How to build a high-performance culture, not more heroes

For decades, the default playbook for a high-performing team has been simple: Find your best players, give them the ball, and get out of the way. That approach may seem intuitive, but Culture Amp’s Chief People and Customer Engagement Officer, Justin Angsuwat, believes it’s wrong. 

According to Justin, depending on a small number of exceptional people only looks like a strong performance strategy. In practice, it creates a situation in which organizations can become far too dependent on those high-performing individuals. 

He offers the example of the 1980s Chicago Bulls. Their playbook: Get Michael Jordan the ball, and let him do the rest. The plan worked, taking them all the way to the NBA finals, where the Detroit Pistons’ defense focused on keeping the ball away from Jordan. Unable to execute their Jordan-centric playbook, the Bulls lost while learning a valuable lesson.

Under Phil Jackson in the 1990s, the team started using the triangle offense, a system built on passing the ball to any open player. It didn’t hold Jordan back; in fact, he and the team became close to unstoppable. Instead of just one way to score, they had many.

Key insights

• A Peak Performance culture isn’t about relying on a few star performers; it’s about what happens when employee engagement meets performance confidence on an organizational level.

• When HR teams measure employee engagement and performance confidence separately, they may take a narrow focus that overlooks broader issues. 

• Meeting with direct reports on a regular cadence is the single most useful thing leaders can do to build a high-performance culture. Instead of prioritizing individual high performers, this supports every employee in doing their best work.

The high-performance culture formula

Culture Amp's people science team has spent over 15 years studying what actually separates teams like the triangle-offense Bulls from teams still using the "get it to our best player" playbook. The answer comes down to two things, measured together:

• Employee engagement - How connected do people feel to the organization, and how enthusiastic are they about their work? 

• Performance confidence - Do people believe the company can succeed? 

When you look at these scores together, you get one of four measurable culture states:

1. Peak Performance - Employees believe in the company’s vision and feel energized to help achieve it 

2. Engaged Skepticism - People are bought in but doubt the plan will work

3. Strained - Employees believe in the company’s vision but are running on fumes

4. Disconnected - Employees are disengaged and lack confidence in the company

Our data shows that companies in the Peak Performance state reap the benefits of their high-performance cultures. In a study tracking 1,800 organizations over two years, companies in Peak Performance saw a 25% share price increase in the first year, a 36% increase at the two-year mark, and a 47% share price advantage over organizations in the other three states combined. Notably, 44% of the Culture Amp customers in that study had already reached Peak Performance, which means it isn't rare. It's a state that companies can deliberately create. 

As Amy Lavoie, VP of People Science at Culture Amp, puts it: "Peak Performance isn't a cultural unicorn, nor the result of a few heroic high-performing employees. Rather, it's a distinct, measurable state you can systematically work toward."

In contrast, the Strained quadrant can be deceptive. Cultures in this state may look fine on the surface, because employees have high performance confidence, but they also report low engagement. A company in this state may produce short-term results through sheer force, which is exactly why it's dangerous. That success likely isn’t sustainable.

Looking at the big picture often adds crucial context

If your company culture isn’t where you want it to be, don’t look for a quick fix. When something goes wrong, the loudest signal often gets the most attention, but it may not be what needs your attention most. Justin references an example from the airline industry. 

In 1972, an Eastern Air Lines flight approaching Miami had a burned-out indicator bulb on the dashboard. The rest of the aircraft was working fine, but all three pilots in the cockpit were fixated on that one missing light. As they debated whether it meant the landing gear had failed, they accidentally disengaged the autopilot, and the plane began to descend. 

The lesson the aviation industry took from that crash, and others like it, wasn't "hire better pilots." It was to redesign the entire operating system around the pilots they already had, and connect the instruments so they could see the full picture in an emergency.

It’s been decades since the airlines learned that lesson, but HR teams still make a similar mistake. One low engagement score, one high-profile departure, or one difficult calibration conversation can absorb all the attention in a room, even as trust and strategic confidence are quietly eroding elsewhere in the organization. A narrow focus makes it more likely that leaders will overlook the biggest risks.

An ongoing challenge is that most HR teams still run engagement and performance measurement as two separate cycles. Separately, they may not show any issues, but when they’re overlaid, they could reveal a team that scores well on engagement but is quietly losing confidence in the company. This is precisely the pattern Engaged Skepticism describes.

How can HR teams gain a broader perspective?

Culture Amp's Multi Signal Intelligence™ – Talent Retention (coming in October 2026) is designed to help HR teams see the big picture and build a high-performance culture. It connects engagement, performance, and HRIS data into a single view, explains what's driving the patterns it finds, and then uses AI Coach to help leaders and managers understand their team’s data. 

AI Coach doesn't hand a leader a verdict. It functions as an advisor, considering the leader’s perspective before suggesting a next step, whether that's drafting a conversation guide, building an action plan, or planning to discuss the topic in an upcoming 1-on-1. Every step addresses performance improvements at the team level, rather than focusing on any one person. 

Moving toward a high-performance culture

While Culture Amp's Multi Signal Intelligence™ – Talent Retention will provide company-specific insights, leaders don’t need new tools to start taking action. The single most useful thing they can do is meet with direct reports on a regular cadence. Culture Amp's people science team has found that employees who have 1-on-1s with their managers twice a month are roughly 67% less likely to leave in a given year, and more structured 1-on-1s reduce that even further. It's one of the clearest early indicators available, and it's usually the first thing to slip when a team gets busy.

Career growth is also linked with retention. Culture Amp research shows that the number one reason employees give for leaving is a lack of development opportunities. The predictive power of a single survey question is striking: Employees who strongly disagree that they can see themselves at the company in two years stay a median of 1.18 years, compared with 4.44 years for employees who strongly agree.

Holding regular 1-on-1s and supporting employee development can help your company retain high-performing employees, but more importantly, it can help you build a culture of sustainable high performance. Culture Amp's research on the topic, drawn from more than 560,000 employees at over 1,500 companies, found that only 2% of employees sustain a high performance rating across multiple review cycles, and that high performers give feedback 36 percentage points more often than lower-performing colleagues.

 "Sustainable high performance isn't about identifying and recruiting 'superstar' employees,” says Justin, “but rather about deliberately creating the conditions where all employees can achieve their best work."

Focus on performance, not performers

Since only 2% of people sustain top performance across cycles, a strategy built on finding and keeping high performers is a strategy built on a very small, unreliable base. 

The more durable move is to build a system, in the Phil Jackson sense: one that connects engagement and performance signals instead of measuring them separately, that surfaces the quiet signals (1-on-1 frequency, intent-to-stay sentiment) instead of only reacting to the loud ones, and that treats every high performer as a product of the team's conditions rather than a stroke of hiring luck.

Watch Justin’s talk at our Culture First Forum to learn more about how to build high-performing teams that don’t rely on individual heroes.