Contents
A system can create the illusion of clarity (targets, priorities, roadmaps) while the real work is moving somewhere else entirely. At what point do we lose the thread? It’s this question that this piece grew out of.
The bonus and the burnout
Several years ago, when I was CHRO, the company I worked for went through a particularly difficult year, one of those years where, at the group level, almost nothing went as planned. And yet, when it came time to review individual performance appraisals, one number stopped me cold: nearly every employee had met, or even exceeded, their annual objectives.
Curious, I asked one of them what their individual objectives were actually for. The answer was a shock:
I remember falling silent for a moment, wondering at what point we had lost the thread: at what point a system meant to align everyone’s efforts with the company’s collective success had turned into an accounting exercise, disconnected from what actually mattered to the business.
The second situation affected me differently. A colleague, whom I ran into in the parking lot, was returning to work after several months away. He told me he had broken down: a burnout. He had been coordinating a cross-functional program involving several teams, and had discovered along the way that priorities had shifted without anyone telling him: workstreams he depended on had been shut down, decisions made elsewhere that never made their way back to him.
These two situations, seemingly unrelated, actually point to the same thing: a system can create the illusion of clarity (targets, priorities, roadmaps) while the real work is moving somewhere else entirely.
The symptoms that don’t lie
The absence of a real performance culture shows up in a handful of symptoms that recur with troubling consistency from one organization to the next. Have you ever recognized one or more of these signs in your own organization?
- Certain things drift, with no one really feeling responsible for moving them forward.
- Departments operate in silos, each optimizing its own turf without much concern for the rest.
- Ambitious goals and action plans are announced, then quietly abandoned and never mentioned again.
- Problems everyone knows about persist for months.
- Behaviors that flatly contradict the stated values are tolerated.
- People avoid taking risks, for fear of losing their bonus over it.
- Targets are negotiated (and so is their evaluation) and stay more or less secret from one colleague to the next.
- Important decisions seem to take forever to get made.
- Senior management complains that middle managers lack tolerance for ambiguity, without asking who, upstream, is creating that ambiguity in the first place.
Taken individually, none of these symptoms is alarming. Their recurrence, however, reveals something essential: the cause is generally not bad will, but a systemic dysfunction. Treating each symptom in isolation only moves the problem around: as long as the cause remains untouched, another symptom shows up elsewhere.
The four levers, and who carries each one
You have the diagnosis. What follows is the method: the two prerequisites, then what falls to managers day to day, to the HR system, and to the CEO and the executive committee.
Frédéric Nolf · Former Global CHRO of IBA, executive coach, Operating Partner at Q7Leader
The execution discipline
What makes a company succeed? Less often than we think, the answer lies in the strategy itself. Leaders today know that their struggles come less from defining the strategy than from carrying it out.
“Do we have the right strategy?”
“Why can’t we deliver on what we’ve decided?”
It’s precisely this gap between deciding and executing that a performance culture exists to close. Far from being a set of HR tools or a motivational speech, a performance culture is, above all, a discipline of continuous execution, driven by real accountability.
A culture is never found in declarations (the stated values, the charters, the slogans) but in action: the behaviors observed day to day, and the processes people choose to follow or let slide.
What a performance culture is not
Before going further, it’s worth clearing up four misconceptions that come up constantly in the organizations I work with, because they shape entire decisions, often without anyone noticing.
01It’s not a values statement
Managing a culture is not about defining values and then communicating them. Open ten different values statements: you’ll find almost the same words every time (innovation, customer focus, respect, teamwork, excellence, integrity) just in a different order. These words aren’t wrong. They’re simply not actionable: no one changes their behavior because a word is posted in the lobby. Managing a culture means adopting the behaviors and processes that put our purpose into practice, not describing them.
02It’s not more pressure or more KPIs
A performance culture isn’t a matter of dosage either. That confusion is tempting, and costly: the more metrics pile up, the more everyone learns to optimize them locally, at the expense of the collective result. What distinguishes an organization that executes isn’t the amount of pressure applied, but the clarity of expectations, the quality of follow-through, and the consistency of behavior. Pressure produces spikes, not lasting performance.
03It’s not harsher “consequence management”
When I was CHRO, we worked with the executive committee on this topic, and a shortcut quickly crept into our discussions:
That shortcut isn’t harmless: it reflects a punitive reading of performance. Fortunately, we resisted that false certainty. The discipline of execution described in this piece isn’t measured by how quickly people are let go, but by how consistently we clarify expectations, provide support, and follow through on commitments made. When a departure does become necessary, it comes after real support has been given, not instead of it.
04It’s not the carrot and the stick
When I ask a room full of managers or HR people who still believes in the carrot-and-stick method, almost no one raises their hand. And yet most HR systems keep reproducing it without meaning to. A performance culture rules out neither sanctions nor rewards: they are real levers, but two levers among others. Above all, it is about building the adult company, where expectations are clarified, support is given, feedback is exchanged, and people are recognized, far more than they are rewarded or punished.
At a glance
With these misconceptions out of the way, this document sets out two prerequisites, then the levers of a performance culture based on who actually carries them within the organization.
CEO sponsorship and organizational design, without which nothing else takes hold.
Accountability and clarity of expectations, simplicity and continuity of management.
An aligned, agile system, rigorous follow-through, vigilance over incentives, and the development and allocation of talent.
The robustness of strategic choices, focus on critical roles and leading by example at the top.
Without these two conditions, none of the levers that follow really takes hold. They cannot be delegated.
First and foremost: CEO sponsorship
Nothing that follows can really take hold if the CEO isn’t personally its sponsor. This isn’t one option among others, nor a matter of leadership style: it’s a sine qua non.
A competent HR function, a well-designed process, and well-meaning managers aren’t enough if the top leader doesn’t personally believe that people are the company’s most decisive resource. When performance management is experienced as an HR exercise to be tolerated rather than a subject to be actively steered, even the best tools shrink into an administrative ritual.
Second: a design that enables execution
Before talking about behaviors, it’s worth checking that the organization itself is designed to execute today’s strategy, rather than still carrying the imprint of a previous one.
A centralized/decentralized trade-off that no longer fits the needs, a country-based logic that gets in the way of a business-unit logic (or the reverse) can account for a large part of execution difficulties, regardless of any question of culture or individual competence. Asking the design question before blaming people is a step that gets skipped far too often.
Accountability and cooperation. The simplicity and continuity of management.
Accountability and cooperation
When I ask a CEO I’m working with: “if you had a magic wand, what would you change immediately in your company?”, the answer is almost always the same: accountability, often followed by collaboration. In the other cases, it’s the reverse. Rarely anything else.
That’s not a statistical coincidence. These two words keep coming up because they point to the exact place where most organizations lose the thread: between what each person accomplishes on their own and what the company needs to deliver together.
The first pillar is accountability in its most demanding sense: everyone feeling responsible for their contribution to the collective results.
The problem is rarely bad will. It’s more insidious: the absence of any link between individual performance and collective performance. Employees hit their personal targets while the company misses its own. And in that gap, no one really feels accountable for the shortfall.
A poorly understood sense of accountability can create a silo effect: everyone defends their own turf and their own numbers. A genuine performance culture, then, holds together two inseparable dimensions: individual responsibility and cooperation.
This responsibility also assumes that expectations have been clearly set. A common failing among leaders is to leave ambiguity in their decisions to preserve good relationships, assuming the next level down will “figure it out”. That delegated ambiguity spreads uncertainty at every level.
Accountability flows from real commitment, which itself depends on the quality of the debate that precedes a decision. A team that hasn’t had the chance to openly clash over its views never fully commits: it merely complies. Peer-to-peer accountability can only emerge if everyone has genuinely had a voice beforehand.
The second pillar, cooperation, follows the same demand: it is built as a set of concrete mechanisms, not as a nice-to-have.
The “Levers of Robust Cooperation” model, developed by the Belgian firm Viavectis, identifies six of them, only one of which is a prerequisite: a common goal, a shared vision ambitious enough, embodied enough and co-built enough to give meaning and genuinely align actions.
The other five levers are not sequential: they are built continuously, among peers, before they can feed the rest of the organization.
These two behaviors cannot be decreed: they are worked on first within the executive committee, whose example conditions everything else. We come back to this in part 04.
The simplicity and continuity of management
A manager needs to clarify expectations, provide ongoing support, give feedback and recognize work well done. Nothing sophisticated about it, but a continuous exercise, not an annual review. That obvious truth runs into a long-documented reality.
Sources: research on managerial talent (10% / 83%) · Gallup for the variance in engagement (70%).
That means seriously supporting managers rather than assuming the role can be learned on one’s own.
This is also what makes continuous performance management preferable to the classic annual review. When the only moment set aside for performance is a year-end meeting, it becomes a dreaded event rather than the natural conclusion of ongoing dialogue. A manager who checks in regularly with their team, by contrast, turns the formal review into a simple summary of what’s already been said.
The HR function benefits from making the same shift: from guardian of the process to coach of the managers.
What management borrows from the caring professions
This kind of support has a name in other professions: supervision. Therapists, psychologists, coaches and social workers round out their training with regular sessions where they present real cases to peers or to an experienced supervisor.
Managing people is no less demanding. It’s this kind of supervision, far more than a string of out-of-context training courses, that managers actually need.
An aligned, agile system · From diagnosis to action · Vigilance over incentives · Developing and allocating talent
An aligned HR system, not a parallel universe
A trap awaits any organization that formalizes its performance management: watching the HR system take on a life of its own and drift away from business reality. Organizations say they want agility, all while freezing individual targets at the start of the year as if priorities would never shift again. In the worst cases, the very system meant to support performance becomes counterproductive.
01In service of collective execution
Constantly checking that individual targets, evaluation rituals and tracking tools remain in service of the common result.
02Transparency of information
Teams that only have a partial view of how the business is doing lose their ability to make smart trade-offs among their priorities.
03Processes that evolve
Acknowledging that HR processes themselves need to move, rather than defending them because they exist.
In a VUCA world, making marginal fixes to processes inherited from the past isn’t always enough: sometimes the system needs to be rebuilt from scratch.
From diagnosis to action: a system that actually moves the needle
Performance management and performance evaluation are not the same thing. The same is true of talent management: identifying a situation only has value if that identification leads to action.
Too many talent reviews still end up producing matrices, categories or lists of names that give the impression a diagnosis has been made, but ultimately change very little. A few months later, the same people are often back in the same boxes, the same difficult situations are still there, and the actions that were decided on never got past the intention stage.
It starts with the quality of the diagnosis. To act together, managers and HR need a shared vocabulary, simple enough for everyone to understand and use, robust enough to bring some objectivity to the discussion. It needs to distinguish the situations that genuinely call for action:
- Someone whose potential is underused
- An employee struggling in their role
- A talent who needs exposure to different experiences
- A mismatch between a person and their position
- A succession risk
- A critical role that isn’t adequately covered
This shared vocabulary obviously doesn’t replace managerial judgment. It equips it. It forces us to spell out what would otherwise stay at the level of an impression.
The diagnosis needs to be objective enough and grounded enough in reality to be useful, but above all designed from the outset to lead to action. A good system doesn’t just describe talent: it helps managers identify the situations that call for intervention, choose the right action, and track its implementation over time.
The talent review as collective supervision
A talent review shouldn’t be just a moment for evaluating people. By comparing their diagnoses, managers make their own reasoning, hesitations and sometimes blind spots visible. Peers can challenge a reading, share a similar experience or suggest a different way of acting. It’s not just about discussing people, it’s about collectively learning to manage them better.
Technology can play a decisive role here, provided it doesn’t become just another administrative layer. It should support this discipline: structuring the shared vocabulary, surfacing the situations that require action, facilitating diagnosis, documenting decisions and above all making it possible to regularly revisit the commitments made.
Staying vigilant on incentives
No serious thinking about performance culture can skip a critical look at variable pay. The question is simple: what are we actually incentivizing, and does it produce the behavior we’re after?
Many organizations, for that matter, have never actually checked whether their individual variable pay changes behavior at all, or whether it has simply become an expected component of compensation.
A high bar that doesn’t rule out caring for people
A performance culture is not at odds with a “people” culture. A 2023 McKinsey Global Institute study of nearly 1,800 companies shows that organizations combining performance discipline with investment in human capital consistently outperform those that bet on only one of the two.
Clarity, follow-through, consistency.
Development, ongoing attention.
But developing people is only half the equation. The other half is maximizing the use of the talent already on hand: a capable employee who is poorly positioned or underused represents lost value.
The robustness of strategic choices · Critical roles · Leading by example at the top
Robustness, an ally of performance over time
Biologist Olivier Hamant observes that living systems don’t try to constantly maximize a single indicator. Instead, they bet on robustness: the capacity to remain stable under disruption through built-in slack, redundancy and diversity.
This idea isn’t at odds with performance: it’s what guarantees its durability. A system that is hyper-specialized and pushed to the limits of its output becomes fragile. Applied to a company, this insight highlights the risk of short-term performance achieved by cutting into tolerance margins, versatility or people’s development.
Room to maneuver rather than output pushed to the maximum.
Critical roles with backup coverage, able to absorb shocks.
Teams that have developed multiple skill sets.
In a VUCA world, these margins are what set apart performance that lasts from performance that collapses at the first jolt.
Focusing on critical roles
A performance culture concerns the whole organization, but top management needs to pay heightened attention to a small number of genuinely critical roles.
These roles aren’t necessarily at the top of the org chart: a technical expert, the manager of a key process or a frontline team leader can carry more weight in execution than a position that ranks higher on paper.
01Identify these roles
02Know who holds them
03Know what is working and what isn’t
04Track them very closely
The actions identified in talent reviews need to be tracked with the same discipline as a sales or financial action plan.
A discipline that takes a concrete form
In the Q7Leader methodology I deploy with my clients, each manager profiles their team members in a few minutes, using a closed seven-question model that establishes a shared vocabulary between managers and HR.
A closed model that establishes a shared vocabulary between managers and HR.
Development of Organization and Talent: moments of co-development and supervision where peers help each manager turn a diagnosis into a concrete action.
Every action that is decided on is logged with a named owner, the manager, and followed through by the HRBPs.
Without that follow-through, the risk is the status quo, procrastination, or decisions made too unilaterally.
The system, built on the People Model Canvas by Reggy-Charles Degen, is deliberately prescriptive: it doesn’t stop at diagnosis, it pushes toward decision. Performance evaluation thus becomes performance evolution.
This follow-through is also a source of organizational data, a subject developed in the white paper “The Evidence-Based CHRO”.
Leading by example at the top
Behaviors observed at the top tend to reproduce themselves elsewhere in the system, almost by mimicry. If leaders pay real, sustained attention to talent issues, the layers below adopt the same reflexes. Conversely, if members of the executive committee protect their own turf rather than the collective outcome, or leave their disagreements unresolved, there’s no reason accountability and cooperation should emerge anywhere else. You cannot demand of a team what you don’t practice yourself at the top.
Working on the executive committee’s own example, then, often means clearing out accumulated unspoken issues: poorly defined responsibilities, decisions never fully settled, tensions kept quiet to preserve the appearance of harmony.
That requires a minimum level of psychological safety at the top. As long as disagreements and mistakes cannot be named there without fear, it’s wishful thinking to expect teams further down to do so.
Should you announce it?
Should a performance-culture initiative be announced with a big transformation narrative? The temptation is strong, but so is the risk, for two reasons.
The first is the organization’s immune system: a big announcement triggers the wariness of people who have already watched several waves of communication come and go with nothing to show for them. The second is the expectation gap: it creates a gap between the expectations it raises and the concrete actions that take time to become visible.
It’s better to put new practices in place, repeat them and make them visible than to build an ambitious narrative around them.
In summary
Execution isn’t decreed, it’s built, provided everyone plays their part.
01Managers
Clarify expectations, drive accountability without creating silos, and make feedback and recognition an ongoing habit.
02The HR system
Stays aligned with business reality, tracks action plans over time, keeps a critical eye on incentives, and develops and allocates talent with the same rigor as capital.
03The CEO and the executive committee
Build the robustness needed in a VUCA world, focus on critical roles, and embody, by example, what they expect from everyone else.
In the end, culture is built far more through quiet, repeated execution than through the announcement, however tempting that announcement may be.
Frédéric Nolf
Former Global CHRO of IBA, host of the podcast The HR Masterclass, executive coach and Operating Partner at Q7Leader. He works with CEOs and executive committees on performance culture and talent management.
The framework, software and advisory team that turn HR into a strategic function.
Where is your organization losing the thread?
Thirty minutes is enough for a first honest diagnosis: what was decided, what is actually being executed, and the gap between the two.
- You describe your context: strategy, organization, critical roles.
- We identify the two or three places where execution is getting lost.
- You leave with concrete leads.
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