Defining High-Performance Culture

The metrics you use to define ‘high performance’ will drive your team members’ behaviors. Make sure your definition leads to the behaviors you want.

To build a high-performance culture, you have to define what high performance is. What does high performance mean? How are you going to measure it? How much of your definition hinges on hard business metrics like sales, profitability, and growth, versus on qualitative metrics like morale, engagement, and customer satisfaction? The way you define and measure performance will dictate the practices you put in place to achieve it.

If you define performance by hard business metrics, you’ll get behaviors focused on driving those metrics. That won’t always get you the outcome you want in terms of building a high-performance culture. The focus ends up being on driving the number. And that can come at the expense of building a great culture.

If it’s defined by behaviors and soft metrics like engagement, retention, morale, and customer satisfaction, then you get those behaviors. The hard metrics like sales and profits should follow. Let’s look at a couple of examples of defining high performance.

In one organization I know, high performance was defined as sales and customer retention. These were two hard metrics focused on business results The sales reps and branch managers focused on those metrics and they didn’t invest time in training and development. They didn’t invest in anything that took time away from sales and customer retention. The culture they built was one of a grinding machine. Good associates were worn out. They were pushed so hard to hit those sales numbers that it wasn’t fun anymore. They left the organization. The people who stayed ended up being negative influences on the culture of the company. It cratered morale. This was not a high performance culture.

In another organization I’ve worked with, they defined their goals as culture, quality, patient satisfaction, and financial results. That was their balanced scorecard for measuring performance. Now look. Three of those are people-driven measures. They tie directly to culture. This organization views the financials as an outcome of those other three measures. This organization invests heavily in leadership development, training, and coaching high performers. They see development as key to performance because that development builds and reinforces their culture. Their performance reviews and rewards are based on this four-quadrant performance. They’ve ended up building a strong culture of people doing the right things for the right reasons. The big result is that this company is consistently ranked as one of the top 100 places to work.

How you define high performance will drive behaviors. So be mindful of the metrics you put in place because the behaviors are going to follow.

Want to learn more about creating a high-performing culture? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start building a high-performing culture. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!

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