Start with the team

Two conversations in the past few weeks have been rattling around in my head, and I think they belong together.

The first was with a people and culture leader at a large organisation. Her business had been struggling to get the performance outcomes it wanted, and when she looked hard at why, the culprit wasn't effort or talent. It was the individual performance reviews. Pay and bonuses were tied to each person's own effort, so everyone was heads-down on their own tasks. The places where the work overlapped, the handovers, the shared problems, the pieces that belong in nobody's job description, were nobody's priority.

So they got rid of the individual performance review. They stopped linking remuneration to individual performance. And they have just had one of their best years for performance since.

She's now asking a far more interesting question than "how do we fix the review?" She's asking what a better way to assess performance looks like in her culture, and what a better way to create collective work looks like. She may well take a team approach to both performance and development. That is genuinely counter-cultural, and I think she might be right.

The second conversation was with a leader who spent years working in the Middle East before coming home to Australia. What struck him on his return was how individualistic everything was here, and how completely that shaped the way organisations approached development. He wasn't saying one way is better. But the differences are real, and they line up with what our research found.

What the West gets right, and what it costs us

Broadly, Western organisational culture is person-focused. Personal goals, personal success, independent thinking. Most organisational development strategies put exactly these things in place first and treat them as the early stages of maturity: individual job descriptions, individual performance reviews, individual development plans.

Independent thinking is genuinely valuable to a team. It's where diversity of view comes from, where reflection comes from, where speaking up comes from. It's the antidote to groupthink. When teams complete a TeamHive 360, in our PLUS model this shows up in Learning and in Unity: the safety to hold a different opinion, and the habit of using challenges to get better.

But team and organisational performance needs something the individual lens doesn't supply. It needs people to lift their eyes off their personal goals and towards shared accountability. Less personal success, more collective success. Working together to get the outcome, rather than delivering your piece and stepping back.

What the East gets right

Many Eastern cultures hold the group above the individual. Harmony and the needs of the collective come before personal glory. Read that through the lens of team performance and it sounds almost like a description of Unity and Shared Leadership: belonging, connection, and responsibility for the outcome held by everyone rather than by one hero.

There's a piece of research on this I love. In the late 1980s, Christopher Earley gave American and Chinese managers the same group task and quietly varied whether each person's contribution could be seen. The American managers, who mostly held individualist beliefs, eased off when their own effort was invisible. The Chinese managers didn't. And the thing that predicted the loafing wasn't nationality. It was the belief. Collectively minded Americans didn't ease off either.

So the point isn't that one culture has it right. Reading the two side by side, what I see is that effective teams need both. The personal commitment, the individual belief and the independent thinking we prize in the West. The collective goals, the shared success and the shared accountability that the East holds dear. In our model, that's the whole of PLUS. Purpose and Shared Leadership live in the collective. Learning and Unity need the individual who is willing to speak.

Why organisations usually start with individual development

In the course of my work I speak with a lot of people and culture, organisational development and talent leaders. When these practitioners walk into an organisation that has no development or performance processes in place, they all start from exactly the same point. Individual job descriptions. Individual performance reviews. Individual development plans.

Some describe their organisations as "not very mature", and when they talk about building maturity, they mean building the individual apparatus first. The team comes later, if it comes at all.

I understand why. It's how it has always been done. But it takes a long time, its results are patchy, and it leans heavily on the organisation knowing how to do it well. The research on removing individual ratings is instructive here. Organisations that simply took the ratings away and put nothing in their place found that performance conversations got worse, not better. Removing the individual system on its own isn't the answer. Replacing what it was doing with something collective might be.

The evidence on incentives points the same way. A large review of financial incentive studies found that team-based rewards lifted performance at least as much as individual rewards, and usually more, particularly when the reward was shared according to what each person had contributed. The education provider I mentioned didn't stumble onto something odd. They stumbled onto something the research had been quietly saying for a decade.

Consider starting with the collective

If you walk into an organisation that has none of this in place, you haven't got a gap to fill. You've got a green field. You have a chance to do this more effectively than it has been done for decades.

What if the better place to start, particularly in a less mature development culture, is the collective? Set collective goals and cascade them down. Measure and develop team performance first. Let people see shared success, and see it often. Then, once that has matured, think about individual goals, individual performance and individual development, if you still need them.

I suspect it might also be a more psychologically safe way to begin. Think about the Eastern idea of face. The collective exists partly to look after the individuals inside it, so that no one is shamed. Now think about how individual performance assessment lands in a Western workplace: if I don't get everything right, I'll be exposed in my review, in my feedback, in my rating. Starting with the team's performance rather than mine takes the spotlight off the individual at exactly the moment the organisation has the least trust built up. Amy Edmondson's original work on psychological safety was, after all, about teams, and about what teams learn when their members feel safe.

I'd love to see research that tests this directly. Is collective development a more psychologically safe place to start? Does it build performance faster than the individual-first path? And if it works, do you ever need to go to the individual level at all? You might find you've built a better performance system without it.

Our own research with the University of Newcastle tells me the collective is worth measuring. The four PLUS conditions together explained 60% of the variance in team effectiveness and 37% of the variance in team performance. That is a great deal of what an organisation cares about, sitting at a level most performance systems never look at.