Most companies these days say they have or are trying to implement a performance culture. You will hear phrases such as "We pay for performance" when it comes to the people performance aspect, or "We need to continue to improve our financial performance" when it comes to the business in general.
However if you examine this performance culture closer what you often see is that a performance culture means dealing with that which is not performing. When it comes to people you might pay more for those that perform, but where you as a leader spend much of your time is on increasing the performance of those that don't perform. In the business in general you might be dealing with increasing the performance of non-value adding assets or even sell them off while you hope that your high performing assets just keep performing.
Let's look at a very tangible example which we as CFOs and financial managers can relate well to. Let's say you have an objective to close your monthly books faster and you are dependent on 10 entities to do their reporting. Your goal is to close by WD6 and the current performance of your entities is as follows: (10;9;9;8;8;7;7;6;6;5) so your average is 7.5 days. Ask yourself what you would focus on? Is it those that close on WD9 or 10 or those that close on WD5 or 6? Or in other words do you focus your efforts on the performing entities or the non-performing entities? Most would probably focus on the non-performing entities and get them to report on WD6 or 7 on average hoping that the high performing entities would keep performing or maybe even improve to pull down the average even further. So you spend most of your time trying to increase the performance of non-performing entities instead of moving the boundaries for high performing entities.
The problem with this behavior is obviously that when next year you are challenged to close on WD4 you have no entities that are delivering this kind of performance because no focus was put on moving the boundaries of what the best of the best in your organization can deliver.
A different approach would be to tell your non-performing entities that they need to learn and maybe even just replicate what the high performing entities are doing. As a leader you will instead focus on moving the boundaries for what your organization can perform at it's max so you can always stay ahead of the game. Otherwise you will never be able to deliver anything but mediocre performance. The question is of course what performance do you focus on?