Most leaders who want a stronger performance culture are solving the right problem — but looking in the wrong place. Here’s where to look instead.
If your organisation’s culture isn’t where you want it to be, you’re probably already thinking about what to do about it. Are you thinking about another leadership off-site? Running another engagement survey? Strengthening your performance management and accountability models? Maybe investing in a cultural transformation program?
The question to pause on, before deciding, is this: have these tactics worked in the past? Because there’s little to no evidence that they have. The cynicism, the defensiveness, the teams focused on activity rather than results, the gaming of numbers, the reviews where everyone says the right things but nothing really changes… that’s just going to continue. And it will continue while ever the solutions are pointed at the wrong end of the problem.
Culture isn’t the cause of organisational underperformance. It’s a symptom. And when you treat symptoms rather than causes, the problem keeps coming back.
The leaders who build strong performance cultures — the kind where people are engaged, focused on results, and willing to look at evidence and use it to improve their results — don’t start with culture. They start somewhere quite surprising.
The culture problem is real — but the standard remedies aren’t working
Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report found that in 2025 only 20% of employees worldwide feel engaged at work. The estimated cost of that disengagement is around US$438 billion in lost productivity each year.
You — like most leaders everywhere — are well aware of the problem.
But investing in culture programs, engagement initiatives, and accountability models don’t permanently fix the problem. This suggests that most leaders are unaware of the cause of the problem.
Gallup’s own analysis points to three underlying causes: lack of meaningful management, weak team connection, and employees having no clear sense how their work connects to the organisation’s purpose. Culture is not named as a lever that can shift engagement and fix underperformance. But there is something unexpected that is a powerful lever that can.
That something else is measurement. (Just not the way you might expect.)
The culture trap: behaviours that look like a people problem
Walk into most organisations that are struggling with culture, and you’ll find a recognisable set of behaviours. People are skeptical of KPIs. Teams focus on activity rather than outcomes. Managers defend their numbers rather than learning from them. Effort goes into looking good on the metrics rather than improving the results behind them.
Leaders typically read these as cultural problems — attitudes that need to change, values that need to be embedded, mindsets that need to shift.
But look at those behaviours more carefully. They’re rational responses to an environment where measurement is used as judgement. When people know their performance data will be used to evaluate them — to expose weakness, to determine consequences, to distribute blame — they do what any sensible person does. They protect themselves:
- They focus on what’s easy to count rather than what actually matters.
- They avoid measures that might make them look bad.
- They game the numbers when the pressure to hit targets becomes great enough.
- They become cynical about the whole exercise because they’ve learned, through experience, that the data isn’t really being used to help them — it’s being used to judge them.
The cynicism, resistance, and apparent lack of ownership — these are not attitude problems, but rather a predictable response to how measurement is being done. You can’t workshop your way out of it, because the cause is still sitting there in the management system.
Measurement as a lever to create a real performance culture starts making sense when you can see its true role: it’s like the organisation’s nervous system. And how well it functions starts with clarity of purpose, as PuMP Partner Mark Hocknell explores in his article on the WHY of performance measurement.
When teams can’t see what success looks like at their level
Even in organisations where measurement doesn’t have the judgement baggage, there’s a second, more subtle version of the culture problem.
In these organisations, people aren’t gaming the system — they’re just busy. Teams are working hard, delivering outputs, and filling the day with seemingly legitimate activity. Progress is tracked and reported. Regardless, the strategy isn’t moving and the goals that matter aren’t getting closer.
This is what happens when strategy hasn’t been translated into clear, meaningful results at every level of the organisation. When people don’t have measures that show them whether their work is making the difference it’s supposed to make, they fill that gap with what they can see: what they did. How many meetings they held, reports they produced, services they delivered, interactions they completed.
This happens not because they don’t care about the outcomes. Rather, it’s because no one has shown them what success looks like from where they sit.
This is overwhelmingly a systemic problem, which motivation has nothing to do with. Research consistently shows that around 90% of performance problems sit in work process design — in the structures and systems that constrain what people can achieve — not in the attitudes or effort of the people themselves. When performance disappoints, the useful question isn’t “what’s wrong with our people?” The useful question is “what is the system preventing them from seeing, doing, or improving?”
A culture of busyness is what you get when the measurement system doesn’t give people a meaningful line of sight from their daily work to the results that matter. Fixing the culture means fixing that line of sight — not running an engagement program.
What blame-based measurement actually produces
Now consider what happens when measurement is used as a report card rather than a feedback loop. The organisation has KPIs. Performance is reviewed. But the review is fundamentally a verdict — was this good enough or not?
When measurement serves as a report card, the people being measured focus their energy on the card, not the performance behind it. And you already recognise what happens: targets get gamed, definitions get massaged, data gets selectively presented, problems get hidden until they’re unavoidable. And the culture — visibly and measurably — deteriorates.
This is the downward spiral. Management responds to underperformance with more monitoring. More monitoring increases the sense of being judged. Increased judgement triggers more defensive behaviour. Defensive behaviour produces poorer decisions and worse results. And the response is more monitoring still.
The culture you end up with isn’t the culture anyone wanted. It’s the logical output of the system that was built.
Now consider what happens when measurement is genuinely used to learn and improve. When the purpose of a measure is to help a team understand variation in their results, find root causes, and make better decisions — when it’s truly a tool in their hands rather than a rod for their back — the dynamic reverses.
People start to want to know how they’re tracking. They stop fearing what the data will reveal, because revealing it is the point. They begin to own the measures, because the measures are working for them. That sense of ownership, that openness to evidence, that willingness to examine performance without defensiveness — that’s a performance culture. And it doesn’t come from a culture program. It comes from changing what measurement is for.
As Groysberg and colleagues observed in their influential Harvard Business Review research on organisational culture, a strong culture can be a significant liability when it is misaligned with strategy. The culture problems leaders are experiencing are often, at root, a strategy-measurement misalignment problem. The culture is faithfully reflecting the system. Change the system, and the culture follows.
Measurement as a feedback loop, not a report card
What does it look like when measurement actually works this way?
A production team in a medical device factory in Turkey offers a precise illustration. Working with licensed PuMP Affiliate Ayça Tümer Arıkan, two production teams developed their own process measures for the first time. Because they designed the measures themselves, they felt ownership of them from the start. Because the purpose was improvement rather than judgement, they felt safe using them.
What happened next didn’t require a culture initiative. The teams set up monthly review meetings — and they weren’t told to, it was because they found the measures useful. When one measure showed an unexpected spike in defects, the team noticed it themselves. They dug into their process, identified the root cause, and took action. Then the measure moved.
That’s the shift: from measurement being something done to teams, to measurement being something teams reach for. They brought questions to the data. They made the connection between their process decisions and their results. They started behaving — without instruction or incentive — like the kind of team every leader says they want.
The culture changed because the measurement practice changed. Not the other way around.
This is what PuMP means by measurement as a feedback loop rather than a report card. A feedback loop connects what a team is trying to achieve with evidence about how they’re actually tracking — regularly, visibly, and in a form the team can act on. It makes performance visible in a way that invites curiosity rather than defensiveness. It turns the review conversation from a verdict into a learning session.
Reviews stop being exercises in presenting the numbers in the best possible light. They become conversations about what the evidence is showing, what it means, and what to do next. That shift — in the texture of a single conversation — is the beginning of a performance culture.
When measurement changes, culture follows
The pattern plays out consistently. When organisations change how measurement is used — shifting its purpose from judgement to learning, focusing it on process results rather than people’s results, giving teams ownership of their own measures — the behaviours that leaders were trying to fix with culture programs begin to change.
People start bringing data to conversations rather than waiting to be asked. Managers start asking “what is this telling us?” rather than “how do we explain this?” Teams start noticing signals in their measures and acting on them between formal reviews. The energy that was going into defending numbers starts going into understanding what they mean.
None of this requires a cultural transformation to be announced first. It requires the measurement system to start working as it should.
This is the tipping point that both research and practice points to consistently. When measurement is designed to help people improve rather than to judge whether they’ve performed, and when it creates a clear line of sight from daily work to strategic results, it pulls people toward ownership and engagement. The culture that leaders want — curious, accountable, evidence-driven, focused on results — is the natural output of a measurement system that’s doing its job. PuMP Partner Mark Hocknell explores what this looks like in practice, here.
You don’t need to transform everything at once
None of this requires an organisation-wide transformation before anything changes. Clarity at the leadership level ripples outward.
When a leadership team has meaningful measures that genuinely show whether strategy is working — not vanity metrics, not activity counts, but real evidence about results — it changes how they lead. They ask different questions in reviews. They model a different relationship with data. They stop defending positions and start exploring evidence. And because leadership sets the tone for what is expected and rewarded, that change in approach works its way through the organisation over time.
A single team with well-designed process measures and a regular dialogue about what those measures are showing can become a proof point that shifts the wider conversation about what measurement is for. Other teams see that the measures are being used to help, not to judge. They lean in.
The journey to a genuine performance culture takes time — there’s no shortcut that bypasses the work of designing meaningful measures, building the habit of using them, and embedding the disciplines of evidence-based decision making. But the rewards start appearing early. The shift away from blame and toward learning produces visible change in how people engage with performance conversations, often within weeks of making it.
And once people experience measurement as something that helps them rather than threatens them, the culture starts to change from the inside. It doesn’t have to be declared, only demonstrated.
Where does your measurement system sit right now?
If you recognise your organisation in any of this — the busyness without visible progress, the gaming of numbers, the reviews that generate heat but little insight, the culture programs that don’t quite stick — the productive question isn’t “how do we change our culture?” It’s “how is our measurement system contributing to the culture we have?”
The free PuMP Diagnostic is a practical starting point for that conversation. It’s a structured, dialogue-based team assessment across 26 criteria of sound measurement practice. Working through it with your colleagues, you’ll identify your current Measurement Maturity Score, see clearly where your measurement system is strong and where it’s letting your strategy — and your culture — down, and leave with a shared picture of where the most valuable improvements are.
It won’t take long. And it will show you more about the state of your performance culture than any engagement survey will.