We Teach Leadership. Here’s Why We Don’t Use Performance Reviews.

I spent the early part of my career in sales. And if there’s one thing sales culture does consistently well, it’s talking about teams.

Every sales floor I’ve ever been on had a team name, a team target, a team celebration when the number got hit. The language of teamship was everywhere. The structure underneath it told a completely different story.

The reality of most sales environments is in the measures: the KPIs are individual, the commission is individual, the performance conversation is individual, and when it comes down to it, your number is your number. In that design, someone else’s success isn’t something you celebrate because it helps the team. You celebrate it, if you celebrate it at all, because it lifts the mood. But it doesn’t change your position. It doesn’t change what you’re being measured against. And in the moments that matter, when territory overlaps or a lead is contested, or a deal could go either way, the system quietly encourages you to look after yourself first.

That’s not a criticism of the people. It’s a description of what individual KPIs produce when you dress them up in team language: a group of individuals with the same job title and a shared target on the wall.

The Question that Followed Me

When I became CEO of LIW, that experience stayed with me. Not as a grievance, but as a genuine question: if the structure produces the behaviour, what structure would actually produce a team?

LIW exists to transform how people experience work through leadership. We work with organisations every day on exactly this. So the question of how we run ourselves wasn’t an abstract one. It felt like the most important question we could ask.

We landed on a value that we take seriously: above all, we are a team.

In doing this, we made a conscious decision that this value had to be reflected in the actual design of how we work, not just written on a wall and nodded at in all-hands meetings.

That decision led us deliberately away from a traditional performance management framework.

What We Do Instead

The model we’ve built is straightforward, though it takes genuine commitment to sustain.

Each month, we come together as a team to think about our goals and agree collectively what the most important priorities are for that period. Not handed down, agreed together. Each week, in our standups, the conversation is built around how we’re tracking, whether anyone needs support, and whether anything has shifted that should change how we’ve allocated our effort. When something does shift, whether that’s a client need, a new piece of information, or a realisation that something else matters more, were set together and move accordingly.

When we talk about performance formally, the focus is on how we’re working as a team. It’s a retrospective conversation, not a scorecard review. And in one-to-ones, the conversation is about the individual’s growth, where they want to go, what good looks like for them in the business, and how we support that within the collective. The one-to-one serves the team model. It doesn’t sit alongside it as a shadow system of individual accountability.

What this creates, in practice, is an environment where the conditions for success are shared. Clarity comes from building priorities together rather than receiving them. Climate comes from a standup culture, where asking for help is normal rather than an admission of weakness. People understand how their contribution connects to the team’s goals because they helped shape those goals in the first place.

On Accountability: Because it’s the Right Question to Ask

If there’s no performance management framework, no individual KPIs, no formal review against personal targets, then who is actually accountable for what? And what happens when someone isn’t pulling their weight?

It’s a fair challenge, and the honest answer is that this model doesn’t reduce accountability. In some respects, it increases it, because there’s nowhere to hide behind a private scorecard that only your manager sees.

That transparency is the accountability mechanism. And in my experience, it’s more demanding than a quarterly review with your line manager, because it operates continuously and in the open. The risk in this model isn’t a lack of accountability. The risk is a lack of candour. If a team isn’t willing to have honest conversations about contribution, if the culture tips too far towards being supportive at the expense of being direct, then the transparency that should create accountability becomes something people talk around rather than into. Someone carries more than their share quietly. Someone else drifts without anyone naming it.

The safeguard isn’t reintroducing individual KPIs. It’s building a clear enough shared picture of what good looks like, what the conditions for success are, and what each person’s contribution to those conditions should be, so that the feedback conversation always has a reference point. We’ve worked hard to create that picture together as a team, and it means that when a difficult conversation needs to happen, it can be grounded in something we’ve all agreed on rather than something handed down from above.

What I’d say to anyone considering this model is that it asks something real of leaders. It asks you to be more honest more often, not less. A performance review creates a formal moment for feedback. This model requires you to create those moments yourself, continuously, in the flow of normal work. That’s harder. But it’s also, I think, closer to what good leadership actually looks like.

Why this Matters Beyond LIW

I’m not suggesting every organisation should scrap its performance management framework. Different contexts produce different needs, and I know better than most that in some sales environments, individual accountability structures exist for good reasons.

But I do think most organisations have never seriously interrogated whether the framework they have is producing what they say they want. Individual KPIs are familiar, measurable, and easy to defend. They are also, in many environments, quietly producing competition where collaboration is needed, compliance where ownership is needed, and a version of “team” that looks like one from the outside and doesn’t function like one from the inside.