Performance and the Long Game

She thought she was saying one thing, the room heard several

I was in the room once when a chief executive stood up in front of her leadership team to talk about performance, and she meant it well, talking about lifting the bar and about the year ahead, about everyone needing to step up, plainly believing every word of it. What caught my attention was not her, though, it was the room, and the way the same words were landing on people in completely different ways, because some of them sat up, the ones who hear a word like perform as a kind of starting gun, leaning in, already half out of their chairs, energised and ready to go and chase the thing down, while right alongside them others were folding inward, arms coming across chests, a few notes taken that I would put money on never being read again, one or two faces settling into that polite, attentive mask good executives learn to wear when they have stopped really listening. She thought she was giving one talk, and the room was hearing several.

The difficulty is that she meant one thing by the word, do better, grow, take some pride in the craft, but performance never lands as one thing, and for some of the people sitting there it meant being the best, the scoreboard, winning at any cost, while for others it meant doing their best and being judged on it regardless, and for a fair few it had long since curdled into something close to a dirty word, a stand-in for outcomes chosen over people and profit chosen over culture, the language of the spreadsheet rather than the language of the human beings actually doing the work. The word carries all of that at the same time, which is exactly why it puts people on edge, and most of us feel that long before we can put a name to it.

What I have come to believe, after years spent inside these organisations, is that sustainable high performance does not resolve that tension by picking a side, it holds onto both of them at once, which is why the leaders who win once and then keep on winning are not the ones who double down on the scoreboard and drive people straight through it, but the ones who manage to keep two true things in the same hand at the same time, the results and the people who actually produce them, refusing to trade one off against the other.

There is good research behind this, even if it rarely makes it into the boardroom, and Wendy Smith and Marianne Lewis, writing in the Academy of Management Review, describe how the most resilient organisations treat competing demands not as a problem to be solved once and then filed away, but as an ongoing tension to be worked, a both/and rather than an either/or. The leaders who try to settle it permanently, deciding that this year it is all about growth and the people can wait their turn, tend to get a short burst and then a long correction, while the ones who can hold the tension keep performing.

This is the longer game, and it asks for a longer kind of vision, the sort Mark Batterson is pointing at when he talks about playing the long game, about making decisions with a horizon set well beyond the next quarter, which is exactly how the best chief executives I have worked with think. They are not indifferent to this month's numbers, they simply refuse to build the whole house on them, and they spend most of their attention somewhere far less obvious and far more important, on the conditions that make good performance possible in the first place.

I say that because of something I have watched play out again and again, which is that a one-off result can happen for all sorts of reasons, a kind market, a heroic individual, a deadline that frightened everyone into focus for a fortnight, whereas continuous performance is a different animal altogether, because it is built, coming out of an environment that has been designed on purpose to let an organisation breathe and reflect and learn and experiment, so that getting better becomes the ordinary state of things rather than the occasional happy surprise.

We tend to assume the way to get better is simply to do more, and Giada Di Stefano and her colleagues at Harvard and HEC Paris put that assumption to the test and found close to the opposite, because when they had people stop and reflect on what they had learned rather than push straight on to the next task, the reflecting group went on to perform almost twenty-three per cent better on the assessment that followed, and they managed it while spending less time actually working than the group that just ploughed ahead. The pause was not the price they paid for performance, it turned out to be where the performance came from, and yet I have found that hardly any organisation builds real room for it, and most still treat reflection as a luxury for when the work finally eases off, which of course it never does.

The other thing these environments do, and this is the part leaders most often get wrong, is make sure the right voices are heard at the right time, and I used to think the smartest organisations were simply the ones that hired the smartest people (and yes, I spent a fair few years getting this exactly wrong myself), but I have watched enough rooms now to know that is not where it lives, because the question is not whether a leader surrounds themselves with clever people, it is whether the environment lets those voices actually be heard. Anita Woolley and her colleagues found something worth sitting with when they studied group intelligence, in a paper published in Science, because a group's collective intelligence had remarkably little to do with the average IQ of its members, and a great deal to do with whether people took real turns in the conversation rather than a few voices running the room, and with how well members read one another, which means you can put your brightest people in a room where only the loudest get any airtime and waste most of what you are paying for.

This is why psychological safety matters as much as it does, and why it gets so badly misread as something soft, when Amy Edmondson's work shows that the teams which learn fastest are the ones where people feel able to speak up, ask the awkward question and own the mistake, without the fear that it will be filed away and used against them later. That is not comfort for its own sake, it is how an organisation actually finds out what is going on in time to do something about it, and the environment that feels humane turns out to be the one that performs, which still seems to take people by surprise.

And all of this rests on the leaders themselves, on whether they are doing the work that only their level can do, which is what Ram Charan and his colleagues are describing in the Leadership Pipeline when they talk about the particular kind of value leaders are meant to create at each level, and how much damage gets done when senior people spend their days buried in work that properly belongs two rungs below them, busy and useful and in entirely the wrong place, because the leader who is lost in the to-do list is not building the conditions for anyone else to perform, they are just busy, and busy is not the same thing.

So I have started paying close attention to the questions these leaders ask, the ones running genuinely healthy, high-performing cultures, because I have found the questions matter rather more than the answers:

1. Are we honestly clear, together, about what success even looks like, or have we just assumed we are?

2. Do our leaders understand how their own role adds value to that success in a way that means something, or are they simply being busy?

3. Are we building the conditions for success, or working our way down a list of things to do and calling it a strategy?

4. Are we running at a rhythm that lets people reflect and learn and improve, or have we designed reflection out of the week without ever deciding to?

5. Whose voices do we actually hear from, and are they the right ones for the moment we are in?

6. Can we perform across every context and be relied upon, or do we only shine when the conditions happen to fall in our favour?

None of these are quick questions, and that is rather the point, because they cannot be answered on the run, they need the one thing most leaders have trained themselves out of, which is the willingness to pause long enough to think clearly before they act. That pause is where presence comes from, and presence is what shapes the environment, and the environment is what lets performance keep happening long after the kind quarter has gone, so that while the win certainly matters, I have come to think it is never really the thing worth chasing, and the thing worth chasing is whatever sits underneath it and keeps producing wins, again and again, long after any single result has been forgotten. So perhaps the question worth sitting with is the uncomfortable one, which is this: if your results vanished tomorrow, would the conditions still be there to produce them all over again?

References

Smith, W. K., and Lewis, M. W. (2011). Toward a theory of paradox: a dynamic equilibrium model of organizing. Academy of Management Review, 36(2), 381-403.

Batterson, M. (2025). Gradually Then Suddenly: How to Dream Bigger, Decide Better, and Leave a Lasting Legacy. Multnomah.

Di Stefano, G., Gino, F., Pisano, G. P., and Staats, B. R. (2016). Making experience count: the role of reflection in individual learning. Harvard Business School NOM Unit Working Paper No. 14-093.

Woolley, A. W., Chabris, C. F., Pentland, A., Hashmi, N., and Malone, T. W. (2010). Evidence for a collective intelligence factor in the performance of human groups. Science, 330(6004), 686-688.

Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383.

Charan, R., Drotter, S., Noel, J., and Jonasen, K. (2024). The Leadership Pipeline: How to Build the Leadership-Powered Company (3rd ed.). Jossey-Bass.