#77 JooBee's newsletter

TL;DR

🤷🏻‍♀️ Your founder wants high performance. But what does that actually mean?

⚠️ Sometimes the ‘wrong’ performance practice is right for the company

🎧 Listen to the newsletter here

This newsletter edition is brought to you by Rippling 💛

Your founder wants high performance. But what does that actually mean?

When HR thinks about performance management, we tend to think about what good practice looks like: clear expectations, regular feedback, fair evaluation, capable managers, development and consistency.

All sensible, but… after years of working (and battling 😅) with founders, I can tell you they're rarely sitting there thinking about any of those things.

They're thinking:

• Are we going to hit the number?

• Are we shipping fast enough?

• Do I have the right people to get us where we're going?

• Why am I paying this much for someone who isn't delivering?

• What happens if we don't make the next funding milestone?

So before I build anything, I want the unfiltered truth about what my founder truly believes about performance. 

That’s particularly important in a start-up because (as some of us may have experienced painfully 😣), your founder can ultimately veto any performance decision, regardless of the process you’ve built. 

Start with your founder’s hopes, fears and dreams

I start by understanding what my founder is trying to achieve and what they're afraid might get in the way. Let's say the dream is to double the business. They're hoping the new product takes off, customers renew and the team they've assembled can take the company through its next stage of growth. And what are they afraid of? Missing the number. Running out of money. Shipping too slowly. Losing their best people. Realising six months too late that someone they trusted isn't good enough.

Now look at performance through that lens. Suddenly, their impatience with underperformance makes much more sense. So does their obsession with their best people. 

Take a founder who says: “Just pay her whatever it takes.” We might immediately think about salary bands, internal equity and the precedent it creates. In the founder's mind, they're worrying about a different question: “What will it cost the business if she leaves?” 

If I don't understand what my founder is optimising for, I risk solving a different problem from the one they're trying to solve. 

Then, find out what they're actually willing to do

Founders always say they want a high-performance culture 🙄.

And I’ve found the two ends of the performance spectrum tell you a lot about where their boundaries are… and therefore what you have scope to build. 

1️⃣ What are they willing to tolerate (in pursuit of their hopes and dreams)?

Let's say someone has been underperforming for three months. How much longer are they willing to invest, and when do they part ways?

I've worked with founders who have very little tolerance for sustained underperformance. In that environment, I need an excellent process for identifying performance gaps early and parting ways well. 

Others genuinely want to give people more time to improve. Then I need to invest much more heavily in manager capability, feedback and development.

Both can work. I just want to know which is true here. There's little point building a six-month performance improvement process if your founder knows after six weeks that they want someone out.

2️⃣ What are they willing to do for someone truly exceptional?

What happens at the other end tells you just as much. 

One founder I worked with had a very simple philosophy: for our very best people, we go above and beyond. The usual rules don't apply. If retaining exceptional talent meant breaking our salary benchmarks (and others weren't happy about it) so be it. 

Another founder valued internal consistency much more. If someone exceeded expectations but was already at the top of their salary range, we wouldn't break the range or automatically promote them. Instead, we'd find other meaningful one-off ways to reward them such as equity, additional holiday, training budget or pension contributions. 

Neither is the right answer. What matters is knowing which one your founder actually believes, because that shapes how you handle it. 

Don't wait for the first veto to learn what your founder really believes

I used to pay attention to the latest performance management reinvention: annual vs quarterly reviews, ratings vs no ratings, continuous feedback, 360s, calibration, nine-box grids…those are just mechanisms.

After a few frustrating vetoes broke my beautifully designed ‘best practice’ performance systems, I started paying much more attention to what my founder actually believed and weaving those beliefs into how we design performance philosophy and practices. 

That clarity can then be built into the process and communicated clearly to employees from the start. #NoSurprises. 

Sometimes the ‘wrong’ performance practice is right for the company

We spend a lot of time debating what ‘good’ performance management looks like. But some companies have made choices that might make our HR brain go: You do WHAT?! 😳 

Once we understand what the company value, what they’re willing to tolerate and what they expect from people, those choices start to make sense… even when they challenge what HR generally considers ‘best practice’.

And that’s what I find interesting.

Here are 3 that challenge some of our most familiar HR instincts.

1️⃣ GitLab doesn't automatically put someone on a PIP

A common HR instinct is that underperformers should get a formal Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) before considering an exit.

GitLab doesn't make that automatic. Its handbook says coaching and feedback come first, but if performance doesn't improve, “in many cases we will not offer formal performance remediation or PIPs.” Separation may be the next step (subject to local employment requirements).

Why? GitLab explicitly points to the “critical impact of underperformance on the team and on the organization” and its commitment to maintaining a results-focused, high-performing culture. For them, a fair opportunity to improve doesn't always mean a formal PIP. 

That's their performance beliefs translated into practice.

2️⃣ At Alan, your performance review isn't confidential

When Alan described its performance review process in 2024, written reviews are published internally for everyone to see. Even the reasons someone was (or wasn't) promoted are shared in internal public documents. My HR brain immediately went: 😳.

But Alan's reasoning is interesting. They believe transparency creates fairness because decisions and the reasoning behind them are open to scrutiny. And the same process applied to everyone, including the CEO, CTO and interns.

They've designed around a clear belief: making performance decisions visible can make people more accountable for the quality of those decisions.

3️⃣ Jensen Huang gives corrective feedback in front of everyone

We've all heard the management advice: praise in public, criticise in private. Jensen Huang doesn't subscribe to it. He's said he doesn't do 1:1s and gives feedback “right there in front of everybody.” His reasoning is that when he works through the feedback publicly, everyone gets to learn from it.

His approach to underperformance is equally unusual. He's spoken openly about rarely wanting to fire people, saying he'd rather “torture you into greatness” because he believes in developing the people on his team (to be clear, these are Huang's stated management practices, rather than an NVIDIA-wide HR policy).

What I find interesting is the thinking behind it. He believes feedback and mistakes should create learning for more than the individual receiving them. His management practices follow from that belief.

Please don't copy any of these 😅 (that's not why I'm sharing them)

The companies above don't even agree with each other. GitLab is prepared to move towards separation without automatically going through a formal PIP. Huang talks about investing heavily in helping people improve… and that's exactly the point.

When you see an unusual performance practice, ask: Why does this make sense for them?

What do they believe about performance? What are they optimising for? What are they willing to tolerate? What trade-offs are they consciously making?

Then go back to your own company and have that conversation.

Because your performance philosophy should determine the practices you build around it — rather than retrofitting someone else's ‘best practice’ and discovering what your founder really thinks at the first veto.

👀 I'm plotting what to create for you in 2027

According to your onboarding responses, 74.5% of you prefer reading (no surprises there, you did subscribe to a newsletter! 😂), while 12.4% prefer listening. But as I'm thinking about what to create in 2027, I'm curious whether that's still true.

What do you need to STEP UP next?