What’s the Performance VS Growth Culture Difference?

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I recall a coaching conversation with a senior leader in a big tech company, and he was squirming over having to label at least one person on his team as a “low performer.” The organization declared itself having a high performance culture, where it systematically force-ranked all people as a basis for continuously removing the lowest rated performers. In this case, the leader felt that he had no poor performers, and detested the idea of demotivating a top performer and even his entire team, because the culture's “performance system” demanded it.

Tony Schwartz recently posted a great article in the Harvard Business Review. He points out that c-suite leaders are expected to be very focused on how to build higher performance cultures. However, research by Schwartz found that, “building a culture focused on performance may not be the best, healthiest, or most sustainable way to fuel results. Instead, it may be more effective to focus on creating a culture of growth.” What's the difference?

Schwartz refers to the work of Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey around “deliberately developmental cultures.” He emphasizes that building a growth culture requires psychological safety, a continuous learning mindset, and a relentless focus on everyone getting better. By contrast, Schwartz notes, “A performance-driven culture often exacerbates people’s fears by creating a zero-sum game in which people are either succeeding or failing and ‘winners’ quickly get weeded out from ‘losers.’ Results also matter in growth cultures, but in addition to rewarding success, they also treat failures and shortcomings as critical opportunities for learning and improving, individually and collectively.”

I appreciate the need to have a reasonable focus on performance versus growth. Too much attention on high performance eventually overwhelms people, and they burn out. On the other hand, too little challenge can create complacency and a lack of urgency. It’s important to recognize that strong growth cultures have the highest standards and expectations.

One unique and additional key learning for me through this research is captured by Schwartz’s wrap up, “A performance culture asks, ‘How much energy can we mobilize?’ and the answer is only a finite amount. A growth culture asks, ‘how much energy can we liberate?’ and the answer is infinite.”

Liberate the limitless energy in your organization by focusing on getting better and growing, versus over playing performance.

Think Big, Start Small, Act Now,

- Lorne

One Millennial View: We’ll often say, “no results = no job,” as a barebones DUH, because like it or not, if no one’s performing, that’s even less sustainable than the inevitable burnout of overworked high performers. Sometimes I think we get trapped into wondering who the performance versus growth culture debate is protecting, and it masquerades as some clever work-around to avoid shame, blame or finger pointing. The key is, high standards and expectations are not lost, there will be winners and losers, no matter what, however the mindset allows for valuable, fast learning. Performance starts at the hiring and onboarding process, so leaders shouldn’t create a team in the first place that they aren’t confident can learn and improve from the small mistakes we all know we’ll make from time to time.

- Garrett

Edited and published by Garrett Rubis

What’s the Performance VS Growth Culture Difference?

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