Toxic or Coachable?
There is a concept in Simon Sinek’s latest book, “The Infinite Game” that is slam-against-the-wall important.
It’s an XY graph. We haven’t had one of those in a few months.
Organizations must build a culture of trust and performance.
The horizontal line is a trust continuum.
The vertical line low performing to high performing.
Intuition tells us the obvious.
We don’t want people in the bottom left. We do want people in the top right. High trust, high-performance people. Simple?
The problem is that we find a lot of people in the other two quadrants, and this is where it’s not so intuitive in our performance-driven work cultures.
Most of the organizations I’ve ever worked with reward the people who fallen the top left and get rid of people in the bottom right. In other words:
We reward performance before we reward trust.
This is toxic.
A high performing/low trust person is poison to the culture of an organization. This is a person who plays fast and loose with the people around them because their end-game is to win at all costs. People are not important. Winning is important. Often these are the people who get promoted. They’re high-performers. Why shouldn’t they?
But as they are promoted, trust levels in the organization erode. Organizational culture is in deep trouble.
Does this mean we should promote low-performing individuals? That doesn't make much sense either. We shouldn’t reward incompetence, should we?
It depends on their answer to this question:
Are you willing to be coached?
“The Infinite Game” by Simon Sinek has been rocking my world this week. This is recommended reading for everyone I know.