The Performance Culture Wake-Up Call: Don’t Forget What Drives It

22 May The Performance Culture Wake-Up Call: Don’t Forget What Drives It

There’s a word showing up with striking frequency in CEO communications right now: performance. Bloomberg recently noted that the phrase “performance culture” is appearing in executive messaging at an accelerated pace — and if you’ve been paying attention to the C-suite lately, you’re not surprised. Amazon, Salesforce, Disney, and dozens of other major companies have been sending an unmistakable signal: the era of ambient accountability is over.

Some employees are caught off guard by the shift in tone. I’m not.

Why This Moment Was Coming

We are living through a fiercely competitive moment. AI is reshaping industries almost overnight. Markets are tightening. The job market, once a seller’s paradise for talent, has swung back toward employers. Leaders who spent the last several years investing heavily in employee experience, psychological safety, and purpose-driven culture are now asking a pointed follow-up question: But are we actually winning?

There’s also, I suspect, a quieter force at work. The pandemic accelerated a years-long emphasis on employee experience — flexibility, wellness, belonging, meaning. Much of that investment was genuinely valuable. But some of it tipped into a kind of over-correction, where the discomfort inherent in high performance — honest feedback, demanding standards, the productive tension of stretch goals — got quietly shelved in the name of wellbeing. The pendulum, as pendulums do, is swinging back.

The Real Danger Isn’t High Expectations

Here’s what concerns me about this moment, and I want to be direct about it: the danger is not that leaders are raising the bar. That’s long overdue in many organizations.

The danger is that leaders will swing the pendulum so far that they abandon the very things that make high performance sustainable.

High performance doesn’t come from pressure alone. It never has. The research — and decades of my own work with organizations around the world — points consistently to the same sources:

Purpose. People perform at their highest when they believe the work matters. Not just that their job matters, but that the organization itself is doing something worth doing. Strip away purpose in the name of efficiency, and you don’t get a performance culture. You get compliance — and compliance is the enemy of excellence.

A focus on getting better, not just looking good. True performance cultures are relentlessly oriented toward growth. They create psychological safety not as a comfort measure, but as a performance strategy — because people only take the risks and surface the truths that lead to breakthrough when they aren’t afraid of being punished for honesty.

Collaboration, feedback, and learning. The highest-performing teams I’ve studied aren’t collections of individual star performers grinding in isolation. They are communities of people committed to each other’s development, willing to give and receive hard feedback, and united by a shared obsession with doing the work better tomorrow than they did it today.

There Is No Contradiction Here

Years ago, a CEO said something to me that I’ve never forgotten. We were talking about the cycles organizations go through, and he shook his head and said: “Most companies just swing back and forth — driving profits and performance for a while, then swinging over to taking care of their people and obsessing over customers. We keep swinging. Why don’t we just realize we need both, all the time?”

I’ve been making this argument for most of my career ever since: purpose and performance are not opposites. They are partners.

My keynotes on Stepping Up and Leading High Performance Teams have always been about exactly this combination — high expectations alongside deep meaning. When a leader stops accepting mediocrity and calls a team to be genuinely better, something remarkable often happens: people respond. Most of us, at some level, want to be on a winning team. We want to be part of something excellent. We are waiting for someone to ask more of us.

The leader who raises standards while deepening the sense of purpose isn’t creating tension. They’re creating conditions for extraordinary performance.

What Leaders Should Actually Do Right Now

As you recalibrate your culture toward performance, ask yourself these questions:

1. Are we clear on why we exist — and does our team feel it? Performance without purpose is exhausting. Purpose without performance is hollow. You need both, and right now you need to make sure the “why” hasn’t gotten lost in the push for results.
2. Are we measuring growth, or just outcomes? A true performance culture tracks whether people are getting better — not just whether they hit their numbers.
3. Is feedback flowing freely? If your people are afraid to tell you what’s not working, you don’t have a performance culture. You have a performance theater.
4. Are we calling people to excellence, or just punishing underperformance? There’s a profound difference between a culture that inspires people to be their best and one that simply makes them afraid of being their worst.

The Bottom Line

The CEOs leaning hard into performance language are right that this moment demands more. The competitive environment is real. The need for results is real. Mediocrity is not an option for any organization that wants to survive the next decade.

But the leaders who will actually build high-performing organizations are the ones who understand that performance is an outcome — not a culture in itself. It is the product of purpose, growth, trust, and extraordinary human commitment.

Don’t swing the pendulum. Hold both.