Leaders: Let’s exchange Performance for Contribution

From the age of 13 I knew about Performance. I was a cycle racer. Every waking moment of my day was spent obsessing around my performance and what would improve my finishing position. There were times, limits, goals, and they all had to be met and improved upon. A good time, a good position and I’d performed well. A time that was less good than the previous race and I’d feel deflated and down on myself. Then I entered the adult world and everything in the language of the work-place was built around that same word – Performance; Performance indicators, performance management, performance coaching, high performers, poor performers, performance reviews and the dreaded Performance Improvement Plan. 

I’ve been wondering, who said that was a good and helpful thing to focus on? Who said that it was the best way to frame how I earn my income, or how I fulfil my potential?  Who said that focus on performance is the most helpful frame for realising what it means to flourish as a human being?  I am only too aware that a business must make money, to both feed everyone and ensure the business keeps on developing, but is performance driven focus the right way of doing this?

I want to challenge the uncritical use of the word Performance.  Getting the word wrong matters.  We lost a generation of work mentality to Jack Welch’s ruthless focus of business on shareholder value, only to hear decades later, from the same man, that it was ‘the dumbest idea in the world’. We can blindly use words because they seem to catch on easily and shape the business narrative and the behaviours of the workplace, only to discover that it was the wrong word, wrong narrative, wrong focus and a wrong shaping of a very human workforce.

It seems that the P word originated in business, with textile mill owner Robert Owens, in the early 1800’s and later surfaced in Australia, with management consultant Walter D Scott, in the 1920’s. The scientific-industrial models turned everything, including people, into parts of a machine, according to this scientific theory of management. Everything is a functioning part of a machine that is either working well, or ineffectively, optimally or below standard, to produce a final output. Just as the loom had a thousand working parts that together produced a cotton shirt, so the individual people in that factory were also viewed as parts in the management machine. 

The performance-centric model of business and organisational effectiveness, seems to have been reinforced more recently by the introduction of the sports models of performance. The Inner Game theory gave us, “Performance = Potential – Interference”, in management performance development. We have not been able to step away from the P word for almost 200 years. Everything had to prove its value in the currency of Performance. This obsession with performance at work has grown so acceptable that it has now flooded into every aspect of life. My friends’ pre-schoolers get performance reports, and it has seeped its way into every level of education, from Primary to Tertiary. 

The underlying problem with the P word is one of judgement. Even when we try to make it sound like a neutral judgement, ‘your performance is not up to standard’, it is in reality a personal judgement, meaning that you, the performer, isn’t up to standard. What we know about the conditions required for people releasing their full potential, is that judgement is definitely a crusher, not an enabler.

Is Performance the right word for business, organisations or education? The unspoken reality is that there will be someone behind everyone, with a clip-board, judging their performance. Getting the focus-word wrong is dangerous, as the Jack Welch story reminds us. I am reminded of the words of Martin Luther King Jnr, when he said,

“There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think”

I believe it is time that we paused to think. Why? Because if we are unquestioningly serving the wrong word (Performance), then it will not be benefiting and liberating the flourishing of the millions of humans who go to work each day.

I want to try out a different word to replace performance, to create some dissonance, some challenge, with the desire for a more human, more congruent focus to our working lives and our wider lives. 

The word that I want to suggest is contribution.

 Contribution is about giving, not about judgement. It takes us from, ‘what are you doing?’, to, ‘what are you giving? What value are you adding?’ I think this is vitally important to work (as well as every other area of our lives).  Going back to the 4th century BCE Chanakya, accredited with being the founder of political science in India said, ‘the leader shall consider as good, not what pleases himself but what pleases his followers; the leader is a paid servant’.  Lao-Tzu (570 - 490 BCE), said the same, so did Jesus, so did the Prophet in Islam. Perennial wisdom says that leadership is about serving, contributing to others, whether that is an individual, a work force, a community, or a society. 

I remember listening to the Nigerian Nobel Laureate Chinua Achebe, one evening in Cambridge, where he spoke these words with such authority,

“Leadership exists for the benefit of others”.

If we look at one of the founders of the modern economy, Adam Smith, he was clear that business exists for a purpose – to create hope for people. The core question that business has to answer is, is it contributing to hope in people lives?  Business exists to fight poverty, to fight inequality, injustice and hopelessness. Nobel Laureate Mohamed Yunus challenges the inherent selfishness of the performance - centric business model in his crusade to establish social businesses, where profit is invested in the mission and the social good, not into the pockets of a few. One of the iconic stories in the legends of King Arthur and his knights, is the tale of Parsifal. Parsifal’s painful journey to find the Holy Grail finally confronts him with deep truth about the Grail, the true meaning of life. What he discovered was,

“the Grail serves those who serve”

He did not learn, 

“the Grail serves those who perform”

Contribution puts the focus on the leadership to get extra clear about the mission and contribution that the organisation is making to its staff, its customers, its community, and wider society. This clarity then provides the platform for each member of staff, to then ask themselves a simple question,

“What did I do today that contributes to the overall contribution of the organisation?”

 A contributing attitude at the centre of the organisation is essential.  A contributing business model creates a contribution mindset amongst its staff. A current example of organisations and individuals that are not demonstrating this, are those who are avoiding paying tax. Paying tax isn’t a punishment against entrepreneurs, it is a contribution to our children’s school, their free health care, the roads we drive them to school on, the public services that keep them safe. 

So, in summary.

To shift our mindsets to thinking in terms of contributing, ensures that the organisations mission and culture is aligned with the true purpose of business in society. How is the whole organisation contributing to people and planet, community and society?

To shift to contribution refocuses the whole work force into a humanity project, rather than a largely profit project. 

To shift to contribution realigns the management conversations around whether an individual is contributing. How are they? What help do they need to contribute? 

Performance, I would argue, is outdated and it doesn’t provide sustainable motivation for most and doesn’t match the true purpose of business and organisations. Contribution is deeply aligned with the purpose and the most important outcome of business – the human flourishing of all.

Photo by Wynand van Niekerk