Drivers of Performance: Why Managing Outputs Alone Fails Your Team

Lee: What if the performance problem on your team is not actually a performance problem at all? What if the issue is not the person, but the conditions around the person? And what if every conversation you're having about underperformance is actually making things worse? Welcome to Level Up Leadership. I'm Lee and today we're getting into something that's critical to how leaders actually improve results. The difference between managing performance and managing the drivers of performance. They sound similar. They're not. And confusing the two is one of the most common and costly mistakes I see. Particularly for those under pressure to deliver, uh, in complex, fast moving organizations. Here's what we're going to cover. First, I want to draw a clear line between performance as an outcome and the conditions that shape the outcome. Then we're going to look at what happens when leaders over manage the output and under manage the environment. After that, I want to offer you a practical framework for thinking about the real drivers of performance, grounded in the kind of situations real leaders face every day. And we'll close with one sharp takeaway and one action you can take right now. Alright, let's get into it.

Narrator: Welcome to the Level Up Leadership podcast. If you found this episode, that probably means you're a leader looking to level up their leadership game. If that's right, make sure you follow and subscribe to Level Up Leadership now. Okay, here's today's episode.

Lee: Let me start with a question. When you look at your team and you see someone who is not quite performing to the level you need, what's your first instinct? If you're honest, for most leaders, the instinct is to have a conversation about performance, talk about outputs, review the numbers, set clearer expectations, maybe put something in writing. And sometimes, yep, that is exactly the right thing to do. Crack on. But here's what I want you to sit with for a moment. Performance is an outcome. It is a result. It is the thing that happens at the end of a chain of cause and effect. And when we jump straight to managing the outcome without understanding the chain that produced it, we are essentially treating a symptom without diagnosing the condition. Think about it this way. If a member of your team isn't performing, you could stand over them and you could demand they work harder, work faster. You could measure everything they're doing, measure every target and have serious conversations about why they're not meeting it. But none of that's going to matter if they haven't got the tools to do the job or the competencies and the training to know how to do it. Now that might sound like a bit of a stretch, but I genuinely believe this is what's happening in some organizations. Every, every day, leaders are standing over the people, measuring the outputs, holding reviews and wondering why nothing changes, while the conditions that actually determine performance remain entirely unexamined. Performance is what you see. The drivers of performance are, uh, what you need to understand. And the job of a leader is not just to hold people to account for outcomes. It is to understand and actively shape the environment in which those outcomes are produced. This distinction matters. Many leaders I've spoken to are operating in genuinely complex conditions, leading teams through significant change, navigating AI adoption, managing workloads that, uh, have stretched well beyond what they were designed to handle. In those conditions, you cannot afford to only look at the scoreboard. You need to understand the game being played on the pitch. Here's what over managing performance looks like in practice. I'm going to be direct about this because I think it's more common than most leaders want to admit. It looks like weekly or daily reporting on metrics without asking what's influencing those metrics. It looks like performance review conversations that focus almost entirely on what someone has or has not delivered, with very little time spent on what was getting in the way. It looks like a leader who is very clear on what they need from people, but less clear on whether those people have what they need to actually produce it. The result? Short term compliance. People respond to the pressure if they can. They tighten up. They hit the numbers this week, perhaps by cutting corners, deferring the hard work, or simply looking busy. But they do not fundamentally change because nothing in the system has changed. The underlying drivers, the things that actually produce sustainable performance, remain untouched. And over time, something else happens

Narrator: when

Lee: people feel perpetually judged on outputs without feeling supported in the process. Trust erodes, energy dips. The most capable people, the ones with options, start looking elsewhere, and the leader ends up in a cycle of managing underperformance rather than building performance, which are two very different things. I want to be clear, accountability is crucial. I'm a huge advocate for single point accountability, and I've spoken about this many times. But we must not confuse accountability with the act of simply demanding performance. Accountability means clarity of realistic standards, providing someone with everything they need to be able to do the work and the mechanism to ask for help when they need it, and then holding them to account if they fail to deliver what they should reasonably have been expected to do. But accountability without support is not leadership. It's pressure. Support without accountability is also not leadership. It's avoidance. The question is whether you are doing both and whether you're doing them in the right order. When performance is lagging, the right first question is not. Why is this person not delivering the right first question is, what conditions are shaping this person's ability to deliver? Uh, that shifting question changes everything about the conversation that follows. So what are the actual drivers of performance? I'm going to give you a practical framework here, not a long academic list, but a set of honest questions a leader can use to diagnose what's really going on. The first driver is clarity. Does this person genuinely understand what is expected of them and why? Not just the task, but the standard, the context and the priority. Unclear expectations are, uh, one of the single most common causes of underperformance, and they are entirely within the leader's control to fix. I am constantly surprised by how often a leader believes they've communicated clearly, while the person receiving the communication has a significantly different understanding of what they were being asked to do. The second driver is capability. Does this person have the skills, knowledge and tools they actually need to do this work? Well, now it sounds obvious, but in practice it is frequently glossed over, especially during periods of change or when new technology is being introduced. We put people into new situations, hand them new responsibilities, and then manage them on outputs before the capability has been built. This is not a performance problem. That is a development gap dressed up as a performance problem. The third driver is energy. It's this person's mental and physical ability to do their best. Workload, stress, burnout and personal circumstances, and even just the relentless pace of change. All of these things effectively affect the quality of someone's output, but they are invisible on a performance dashboard. The fourth driver is trust. Is there enough psychological safety in this environment for people to raise problems, ask for help, and be honest about what's going wrong? When trust is low, people manage upward. They tell you what they think you want to hear. They hide the problems until they become a crisis. And a leader can read a set of progress reports that bear almost no resemblance to the reality on the ground. In Enhanced Leadership, I talk about the coaching relationship as an example of this. Real trust takes time to build. I've had coaching clients spend the first several sessions presenting a version of themselves before they felt safe enough to be genuinely vulnerable and ask for help in the areas they needed it. The principle holds in teams, too. You cannot shortcut the relationship and expect opportunities. Honest performance. The fifth driver is feedback. Not the annual review kind of feedback. The ongoing, real time kind of feedback. Do people in your team know how they're doing when feedback is absent or only appears as criticism when something goes wrong? People lose their bearings. They either play it safe to avoid getting it wrong, or they continue doing the wrong things simply because no one has told them. And then of course there are the structural drivers, systems, processes, workloads, environment. Sometimes performance is low because the systems people are working within are, ah, genuinely broken. The process creates unnecessary friction. The tools are inadequate, the workload is unrealistic. These are not personal performance issues, they are organizational design issues. And no amount of one to one performance management will fix a broken system. So what does good look like when a leader manages the drivers of performance rather than just the outputs? Let me give you a practical example. A team is consistently missing its weekly delivery targets. A leader who's managing drivers does something like this. Before they meet with the team, they spend time understanding the picture. They have individual conversations, not review conversations, but genuine listening conversations. They ask what's getting in the way? What do you need that you do not currently have? Is the workload realistic? Is the brief clear? They look at the process end to end. They ask whether the system is set up to help people succeed or whether it's quietly making success harder. What they often find is not that people are not trying, but they find it is a combination of unclear priorities, inadequate tools, maybe a couple of team members who are overloaded while others are underutilised, and a culture where people are not comfortable raising problems early. None of that's going to show up in your weekly metrics. Fix those things and performance can follow. Not because you managed the output, but because you improved the conditions that produced it. This is what I mean when I talk about improving the system rather than just the score. The score is the lagging indicator. It tells you what's already happened. The drivers are the leading indicators. They tell you what might be about to happen and more importantly, they give you something to actually work with. M It's important to add that once you've done this groundwork, that's not the end of the story. You do then need to move into accountability mode, where you hold your members of staff to account for the targets they should now be reasonably expected to achieve. That's an important step that mustn't be glossed over. That's the bit that some leaders shy away from because, let's face it, it feels nicer to do the supportive, softer stuff. But you do need to do both halves of the bargain. I want to say something else specific about leaders who are operating in complex, high pressure environments. Because I think this distinction between performance and its drivers can be even more critical in those conditions. When you're leading through major change, when you're navigating AI adoption, when your organization is being restructured around new ways of, the temptation to grip performance data even harder is understandable. Everything feels uncertain and the numbers feel like the one thing you can see clearly. So you track them. You track them harder, you report on them more frequently, you escalate more quickly. But here's the problem. In periods of change, the drivers of performance become more volatile. Clarity is disrupted because the context has shifted. Capability gaps emerge because roles are revolving. Energy is depleted because change itself is exhausting. Trust is fragile because people are uncertain about the future. And systems are often transitional, which means they are neither what they were nor what they will be in those conditions. Focusing narrowly on outputs is not just ineffective, it can actively damage the very people that you need to deliver the change. The leader who doubles down on performance management during a difficult change program often ends up accelerating the very disengagement they are trying to reverse. The leader who succeeds in complex conditions is the one who keeps asking, what does my team need right now to do this? Well, what conditions am I creating or allowing that, uh, are helping or hindering them? Am I treating symptoms or am I working on causes? This is the discipline. And it is harder than reviewing a spreadsheet because it requires genuine curiosity, genuine listening, and the humility to accept that some of what is driving the performance problem might be within your own leadership behaviour. So here's the takeaway I want to leave you with. Performance is always produced by a system. Your job as a leader is not just to hold people accountable for the output. It is to understand and actively shape the system that produces it. When performance is low, start with the environment, then the individual. Diagnose before you prescribe. And here's the one action I want you to take this week. Think of one person or one team whose performance is not quite where you need it to be. Before you have a conversation about outputs OR standards, spend 15 minutes mapping the drivers. Uh, ask yourself, do they have clarity? Do they have capability? Do they have energy? Is there enough trust? Are the systems working for them or against them? Just that 15 minute audit done honestly will change the quality of every conversation that follows. If this episode has landed for you, I'd love to hear your thinking on the matter. You can comment on whatever platform you're listening on. You can find more episodes, articles and resources@levelupleadership.uk and if you haven't subscribed yet, subscribe now. It only takes a second and it means you will never miss an episode. Until next time. Keep leading, keep learning and keep leveling up.

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