Reward People Who Make Themselves Unnecessary

Four reasons organisations can’t do it — and why the future belongs to those who will

Here is a medical analogy that fits most organisations today: the operation was successful, but the patient is dead.

Year-end reviews look healthy. Feedback happened. Teams delivered. Yet the metrics that matter — growth, productivity, customer impact — barely moved. The root cause is usually not broken forms or missing ratings. It is that most organisations still reward the preservation of work, not its elimination.

AI and automation are rewriting how work gets done. Tasks that used to take hours now take minutes. The people who best understand where automation opportunities exist are the very ones doing the work. Yet performance systems quietly discourage them from speaking up — improving efficiency might shrink their role, automating a process might reduce their team. So the system nudges people toward protecting work rather than improving it.

AI will compress the gap between average and good. The real differentiator will be judgment — knowing what work should not exist at all.

So why can’t most organisations reward this? Four reasons.

1. We Measure Activity, Not Elimination

Open most goal sheets and you will find: conducted workshops, attended meetings, launched initiatives. Entries that show effort — rarely impact, and almost never removal. No one writes “eliminated three processes that no longer need to exist” as a goal because the system has no vocabulary for making work smaller. It only knows how to measure more.

Performance conversations should sound different: reduced churn by five percent, cut onboarding time by thirty percent, enabled growth without adding headcount, made a workflow obsolete. Until “eliminated” is valued as much as “delivered,” organisations will keep rewarding motion over progress.

2. We Reward Job Descriptions as Breakthroughs

Sit in enough calibration rooms, and you will see a pattern. Someone says, “This person has done genuinely innovative work.” The role expectation is then read aloud, and innovation was literally the job. Technology functions get applauded for innovation. Finance gets recognised for cost savings or securing funding. Product teams earn praise for new ideas. Nobody pauses to ask whether any of this exceeded what the role was hired to deliver.

This happens often because these are scarce-skill roles, and leaders fear losing people. But when retention anxiety drives rating inflation, performance management quietly becomes a retention workaround. The budget meant for genuine excellence gets consumed by baseline delivery — and the person who actually questioned whether the work should exist at all walks away unrewarded.

Leaders who lack real retention tools — differentiated bands, accelerated growth paths, ring-fenced packages — should fight for them from the CEO. Not dilute the performance system to compensate.

3. We Punish the Brave — In More Ways Than One

Team size is power in most organisations. A leader who automates half their function and returns headcount has just shrunk their influence — fewer direct reports, smaller budgets, less visibility. The system punishes exactly what it should celebrate.

But there is a subtler version of the same problem that plays out at the individual level. When PODs were introduced in a technology product organisation — cross-functional teams structured around specific problems — the intent was to assign the hardest problems to the best people.

What emerged was an uncomfortable paradox: the most capable individuals landed on the toughest PODs, which by nature had the lowest probability of clean, visible success. Meanwhile, relatively straightforward problems went to others who, working collectively, delivered tidier outcomes and better ratings.

Will a high performer not quietly disengage when being trusted with the hardest work means high chances of failure and hence a lower performance rating? There is no clean answer.

This is where leadership discretion must step in — visible, intentional, and rare enough to feel like a genuine exception, thus providing a safer environment for the top performers to take on the hardest problems head-on, rather than avoiding them. The system will not solve this on its own.

Until organisations explicitly reward leaders who achieve more with less — and individuals who take on the hardest problems — the incentives will keep running in the wrong direction.

4. We Hire For Roles, Not the Hunger to Outgrow Them

Performance management does not operate in isolation. The quality of people who enter the system determines everything that follows — how they respond to stretch, how they handle ambiguity, and whether they instinctively look for what can be simplified or just protect what already exists.

Early in my HR career, a senior leader at a large pharmaceutical organisation shared a hiring philosophy that has stayed with me since. She said: If she could not afford the best talent from the top brands, she would not settle for average people from those brands either.

She would rather hire the best people from the second-best brands — because the skill would be comparable, but the hunger to compete with top-brand peers would take them further, possibly even past them.

That hunger is what performance systems rarely measure — but it is what separates the person who defends their domain from the one who looks for ways to outgrow it. High talent density is not just a function of who you hire. It is a function of how deeply leaders think about who fits the dynamic puzzle of the organisation — not just who fills the open role.

What to Do — Starting Now

Ask one question most organisations skip when goals are being set: which goal on this list explicitly removes work? Not improves it. Not digitises it. Removes it.

Then create the conditions where acting on that question is safe. Recognise and visibly reward anyone who eliminates workflows, reduces cycle time, or frees up recurring capacity — validated, not estimated.

Treat leaders who return headcount through simplification as examples of leadership, not people who have shrunk their own relevance. The CEO must make this culturally explicit, because no policy will change behaviour if the cost of returning capacity remains career risk and reduced perceived social power.

Organisations routinely pay consulting firms seven-figure fees to optimise headcount, reduce costs, and streamline processes. What if, instead, you pick up a mid-senior employee – a sharp, intellectually restless, enterprising person — gave them a discreetly high bonus, say double their fixed pay — and asked them the right questions? Set their goals explicitly around process removal, headcount reduction, and cost elimination.

Pair that with leadership goals explicitly set around process efficiency and achieving more with less, and you would likely solve more in twelve months, at a fraction of the cost, with institutional knowledge no external consultant will ever have. The answer is often already inside the building. The system just never thought to ask.

The Question No Performance System Can Answer Alone

A niche-skill employee once told me flatly: “PMS is useless. If my manager does not know what I did, filling the form anyway will not help.” He was not entirely wrong. Goal setting and appraisal processes do need to be sharper, and managers do need to be better equipped to observe and articulate performance. But his statement raised something deeper that I want to leave you with.

Is a brilliant performer who is an absolute negative on basic cultural and professional expectations — acceptable? Should performance management solve for it? Should talent reviews flag it before someone gets promoted into leadership? Should leaders be made personally accountable for the cultural fabric their teams embody?

I do not have a single answer. But I am certain of this: no performance system — however well designed, however fairly calibrated — will sustain a high-performance culture if the underlying cultural hygiene is broken. Brilliant and toxic is not a trade-off. It is a slow leak. And organisations that let it go unaddressed will find, eventually, that the system they spent years building has been quietly hollowed out from within.

The Question That Matters

Performance management ultimately answers one question: what does this organisation actually reward?

Reward activity, and you get motion. Reward outcomes, and you get impact. Reward the courage to eliminate your own work — and you unlock something rarer than productivity: genuine progress.

The future will not belong to organisations with the most sophisticated review systems. It will belong to those with the clarity to celebrate the employee who says, “This work does not need to exist anymore” — and then moves on to solve something harder.

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