When leaders treat performance management as an ongoing responsibility, organizations thrive, say HR leaders
In many Canadian organizations, there’s a gap between what human resources (HR) leaders know drives performance and what senior executives choose to prioritize – and closing it starts with leadership accountability, according to Ramneet Aujla, Chief Human Resources Officer at Metrolinx in Toronto.
“Senior leaders naturally gravitate towards things that are more immediately tied to business outcomes,” says Aujla. “It's much easier to put targets around things like growth, cost, or productivity than it is around the quality of leadership or the health of the performance culture.”
The challenge, Aujla says, is that leadership capability and performance culture are often the very conditions that determine whether those business outcomes are sustainable. “In my experience, organizations get into trouble when leadership behaviours are treated as something separate from executive accountability,” she says.
Making leadership accountability explicit
To bridge that divide, Aujla says Metrolinx introduced a mandatory people leader goal or commitment for every leader across the organization – from the C-suite to front-line managers. The intent is deliberate: how a leader delivers results matters as much as the results themselves, she says.
“You have to stop treating business outcomes and people outcomes as separate conversations,” Aujla says. “Strong positive leadership and a healthy performance culture aren’t competing priorities, they're what makes sustained performance possible.”
Aujla believes that when that alignment is missing, organizations focus on shorter-term metrics and underinvest in the leadership behaviours that drive long-term success.
Katie Thibeault, Human Resources Manager at Cognition+, an insurance technology company based in London, Ont., describes a similar philosophy. At Cognition+, goal-setting cascades from the corporate level to teams and individuals, so employees understand how their work connects to overall company success, according to Thibeault. “Ultimately, it's that human connection and those conversations that are the foundation of [performance] versus the technology,” she says.
Moving beyond the annual performance assessment cycle
Gerard Seijts, Professor of Organizational Behaviour at Western University in London, Ont., says that leaders should be regularly involved in performance management, because “what you ignore, you empower.” He argues that organizations inadvertently enable poor behaviour and disengagement by avoiding difficult conversations.
“That's certainly the role of leadership to create an environment where people really would like to be the best, grow, develop, and are excited about the work that they're doing,” says Seijts.
Seijts draws on author Kim Scott's framework of “radical candor” – challenging people directly while caring for them personally – to argue that most leaders struggle not with directness but with the empathy required to make feedback constructive. “It doesn't mean I can be candid at being an authentic jerk," he says. "If I make you feel inferior, if I ridicule that, you will never listen, so it’s about acting with empathy and compassion, so the conversation is a constructive one.”
Aujla makes the same point from an HR leader’s perspective. “If I could change one thing, it would be moving away from thinking about performance as an event and towards thinking about it as an ongoing leadership responsibility,” she says. “By the time you're sitting down to assign your employees a performance rating for the year, the performance outcome has largely been determined. The real work is happening in all of the conversations leading up to that point.”
That shift is also being shaped by workforce demographics. Aujla notes that Metrolinx's workforce skews toward Generation X and millennial employees who expect more frequent feedback, greater coaching, and clearer growth paths than previous generations did. She says Metrolinx is also exploring how artificial intelligence (AI) can help people leaders who are new to giving constructive feedback frame difficult conversations more confidently.
Accountability starts with clarity
A high-performance culture requires accountability – but it should be distinguished from punishment, according to Aujla.
“Accountability is really about clarity,” says Aujla. "People should know what's expected, understand how success is being measured, and receive feedback early enough to make adjustments.” Accountability cultures don't typically fail because of policy, she adds – they fail because of inconsistency. “Once you start to lose consistency, you start to erode trust. When it's working well, accountability doesn't feel punitive – it feels fair.”
Thibeault takes a similar view. She says her organization provides regular feedback on both desired and unacceptable behaviours, and uses peer recognition programs to reinforce positive performance publicly. “We don't want any sort of accountability or tough conversation to ever come as a surprise,” she says. “People know what success looks like.”
Seijts frames accountability as inseparable from character. “I'm all for accountability, but we need to marry that with other dimensions of leadership principles like humanity, compassion, and empathy,” he says. “Accountability also means courage. But if people don't hold one another accountable, the culture is going to be diluted.”
Workforce planning as a strategic conversation
Aujla's broader prescription is to shift the organizational conversation from headcount to capability. “Too often, workforce planning has become just an annual exercise where we ask how many people do we need,” she says. “The more important question is what capabilities are actually going to determine whether we succeed three or five or 10 years from now.”
At Metrolinx, this means linking workforce planning directly to its performance framework and business strategy – treating talent gaps and succession risk with the same rigour applied to financial risk. "Workforce planning becomes truly strategic when it's discussed in the same way that we discuss operational or financial risk,” Aujla says. “It needs to stop being an HR exercise and really become a business conversation.”
Thibeault echoes this in how Cognition+ defines the talent it hires and promotes – prioritizing curiosity, collaboration, and adaptability over specific technical skills that quickly become obsolete. “We're looking for people who don't necessarily have a specific skill set, but for our culture, we really look for people who are collaborative and they want to be part of a team. They're curious and they're engaged,” she says.
The thread for all three is that performance isn’t a process to be managed once or twice a year by a single manager or HR person. It’s a leadership responsibility, practiced daily, grounded in clarity, and built on trust.
“If we believe that things like coaching, developing talent, succession planning, and driving high-performing teams matter, then those things have to show up in senior leaders’ goals or commitments, and just how we assess success,” says Aujla. “I don't really see transformation and performance as competing priorities – performance becomes even more important during periods of change.”
