What You’ll Learn:
The Performance Floor: Why "sweeping transformations" fail while "standard-setting" succeeds.
The Self-Correction Loop: A framework for moving from top-down policing to peer-driven performance enforcement.
The Cost of Tolerance: How to quantify the silent "performance tax" that mediocrity levies on your A-players.
The Story: The High-Bar Immune System
I recently sat with two CEOs grappling with the same beast: Performance Culture.
The first was mid-pivot, attempting a "sweeping transformation" across hundreds of employees. He was trying to legislate intensity from the boardroom. It was an expensive, uphill battle of memos, KPIs, and forced rankings.
The second CEO was at a different crossroads: a potential merger. As he looked under the hood of his competitor, he had a realization that changed his mind about the deal. "Our culture is simply a different species," he told me. "My team is self-policing. They have a visceral reaction to slacking. If someone isn't pulling their weight or behaving below the standard, the team calls it out and self-corrects before I even hear about it."
One CEO was playing the role of the police officer; the other had built an immune system.
The difference isn't just "vibe." It’s the realization that performance culture is the lowest common denominator of behavior you allow to exist. If you tolerate a "brilliant jerk" or a "likable underperformer," that becomes your new ceiling.
You read that right: the floor becomes the new ceiling.
The Insight: The "Systemic Fallback" of Performance
We often talk about "reaching for excellence," as if performance is an upward reach. It’s not. As James Clear notes regarding personal habits, you don’t rise to your goals; you fall to the level of your systems. In an organization, your "system" is the collective behavioral floor.
In a true high-performance culture, the "high bar" isn't a goal - it's the minimum requirement for entry.
High-performing entrepreneurs often make the mistake of thinking they can "inspire" a culture into existence. But culture isn't what you say in a town hall; it's what your team does when you aren't in the room. When a team "self-polices," they aren't being "mean" - they are protecting the integrity of their own work. They realize that excellence is a fragile ecosystem, and one person "not behaving up to standards" is a direct tax on the energy and output of the entire group.
To scale, you must move from Executive Enforcement to Peer Accountability. If the CEO is the only one defending the standard, the standard will eventually break. The bigger the organization, the sooner this will happen.
Your Quick Win: The "Standard-Setting" Audit
To stop the "performance slide," you need to identify where the floor has dropped. Spend 15 minutes on this today:
Identify the Accepted Mediocrity: Name one specific behavior currently tolerated in your org that would be unacceptable at a company you admire (e.g., missed deadlines without notice, lack of prep for meetings).
Define the High-Bar Response: What would a "self-policing" team do in response to that behavior? (e.g., A peer calling it out in the moment: "We don't show up to this meeting without the data ready.")
The Reset Script: At your next leadership meeting, run a quick retro on the same specific behavior. Ask: "What is the lowest level of performance we are tolerating with regard to this behavior?”
INTERESTED IN MORE OF MY WORK?
If you’ve made it this far, perhaps you’d be interested in my other writing and resources:
1. Most read all time: Why I Stopped Using OKRs
2. Most read Q4: Clarity, Leverage, Resilience: The Secret Sauce of High-Growth CEOs
3. New Cheat Sheets every month, full collection in this FOLDER. (20 in total)
Want to work with me as a Coach & Catalyst for your business? Schedule a call HERE. Available in Q3.
Bachmann Catalyst is a human-centric CEO advisory boutique. We specialize in guiding growth-stage CEOs through the most pivotal challenges at the intersection of strategy, funding, and leadership. By balancing business outcomes with team dynamics, we help leaders scale with clarity, confidence, and purpose.
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