Value: what is in it for the individual

It doesn’t have to be money. It could be exposure. It could be growth. It could be a new skill. It could be all sorts of things.

One person answered honestly and well. I said at the time, I loved the honesty of that response, because for most of us, the answer isn’t nearly so clear. For eighty per cent of us, if we’re honest, we can’t name the benefit we get over and above the obvious, generic one. I get paid, and I keep my job. Beyond that, what’s in it for me? We just don’t know.

That’s the second structural reason performance conversations fail to change behaviour. I call it value.

Objectives are usually the organisation’s strategy, cut into pieces

In many organisations, individual objectives aren’t really individual at all. They’re the organisation’s strategy, squashed down into manageable chunks of activity, and handed out. The board sets its priorities, those become departmental goals, and those become your objectives for the year. When you hit them, the organisation gets something real. Revenue, if you’re in sales. Cost savings, if you’re in operations. Delivery, whatever form that takes in your function.

What does the individual get? That’s much less clear.

Picture two overlapping circles. One is what the organisation gets from you hitting your objectives. The other is what you get. I’ve deliberately drawn the overlap between them very small, because that’s what the evidence shows. Most people can’t articulate what they personally gain from their objectives, beyond the basic transaction of having a job and being paid for it. I’m giving my discretionary effort to somebody else’s goal, and I can’t tell you what’s in it for me.

Why this matters more than it sounds

This isn’t a philosophical point. It has a direct and measurable effect on discretionary effort, which is the effort people give beyond the minimum required to keep their job.

I’ve seen what happens when this is done well. A large global client ran a flagship leadership programme for people who were already at the top of the performance scale, already had demanding day jobs, and already had significant responsibility. And they gave up real time, evenings, weekends, unpaid overtime, to deliver change projects that nobody had asked them to do.

Why? Because they could see the value to them. They were getting the chance to put the skills they were learning on the programme into practice, in the real world, on something that mattered. The organisation gained documented savings, culture change and motivated individuals as a result. But that only happened because the individual value was visible alongside the organisational value.

Without that visibility, you get the opposite. Sheep-like behaviour. Survivor behaviour. People doing just enough to hit the numbers they need to hit, and nothing more. Not because they’re disengaged by nature, but because nobody has ever shown them what’s in it for them.

What actually helps

Attach a visible personal payoff to every objective, or at least to as many as you reasonably can. I know some parts of the job are unexciting, and not every objective can have a personal upside attached to it. But most can, and even some is better than none.

This becomes a conversation you have with your team, not a form you fill in. This bit of your job is the same as last year, and it needs to be done. That bit is the opportunity for growth, for exposure, for change. Naming the difference between the two, out loud, in the conversation, is the work.

Where this connects to how you have the conversation itself

Contamination and value both point to the same underlying issue. The one-to-one has been asked to do too much, with too little structure around what each part of it is actually for. That’s exactly the territory covered in our Improving Performance Through Conversations programme, and in Developmental Conversations Through Coaching, both of which are built around giving managers the structure to separate what a conversation is doing from what it’s trying to achieve, rather than asking one conversation to do everything at once.

If any of this sounds like your organisation, and I suspect it will for a good number of you, I’d be glad to start that conversation properly. Get in touch and let’s talk about what a performance conversation in your organisation should actually be doing.

The third and final structural issue is ownership: who actually drives this conversation, and what that does to how it lands. That’s next.