Can you drive high performance and stay human?

On 3 September 2026, Mark Lewis (Crewmojo’s CEO) was on a panel discussion about the future of the CPO role at Startup People Summit. One question from the audience felt very relevant for the climate we are all working in today:

“How would you balance driving high performance but remaining human?”

The question assumes you have to pick one. Push for performance and people get ground down. Look after people and the standards slip.

I do not think that tension is as real as we have led ourselves to believe. When you focus on your people in the right ways, the business performs better.

Somewhere along the way we forgot that, and high performance got tied to being cut-throat, doing more with less, being more efficient and productive. Many of the processes I have seen HR teams put in place try to increase performance by measuring those things, and then the measurement started to feel to our people like a stick instead of a carrot. What that drives is fear and a need to prove yourself.

I have been on the receiving end of that, and I can tell you there is no better way to kill a person’s motivation and performance than to make measuring it the focus.

Mark’s answer to the question was on point:

“The way I see it being most successful, among our customers, is when you’re effectively orchestrating the conditions for people to be successful. So high performance is a natural outcome from that, rather than trying to come from a more traditional command and control style approach.”

That is the CPO’s job: hold the fort for the people by making sure leaders are creating the conditions for people to be successful, rather than using performance measurement as a stick while piling on pressure to do more with less.

So in this newsletter I will share what the panel said the CPO role is becoming, what it looks like when nobody holds the fort, and three things you could try this week.

PREVIOUS NEWSLETTERS

In case you’re a new reader (or just missed them), here are the past few newsletters:

Build or buy is the wrong question. How to choose the right tool for your people solution.
Reviewed by someone who never saw my work. Why the org chart shouldn’t dictate how performance reviews work.
Engagement scores tell you what people think, not what changed. Vanity metrics versus actionable metrics.

The CPO’s job now: drive performance through people

Georgia Kelaher, who moderated the panel, set up the discussion by describing the people leader who is most valuable right now: someone who recognises that people are both a cost to the business and the value driver of the business.

Alex Cwirko-Godycki from Pave added that “the thing to not forget about is the humanity of the role. That you are in this job to serve the people employed by the company.”

Put those two together and the role of the CPO is to keep the business high-performing by reminding leaders that people are what make it perform.

Each panellist added a piece of what that looks like day to day:

🔍 Improve performance, don’t install it. Five years ago, Mark said, CPOs came to Crewmojo asking how to roll out a best practice like OKRs or continuous feedback. Now they are asking what is getting in the way of their people performing at their best, and solving for that.
🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Right people, right jobs, right time. For Alex, that is the question that never changes, whatever AI does to the answer.
🎯 Re-decide what matters, every year. Tamara O’Sullivan from Compono (55 people across seven countries) said she re-evaluates what the business needs each year and makes sure “the plastic balls fall, not the glass balls”.
💬 Communication is part of the design. Christine van Hoffen from Concord has watched teams put huge effort into policy and process, then “fall apart at the communication stage”.

None of them described performance and people as two separate jobs. Holding both at once is the job. When nobody holds the people side, you get what happened to me.

When nobody holds the fort

Years ago, I was told for six months that I was doing well. At review time, I found out I was not “thinking commercially enough” to be promoted, but that with the right support I could be ready in another six months.

I asked for clarity on what thinking commercially looked like and what I needed to do to improve. I was told to trust my manager and the performance process.

To cut a long story short, I am sure you can guess how that worked out.

Setting clear performance expectations, running a transparent review process and giving a fair pay rise would have cost them far less than replacing me when I eventually left for a better-paying job with more responsibility. I am sure my story is not an unfamiliar one.

The panel echoed this. Alex said the way we have designed performance processes to be backwards-looking and based in memory is pretty unfair. Christine added that the more we focus on efficiency and automation of these processes, the more communication and care for people becomes an afterthought.

No matter how well designed your performance process is, or how transparent your pay policy, if it is not supported by human conversations that answer someone’s concerns or provide the right support, it will not drive performance.

Instead, we need to build a culture around agreeing on:

what outcomes a team needs to achieve
what each person’s role is in achieving those outcomes
how that success will be taken into account when making decisions about promotions and pay

Then talking about performance and providing clarity on how to improve it often enough that it survives a change of circumstance, manager or context.

How to create the conditions: start with one question

If performance really comes down to supportive conversations about expectations, the steps forward, what is working well or not, and encouragement to iterate and improve, then performance processes need to stop being handed down from on high.

Mark’s suggestion was to speak with your team members and understand:

what they need
how they would like to receive feedback
what type of encouragement helps them
how to avoid surprises at review time

Those two-way conversations are what most people miss.

As Alex said on the panel, with the rise of notetakers in all of our meetings and AI linked up to all our systems, it has never been easier to provide feedback grounded in our actual work rather than our memory of it. So long as you have the right guardrails in place and are clear about how it is being used, it can be a powerful performance tool.

Some things to try this week

If you are trying to build a high-performance culture while remaining human, here are three things you could try:

Agree with each person what good looks like for the next quarter, in their words, and write it down somewhere you will both see it.
Use AI to help you give one piece of feedback about something that happened this week, not six months ago.
If you are about to roll out a new process or policy, plan some smaller conversations to test the impact before sharing it through a broadcast or announcement.

The thread running through all three is the same thing Mark described on the panel: you are not installing performance, you are creating the conditions for it. That work is mostly conversations, and it is the part that gets cut first when a process is designed for efficiency.

If you are rethinking what your own process asks of people, our guide on how to design a performance management process that fits your organisation walks through setting expectations, coaching and reviewing as separate decisions rather than one bundled cycle.