there. Over time, companies develop excellent memories for metrics but an almost complete memory loss for everything else.
What Gets Left Behind?
Try to think of the best colleague you’ve ever had. What was it about them that made them excellent? Were they the emergency adult everyone called to soothe volatile clients before a situation erupted? Maybe they instinctively knew when a project was careening off course. Perhaps they just knew which other departments would be required long before an issue was apparent, or they just knew how to mentor a junior person in the office from scratch.
Knowing all these aspects, we are posed with a series of questions:
How could you quantify these skills?
How could you put a number on them?
How would they feature on a spreadsheet?
It might not be possible. Is it possible? Is it feasible? Now we are left with more questions than we had before we knew about the aforementioned series!
Let’s take a look at a different example.
What about a company trying to build itself on measurable, trackable KPIs and not much else? We have a massive body of work in knowledge management that draws a line between the explicit and the tacit: the former can be written down and shared, the latter can only be understood and absorbed through experience and judgment, in context, through interaction.
There are numerous studies that indicate that organizations that have solely relied on measurable performance-only systems fail to capture value and knowledge, even in areas that are absolutely critical to long-term organizational success.
Interestingly, it’s often the people who do not appear on many charts in any system, or who have nothing visible to put on a spreadsheet, who make the organization successful.
The experienced cardiac nurse may have noticed subtle changes in the patients’ physical condition much earlier than the monitors do.
The savvy machinist may hear an anomaly in the noise from an old tool and just know the machine requires maintenance.
The proficient project manager might have noticed the relationship between two key stakeholder groups deteriorating well before the tangible signs of breakdown were evident.
The well-versed account manager may recognize that a client is quietly disengaging long before declining renewal rates or negative feedback makes it obvious.
These can be moments where organizational failures are averted long before anyone even sees an indicator on a dashboard. These are moments that create and deliver value to an organization every day, yet remain invisible to most of its people and many of its systems.
The Things Dashboards Cannot Remember
The majority of businesses believe their decisions are based on facts. In reality, they generally base their choices on whatever facts happen to be quantifiable. Culture is one of the clearest examples of such behaviour.
Companies commonly try to measure culture through surveys, retention data, absence rates, and employee satisfaction scores. While such information is useful, culture itself is not a figure. It is actually the unwritten principles and practices that establish whether workers report errors early or cover them up. It’s that thing that makes junior employees feel empowered to question those higher up. It’s that je ne sais quoi that leads groups to readily volunteer their expertise rather than guard it or choose to assist their colleagues, even when no one is watching.
Boiling these activities down to a handful of quarterly data points has the threat of mistaking the map for the land. The same is true of reliance on craftsmanship, mentorship, interest, durability, and expert judgment. Organizations seldom lose these features overnight. Rather, they simply fail to mention them because they stop measuring them and ultimately stop noticing them.
As soon as something is missing from the discussion, it tends to be absent from decisions on the whole. That is possibly the major peril of KPI memory loss: organizations do not intentionally cease caring about what is most important; they become so adept at remembering their numbers that they fail to remember everything those numbers can not tell them.
The Hidden Costs of Measuring Everything
Most companies do not wake up one morning deciding to disregard culture, relationships, or craft. It happens more subtly, often barely perceptible to the senses.
A new dashboard gets added.
An additional KPI arrives.
Quarterly reviews become more number-focused.
Charts, scorecards, graphs, and trendlines support decisions.
Conversations turn to the question of what we can measure versus what we ought to be asking.
It appears to be a reasonable transition. At the end of the day, numbers are objective, are they not? They establish commonalities and help control a complicated organization. However, numbers are also a source of our most profound blind spots.
Think of onboarding. Think really well. While it seems prudent for a company to track the number of days before a new employee reaches full productivity, there are typically no measures around building trust with other staff, the organization’s unspoken rules, or the logic behind past decisions. This results, six months and two seasons later, in a productive individual who, by all accounts, repeatedly makes the exact same mistakes the company had already overcome a decade earlier.
The knowledge had existed, scribbled on meeting minutes or stored in the heads of long-serving staff or within an unheard conversation, but it had never reached the recipient in need. This tendency pervades almost every field of work.
An oil and gas operation may monitor equipment uptime and production volumes with remarkable precision, while overlooking the field operator whose practical experience prevents a minor anomaly from escalating into a costly shutdown.
A government agency can report on service delivery targets and policy milestones with detailed dashboards, yet fail to recognize the informal relationships between departments that quietly determine whether complex initiatives succeed or stall.
A real estate firm may measure listings closed and average time on market with ease, while overlooking the seasoned agent whose local knowledge and trusted network resolve problems before they jeopardize a sale.
A hospital may monitor how long patients wait with a stop clock, yet it would struggle to assess the level of trust a pair of experienced nurses builds.
A legal firm could chart the time partners log on individual cases with great precision, while ignoring the unstructured mentoring that cultivates new associates from rookies to confidants.
A manufacturing operation can track its output by the hour, but may miss the insight of the retired engineer who stops a press before it breaks down, preventing a sensor from triggering.
With all of these cases, tangible output may increase; however, the intangible abilities that support that output go largely unnoticed until they can no longer be ignored.
When Efficiency Begins Replacing Craftsmanship
Nowhere may the dichotomy be stronger than in craft. Craft isn’t limited to woodworkers and machinists – there’s an equivalent for every role. A software engineer’s craftsmanship might not be about delivering features as quickly as possible but rather about writing testable and maintainable code. A customer success manager’s craftsmanship might be recalling some tiny, human detail from a conversation with a customer and using it to make them feel deeply seen. These are habits you practice into being, not lessons you teach into being.
Picture two identical table factories.
One rewards everyone for output alone (units per shift). The other one measures output AND craft (the ability of seasoned employees to mentor and teach the younger ones). Thus, the most experienced artisans have time to think of better ways to practice their craft, and they reject pieces they deem inadequate, even if it slows output, while prepping a new generation that comes after. One year in, the output factory is ahead.
Five years later, the craft factory might have developed an entire workforce capable of creating not just more output, but better & smarter output without sacrificing quality or values. Their competitive advantage wasn’t about today’s output; it was about tomorrow’s capabilities, and quarterly KPIs don’t easily capture them.
It grows over years so subtly you usually only realize it’s gone after you notice its absence.
The Things Employees Stop Doing
Not only do metrics influence what employees do, but they also influence what employees quietly stop doing. Take a veteran project manager who routinely spends their Friday afternoons working through colleagues’ complex, messy projects. There is no metric for mentoring, no dashboard tracking generosity, and no quarterly goal to help other departments meet their targets.
Nevertheless, when the company adopts a utilization rate that values nearly all hours spent on billable activity, the manager is never explicitly asked to halt his mentoring, only that “we’d love for you to be 100% utilization and work your shift’s duration on billable projects”. Over time, the manager has trouble justifying mentoring anyone.
Then, in an instant, poof, it’s gone!
The company gets 3% points of utilization and a loss of something far harder to repair. Moreover, those who, at this point, would be tempted to say “it’s just an individual matter” should remember that a company is made up of hundreds to thousands of living, breathing individuals. It’s not so much that one person stops functioning; entire departments stop sharing knowledge, because collaboration time could be allocated to departmental goals. Managers stop coaching team members because getting stuff out the door right now takes precedence over people’s development and future growth. Employees hesitate to try innovative projects because failed attempts have consequences for their personal evaluations. These things are not deliberate managerial decisions; these are inevitable responses to organizational cues and the incentives we keep mentioning.
Peter Drucker observed well: “What gets measured gets managed.” Yet what is not measured will be ignored, seldom discussed, forgotten, and will surface as unforeseen consequences later on.
When Good KPIs Produce Bad Decisions
The KPIs themselves may not be wrong; they’re just limited. A good metric can become a bad one when it shifts from a guidepost to the destination itself. Organizations of all shapes and sizes have had the same experience.
Software Development
For many years, developers were measured by the lines of code they wrote. On the surface, the logic seemed fine – the more code written, the more productive the developer. Unfortunately, developers were incentivized to write more code, not better code – ye’ ol’ quantity-over-quality shenanigan. Conversely, modern software engineering holds that good solutions often involve writing less code.
Healthcare
Patient throughput in the emergency room is routinely monitored for a range of reasons, not least to reduce wait times and improve access to care.
This metric is clearly important, but clinicians are aware that meaningful conversations, nuanced observations, and shared decision-making cannot always be neatly slotted into pre-set time boxes. Hospitals that focus solely on speed do so at the risk of missing key aspects of care.
Aviation
Even in this highly quantitative field, there is an understanding that not every important thing can be represented by a number.
Commercial airlines meticulously monitor thousands of variables, from fuel efficiency to maintenance schedules. Nevertheless, they spend a considerable amount of time and resources on developing Crew Resource Management (CRM), an approach focused on building communication skills, mutual trust, leadership, and a safe psychological environment within the cockpit. These aspects are not ignored because they are hard to measure. They are carefully nurtured because, as history shows, they save lives.
Automotive
Perhaps one of the most widely known examples in the business world comes from Toyota, the Japanese automaker. The Toyota Production System (TPS) is well known for its metrics and continuous improvement methodology. Concurrently, it also strongly emphasizes people development, encourages employees to halt the line if they detect quality issues, and views improvement as a collective learning process rather than a numbers game. In essence, the numbers do matter, but so do the conversations that occur around them, and that can be easy to miss.
Companies struggling with KPI memory loss tend to assume that if a metric is not displayed on the dashboard, it cannot be strategically important. The healthiest companies take the opposite approach. They understand that the dashboard offers only a partial picture of the organization’s health.
Some of its most vital components – trustworthiness, judgment, craftsmanship, curiosity, mentorship, and shared experience – remain alive, regardless of whether they are measured. The real problem is not whether to rely on numbers or intuition, but rather the failure to remember that one can never replace the other.
What High-Performing Organizations Choose Not to Measure
That raises an interesting question: if some of the organization’s greatest capabilities are elusive to measure, what do the best organizations in the world do?
They can’t just abandon performance measures, right? RIGHT?
Right, they don’t. In many cases, high performers recognize that measurement has its limits.
Take a look at Pixar. For years, the animation studio has turned out films that win hearts and minds and create core childhood memories for parents and children alike. Of course, Pixar monitors budgets, schedules, and production milestones. Yet some of the real magic happens because the company is willing to make room for what can’t be quantified by a KPI: candid dialogue.
One of the most widely discussed Pixar traditions is the Braintrust, a circle of seasoned directors and writers who regularly gather to roast works in progress.
No scores, no charts, no dashboards, no key performance indicators. What matters is genuine feedback, a psychological safety net, and a willingness to push ideas (not people) to their breaking point. The organization creates room for judgment.
Now let’s go back to Toyota for a second.
Not everything gets translated into a number. The famous Toyota Production System may be well known for its metrics and focus on continuous improvement, but one of the company’s enduring guiding principles is respect for people.
Its workers feel empowered to halt a production line when they spot a flaw not because a performance measure mandates it, but because their judgment is trusted and valued.
This doesn’t mean that Toyota avoids measuring. It has more to do with the fact that it appreciates that its greatest assets reside alongside its measurements, not within them. That theme will appear time and time again across top-tier companies.
Experienced executives don’t just ask, “What should we measure?” ❌
They ask, “What do we need to keep talking about even if we can’t measure it perfectly?” ✅
Beyond Dashboards: Remembering the “Why“
One theme that echoes throughout the literature on organizational memory is that organizations are pretty good at recording what happened. They’re a whole lot worse at remembering why it happened.
Minutes of meetings show what was decided, project plans show when the decision was made, dashboards show what the result was; however, even with all that, the reasoning behind the decision (the trade-offs it required, the alternatives it rejected, the hunches it relied on) often remains elusive.
Think about walking into a company where the same customer policy has been in effect for a decade. Everyone adheres to it, but nobody knows why. Its memory has been lost among dusty desks and cramped file cabinets. A manager suggests tweaking it, as it seems stale and no longer aligns with the organization’s current state. Their peer protests that “it’s always been done this way,” yet none of them can tap the original logic behind it all. It’s not just that information is missing. The entire context for the origin of the information is missing.
This is the plight of most KPIs as well.
We recall that our customer satisfaction score dropped four points, and not that our recent reorganization had frayed our client relationships months prior.
We recall that productivity grew by 12%, and not that our employees started shunning one another to get there.
We recall that costs declined, but not which abilities those reductions simultaneously hobbled.
We recall that revenue exceeded its target, and not that a handful of unsustainably large discounts drove it.
We recall that safety incidents declined, and not that workers had become increasingly reluctant to report near misses.
Numbers capture results or the end product. Stories capture context or the journey to said end product. The best companies value both.
Building Organizations That Remember More Than Numbers
None of that is to say that companies shouldn’t measure less. Often, they should probably measure better. A balanced performance system understands that metrics are evidence, not adjudication.
When your engagement metric drops, it should start a conversation, not conclude it.
When your productivity metric improves, you should question your leaders: “What did you change? What may have suffered as a consequence?”
In the same way, when there’s an unexpectedly great result, don’t just look at it on a celebratory dashboard and gloat to everyone near & dear. Dig into it: What did we do differently to get here? Was it more collaboration? Did a senior, intuitive employee make a gut call at just the right moment? Did the team have enough faith in each other to say, “Hey, this isn’t working?”
Some companies consciously strive to keep institutional memory alive through mentoring, after-action reviews, storytelling, communities of practice, intergroup collaboration, and discussions focused on reflecting on the past. These are more than just tools for transferring knowledge. They are tools for transferring judgment because, as the adage goes, judgment doesn’t live in the data alone. It lives from person to person, conversation by conversation.
Final Thoughts
Performance management has revolutionized modern management. Organizations would have a hard time understanding performance, gauging results and failures, allocating resources, or identifying potential risks without KPIs. The use of metrics remains the strongest lever available to leaders. However, every tool has its limitations.
A map shows us the path around a city; it’s not the city itself. Likewise, a dashboard illustrates organizational performance; it’s not organizational performance itself. Organizational performance is much more than just mere engagement numbers; leadership is much more than productivity metrics; organizational innovation is much more than just the number of ideas spewed forth by lateral thinkers; organizational customer loyalty is much more than Net Promoter Scores, and our organization’s memory is much richer than any data we collect in reports and dashboards.
The single largest risk may be that we measure too much, rather than recognizing that there are more ways than measurement alone can provide. Organizations do not become exceptional by quantifying everything; they become exceptional by discerning what must be quantified and what must be conversational, observant, coached, and trusted.
Numbers tell us what happened; people explain to us why the numbers happened.
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Many organizations believe that employees who disengage lack motivation or discipline. However, most of the time, people disengage for less obvious reasons, such as a lack of clarity.
When people are not fully aware of what matters, why it matters, how urgent it is, or how success is defined, a gradual shift in performance begins. Teams keep working, meetings keep happening, deadlines are being met, and dashboards are being updated, but truly productive momentum is fading.
The organization, while busy on the outside, is subtly becoming misaligned beneath the surface.
This disconnect rarely happens because employees lose interest. More often, it occurs when strategy gets fuzzy, or performance systems overwhelm rather than guide. In these instances, humans intuitively start to optimize for predictability rather than for impact.
The net result is an organization that is busy but lacks momentum.
Recognizing the psychological and operational impacts of vague objectives is critical for organizations striving to link strategy with execution. When goals lack clarity, the highest-performing teams will inevitably lose focus, ownership, and engagement over the longer term.
Why Employee Engagement Fades When Goals Feel Vague
Employees are more likely to remain engaged when they have a clear understanding of the purpose and meaning that their efforts will ultimately generate. When organizational objectives feel distant, intangible, inscrutable, or disconnected from daily actions, a sense of purpose dwindles.
Most organizations have their strategy documented in broad strokes. Common strategy descriptions are “become more innovative”, “focus on the customer”, “lead the transformation”, or “drive greater growth”. While appealing at the leadership level, these aspirations provide little direct guidance for employees.
This begins to create psychological dissonance between effort and outcome.
People naturally seek validation of their efforts and will readily respond to goals that provide evidence of what they are working towards. When individuals don’t have that direct visibility and connection to business outcomes, work becomes functional rather than purposeful.
Emotional investment then begins to decline with celerity.
Employees start to emphasize the accomplishment of immediate, tactical tasks over those that lead to meaningful organizational outcomes because the former offer clearer feedback and more predictable results.
Abstract goals also create divergent interpretations across the organization. Different parts of the organization define success using their own unique frame of reference rather than by overarching organizational goals.
Fragmentation ultimately weakens alignment as it expands throughout departments and teams.
This impact is exacerbated in larger, geographically diverse, or hybrid organizations.
Engagement doesn’t come from being assigned work; it comes from a clear understanding of what it represents.
The Psychological Impact of Unclear Priorities
In addition to reducing operational efficiency, undefined priorities induce psychological stress.
When individuals face competing demands, constantly shifting expectations, or inconsistent direction, they live with perpetual uncertainty about where to direct their efforts.
Humans crave clarity and predictability. When organizational priorities are murky, employees enter a continuous evaluation cycle, questioning their own decisions and seeking clarification from managers.
Stress levels increase
Employees may grow fearful that they are focusing on the wrong tasks or failing to meet expectations.
Cognitive efficiency decreases
Employees divert their attention to several perceived urgencies instead of focusing on tasks that generate strategic value.
This inevitably drives reactive, rather than strategic, decision-making.
Organizations rarely appreciate the compounding impact that this situation has on employee performance.
Conflicts arise, priorities must be constantly re-negotiated, and employees often give up trying to anticipate future work and simply manage the current uncertainty.
Overloading the Employee’s Mind with KPIs
Performance measurement is crucial for establishing and maintaining alignment across an organization; however, organizations often undermine performance when they measure too much.
As businesses become increasingly data-driven, organizations tend to develop more sophisticated KPI-based measurement systems and dashboards. Ironically, when overused, they can cause cognitive overload.
You can only keep a couple of metrics truly in focus. The moment you start asking people to juggle fifty metrics, attention becomes diffused.
This causes three distinct problems:
1. Paralysis
People cannot decide which metrics truly matter and either spread their effort thinly across all of them or focus only on the easiest metrics to influence.
2. Reduced Strategic Focus
Instead of focusing on organizational outcomes, individuals and teams focus on individual metrics.
You end up rewarding people for managing dashboards instead of solving problems.
3. Increased Mental Fatigue
People are forced to keep switching tasks, and the cost of switching accumulates.
The result is that the measurement system itself becomes demotivating.
The most effective organizations succeed because they know that using too many metrics creates more complexity and less clarity.
How Ambiguity Produces “Safe” Instead of Effective Work
An unclear environment can often lead employees to produce “safe” work.
“Safe” work implies completing tasks in a way that minimizes individual risk or visibility.
Ambiguous organizations tend to foster environments where risk-taking is discouraged.
The organization starts to become performance-oriented toward easily defensible activities.
The culture of innovation, as a result, becomes greatly hindered.
Employees are encouraged to maintain the status quo even if it isn’t delivering true organizational value.
By reducing the psychological costs of taking action, organizations increase motivation to do meaningful work.
The Distinction Between Compliance and Commitment
Compliance: employees work to do what they are told.
Commitment: employees work to achieve desired results in ways they believe add value.
These may appear similar on the surface, but what happens underneath is fundamentally different.
Compliant employees focus on doing enough to satisfy expectations.
Committed employees proactively solve problems, collaborate effectively, and adapt more willingly to change.
The gap between compliance and commitment is fundamentally a problem of unclear purpose, low trust, and lack of meaning.
Companies driven by commitment outperform those that rely solely on compliance.
Final Thoughts
The most fundamental reason companies fail isn’t that their people don’t work hard enough; it is that the work they do does not add sufficient value because they cannot clearly see the point.
Unclear priorities, complex systems, and undefined success measures dilute people’s focus, create psychological stress, and diminish initiative.
Strategic alignment is a psychological discipline as much as a tactical or operational one.
Without clear alignment, people can put in a lot of effort without ever having a significant impact because the connection between their work and intended results is too weak.
