04 Mar Design the Context to Improve Performance

How does your workplace shape success?

When we talk about performance, we usually focus on individual skills or motivation. But what if performance is shaped just as much—if not more—by the environment people work in?

Over the past year, our blogs and café conversations have explored how managers’ personalities, business strategies, organisational design, and team dynamics influence success. All these factors come together to create performance—not just at the individual level, but across teams and the entire organisation.

Performance Is More Than Just Effort

It’s helpful to think about performance on three levels:

• Organisation level: Strategic success, financial health, and market position.
• Team level: How well divisions, functions, or projects achieve their goals.
• Individual level: Goal achievement, career progression, financial rewards, and job satisfaction.

Beyond individual effort, these levels are shaped by management styles, leadership culture, and performance systems. If the structure isn’t right, even the most talented people struggle to succeed.

How Context Shapes Performance

Many hidden forces affect performance. Consider three major influences:

• Industry effects: The type of industry, its age, and regulatory landscape shape what is possible. A well-established bank will never move as fast as a fintech startup.
• Market effects: A company in a crowded, competitive market has different challenges from one in a niche industry with few rivals.
• Organisational design: The way a company is structured—whether it’s founder-led, process-driven, or hierarchical—affects how people work and how performance should be measured.

Despite these differences, many organisations use standard performance management systems that don’t fully match their unique realities. A one-size-fits-all approach fails to account for the small but critical differences that shape success.

Designing for Better Performance

Instead of just measuring performance, organisations should shape it. That means designing work environments that naturally encourage better decisions, collaboration, and results. For example:

• If people hoard information, is it because they lack teamwork skills—or does the company reward knowledge as power?
• If teams struggle to collaborate, is it a leadership issue—or do conflicting goals and incentives create barriers?
• If middle managers hesitate to make decisions, is it a confidence gap—or do unclear governance structures make decision-making risky?

By designing the workplace to support performance, organisations can reduce the need for corrective training and coaching. The right structure helps people succeed naturally.

What If There Were No Training Budget?

Our March Conversation Café explores Context Engineering—the idea that performance can be built into the system. Imagine if there were no budget for training. How would we still help people grow and perform?

This isn’t an argument against training—it’s an exercise in rethinking how learning happens. If we strip training away, we uncover what the organisation itself can do to enable performance. Then, when training returns, it can be more targeted, impactful, and seamlessly integrated with daily work.

Join us for this conversation and explore how workplace design—not just training—can create the conditions for long-term success. Register below:

Written by: Craig Yeatman