Building a performance culture without losing your people centricity

Most leadership teams are trying to solve the same problem.

How do we drive stronger performance, faster decisions and higher productivity without burning people out or eroding the culture that made us successful in the first place

Very few organisations can deliver sustainable results and look after their people. There are inherent tensions here that we explore in our Performance with Heart research.

Rather than choosing between performance and care, our research suggests the real work is learning how to hold both.

What we found

In our recent Performance with Heart study, we spoke to leaders across multiple sectors who are resetting their performance agenda. Many are redesigning structures, tightening cost discipline and raising expectations.

More than 80% of the companies in our research are trying to drive a stronger performance culture. But many are experiencing serious negative consequences by over indexing on it. Trust erodes. People burn out or quietly check out. The culture drifts towards “win at all costs” or “never good enough”.

On the other side, some organisations lean hard into being “people first”. Leaders soften standards, avoid tough conversations and over protect teams from pressure. It feels caring, but performance stalls and change becomes harder to land.

Our research highlights that the most effective organisations do something different. They treat performance and heart as a set of tensions to navigate, rather than a choice to make. For example:

• High standards and psychological safety
  
• Clarity and inclusion in decisions
  
• Pace and genuine consideration of impact
  

We captured these tensions in a simple framework and saw four broad leadership culture patterns emerge, from low performance and low heart through to a “pioneer” profile that combines strong results with a genuinely people centred culture.

Why a diagnostic

You cannot change what you cannot see.

In many organisations, the internal narrative about culture is loud but vague. Senior teams trade opinions about whether they are “too soft” or “too hard” on performance, often without shared evidence.

The Performance with Heart leadership culture diagnostic is designed to cut through this.

In around ten minutes, it gives you a clear snapshot of

• How leaders are showing up in practice
  
• Where your culture helps performance and where it holds it back
  
• Where expectations are clear and where they are muddy
  
• Where decisions move quickly and where they get stuck
  
• Where people feel stretched in a healthy way and where they feel worn out
  

The diagnostic is built around the core tensions from our research and shows where you may be over indexing on performance or on heart. It gives leadership teams a shared starting point for an honest conversation about the culture they have today and the culture they need for what comes next.

An invitation

Performance with Heart is about moving beyond the pendulum swing between results and care. It is about building a culture where people can do the best work of their careers without losing themselves in the process.

If you are resetting your performance agenda and want to avoid a “win at all costs” culture, we invite you to explore where your organisation stands.

There can be an overriding sense of needing to deliver more, with fewer resources, whilst also maintaining a people first culture.

The big questions? How do companies achieve this?

We asked over 80 organisations, of all shapes and sizes, from 500 employees to 50,000 to find out. The insights learned can be found in the pack below.