Creating a Sustainable Performance Culture: 10 Questions for Leaders

Our peak performance mandates can quickly become exhausting, suffocating and even debilitating. And the people you lead are feeling the weight of it. So, what does that ask of you, as a leader of others?

I work with the fallout of that culture every day, all the while wrestling with my own internal conflict: “Am I also a contributor to all this striving?” If you lead teams or manage people, you’ll be familiar with this duality.

Coaching great leaders, what I’ve come to learn is that the apparent paradox need not be a struggle. In fact, it becomes a powerful leadership shift, if we can embrace the wisdom:

Striving doesn’t overcome the exhaustion. It’s what invites the exhaustion in.

How, then, do we escape this loop? Moreover, how do we support our people to escape it, without inducing more of it through our efforts?

By leaning into what many would call conscious leadership. And in my experience, it’s a shift that always begins with the same personal realisation: at the heart of being a great leader is not my strategic skill or communication technique, but my emotional, relational and energetic self.

Below are ten questions that surface repeatedly in coaching conversations with leaders carrying the burden of pressure and performance. Not a checklist or a formula. Simply an invitation to sit with the challenge and see what it has to say.

• Where am I striving hardest, and what am I trying to outrun?
• Where am I confusing intensity with leadership?
• Where am I prioritising technique over presence?
• Where am I trusting the plan more than the relationship?
• Which of my pressures has quietly become my team’s?
• What am I rewarding that’s quietly burning people out?
• Where am I asking for openness while modelling defensiveness?
• What would I put down, if I trusted myself to lead without it?
• If my team copied my behaviours, what culture would emerge?
• What becomes possible when I stop managing the outcome?

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