Page 289 - Performance Leadership

278 • Closing Thoughts

think for ourselves. To grow to performance leadership means that the
journey itself is the destination.
But the most important lesson from the book is that performance
management is highly connected to behaviors of people. In many ways
measurement drives behavior, so we need to understand those behav-
iors. Behaviors trigger actions, and actions lead to business perform-
ance (or not). People’s behaviors, what we find important, and how we
define performance, are highly related to their culture. In other words,
performance comes from Venus; it is based on emotion, drive, and pas-
sion. But management comes from Mars, focusing on control, ratio,
and obeying strict marching orders. Seen this way, performance man-
agement is a contradiction in terms.
In this book I referenced an industrial conglomerate with factories
in France, the United States, and The Netherlands. The American
business culture is all about contract and who you work for. The
French business culture is about background, honor, and to which
group you belong. The Dutch business culture focuses on consensus,
where many business decisions are openly discussed and debated.
While writing this book, and particularly this section on values, I all of
a sudden realized that perhaps some of my conclusions and trains of
thought might be driven by my own cultural background.
In the Dutch culture, performance indicators are there to debate.
And, as I have pointed out repeatedly, that is exactly the point of per-
formance management. Would that not work in the United States? I
talked about business interface metrics that drive cross-domain collab-
oration. In The Netherlands, people are usually quick with providing
advice, invited or uninvited, on someone else’s activities, and we don’t
hold back. Would that work in France, where one group’s “interfering”
impacts on the feeling of honor of the other group?
Yet, I stick to my guns, because I like to think that you’ve just read
a book about relationships. And, although how to deal with relation-
ships may not be universally exactly the same, building relationships
bridges many cultures. Moreover, it is something most of us have a lot
of experience with. Many of the lessons in personal development
directly relate to performance management.
In many of our performance management initiatives we think that
we can manage our relationship with a partner or a client with a service