Leading with kid gloves
Research on toxic leadership and psychological safety has made managers more cautious in how they deal with their people. They postpone feedback, keep goals comfortably achievable and avoid the difficult conversation. The reasons sound understandable:
- a focus on wellbeing;
- hybrid teams you see in person less often;
- a constant stream of change you don’t want to add to.
Often there is another reason: managers who are running on empty themselves. Gallup (State of the Global Workplace, 2026) found that global manager engagement fell from 27% to 22% in 2025. That matters, because according to Gallup, around 70% of the variance in team engagement comes down to the manager.
But caution is not the same as care or an appreciative approach. If you stop expressing expectations, you leave people out in the cold.
Focus and goals work
Research shows time and again how much focus, goal orientation and clear objectives matter, for individuals, teams and organisations:
- Specific, challenging goals consistently lead to better performance than a noncommittal “do your best” (Locke & Latham, 2002).
- A clear mission influences organisational performance, through employee behaviour and commitment (Bart et al., 2001).
- Employees whose manager involves them in setting goals are 3.6 times more likely to be engaged than others (Gallup, 2017).
Yet according to the same Gallup research, only 2 in 10 employees say their performance is managed in a way that motivates them to do outstanding work. There is plenty of room for improvement.
Follow-up is an underrated form of appreciation
The traditional annual appraisal faced years of well-deserved criticism. So did management by objectives, where goals are imposed from the top down and ticked off once a year. Many organisations then threw the baby out with the bathwater. The appraisal form disappeared, but nothing replaced it. In practice, individual and team results and performance are barely followed up anymore.
The general impression that “it works fine this way” seems to suffice. It doesn’t. You can see that in the service levels of a growing number of organisations, and in employee stress and absenteeism.
Do we think we’re doing our people a favour? We’re not. Setting goals and following up on them carries an undeniable element of care, attention and wellbeing.
Performance management: what’s in it for your people?
- Expectations create meaning. When someone expects something from you, it means you matter. That is motivating.
- Goals provide structure. With clear agreements, you know when something is good and when you’ve met the standard. For ambitious people and employees with a perfectionist streak, that is essential. A lack of clarity about what your role involves is linked to emotional exhaustion (Lee & Ashforth, 1996). Clear agreements are therefore not extra pressure for them, but protection against overload.
- A fair basis for recognition and reward. A clear goal and a result achieved make appreciation concrete and fair.
Four research-based recommendations
Scientific research on performance management keeps coming back to four recommendations:
- Clear goals, agreed together. That is a solid basis for a win-win.
- An ongoing dialogue. Regular contact and alignment instead of a single annual conversation.
- Open and transparent feedback. It creates clarity and emotional safety. Bear in mind that feedback doesn’t work automatically. A meta-analysis by Kluger & DeNisi (1996) showed that over a third of feedback interventions actually lowered performance. That happened mainly when the feedback targeted the person rather than the task. How you give feedback makes all the difference.
- A focus on the future and on development. Perspective gives people wings.
Food for thought and action
Care and clarity are not opposites. If you truly value your people, you take the time to set goals together, follow up on them and be honest about where someone stands.
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Based on an article by Lou Van Beirendonck, Founder-Director of Quintessence & dONUS++. Updated version of an article from March 2023.
Sources
Bart, C. K., Bontis, N., & Taggar, S. (2001). A model of the impact of mission statements on firm performance. Management Decision, 39(1), 19–35.
Gallup (2017). Re-Engineering Performance Management.
Gallup (2026). State of the Global Workplace.
Kluger, A. N., & DeNisi, A. (1996). The effects of feedback interventions on performance. Psychological Bulletin, 119(2), 254–284.
Lee, R. T., & Ashforth, B. E. (1996). A meta-analytic examination of the correlates of the three dimensions of job burnout. Journal of Applied Psychology, 81(2), 123–133.
Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (2002). Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation. American Psychologist, 57(9), 705–717.