Today’s Strategic Alignment Journal post in two sentences:
A declaration by Friedrich Mahler, the leader of a fictional group of assassins in Kill Jackie, raises some very real questions about how organizations define performance, reward contribution, and determine the value of their people. When winning becomes the overriding measure of success, we need to consider not only what organizations achieve, but what they may be sacrificing in the process.
In the television series Kill Jackie, starring Catherine Zeta-Jones, a group of professional assassins known as the Seven Demons are assembled around a common objective. They are highly skilled, well compensated, and expected to deliver results. But when disagreements and personal rivalries begin interfering with their work, their leader, Friedrich Mahler, played by Julian Rhind-Tutt, calls them to order.
Friedrich makes it clear that he has no interest in their personal relationships or grievances. They are not his children. They have been brought together to perform a function, and he expects them to remember why they are there.
He then delivers a particularly revealing assessment of their relationship:
You are parts of a Formula One racing car, my car, my brand. Yes. Each one of you can be replaced. You exist to win me the race. In return, you receive great riches. But only so long as I win.
The exchange takes place in the fourth episode, Cocaine Blues, and although the circumstances are fictional and extreme, the underlying philosophy is one that people working in entirely legitimate organizations may recognize.
Strip away the criminal enterprise and what remains is a recognizable proposition.
I have assembled you to achieve my objectives. Your contribution will be rewarded, possibly very generously, but your continued value depends on your usefulness to me. You are part of a system designed to produce a particular outcome, and if you cannot perform your function, someone else will.
Friedrich makes no attempt to disguise the transactional nature of the relationship. In fact, his message has a certain clarity that many organizations might envy. Everyone knows what is expected, what success looks like, and what the consequences of failure might be.
But I wonder how much of what we describe as effective performance management is shaped by assumptions about people that we have never really examined.
Performance Is Not the Question
Organizations exist to achieve outcomes, and employing people brings with it a reasonable expectation that they will contribute to those outcomes. Leaders must be able to set standards, evaluate performance, make difficult decisions, and ensure that the organization has the capabilities required to succeed.
I don’t think we serve anyone by pretending otherwise.
People enter employment relationships knowing that their contribution has an economic value. They exchange their time, capabilities, experience, and judgment for compensation, opportunity, and whatever other benefits the relationship provides. There is nothing inherently objectionable about this arrangement, nor should we assume that demanding performance environments are necessarily unhealthy. Some people deliberately seek them out because they enjoy the challenge, the competition, and the rewards that accompany exceptional results.
What interests me is the point at which an expectation of performance becomes a philosophy of human value.
In the Formula One analogy, the individual is not simply accountable for performing a role. The individual is the role, a component whose significance lies entirely in its contribution to the machine. Once that contribution is no longer required, the component can be replaced without any apparent consideration of what else might be lost.
We know, of course, that people can be replaced. Organizations recruit, restructure, promote, redeploy, and separate from employees all the time. These are ordinary features of organizational life. But acknowledging replaceability is different from building a leadership philosophy around it.
The assumptions behind that philosophy influence far more than decisions about who stays and who goes. They shape how people are treated while they are there.
Whose Race Are We Running?
I was particularly struck by the language of ownership in Friedrich’s declaration.
“My car, my brand.”
He defines the enterprise entirely in relation to himself. He owns the machine, determines the objective, and decides what constitutes victory. Everyone else exists to help him achieve it.
In a privately owned business, there may be nothing unusual about an individual having the final authority to determine the direction of the enterprise. Ownership carries rights, responsibilities, and risks that employees do not necessarily share. But when the leader’s personal ambition becomes indistinguishable from the organization’s purpose, it raises questions about how decisions are made and whose interests are considered along the way.
Employees may understand the organization’s objectives without necessarily sharing the owner’s personal definition of success. They may be committed to producing excellent work while holding different views about how that work should be accomplished. They may also recognize risks, contradictions, or emerging opportunities that leadership has not considered.
An organization benefits from these differences when people are permitted to exercise judgment rather than simply execute instructions.
The Formula One analogy exposes the limitation of thinking about people as components.
A mechanical part does not challenge the driver about the car’s direction. It does not question the condition of the track, suggest a different strategy, or recognize that winning the next race might compromise the entire season.
People however can do all of these things.
Yet organizations sometimes create conditions in which employees learn that questioning direction is interpreted as resistance, raising concerns is treated as negativity, and exercising independent judgment is welcomed only when it confirms what leadership already believes.
Under those circumstances, the organization may have assembled highly capable people while creating a system that discourages them from using the full range of their capabilities.
What Winning Encourages
The definition of winning deserves just as much attention as the expectation that everyone should contribute to it.
When success is measured primarily through financial results, market position, growth, or the achievement of particular targets, people naturally organize their behavior around those measures. They direct their attention toward what is rewarded and become increasingly sensitive to what might threaten their standing.
This can produce remarkable levels of focus, discipline, and execution. There are organizations whose success depends on an intensity of performance that would be difficult to sustain without a shared commitment to demanding objectives…but I think we need to examine what else those conditions encourage:
- If people believe that their value depends entirely on the next result, how willing will they be to acknowledge that a strategy is failing?
- What happens when an employee recognizes a problem but knows that communicating it may affect how their performance is judged?
- How does collaboration develop when individuals are rewarded for their personal contribution but held collectively responsible for outcomes over which they may have limited control?
The consequences are not always immediately visible. An organization can continue delivering impressive results while people become more guarded, less willing to challenge decisions, or increasingly concerned with protecting their positions.
Leadership may interpret the absence of disagreement as alignment, when it could just as easily reflect an understanding of what is safe to say.
Over time, the organization risks losing access to information and judgment that it needs to make sound decisions. The people are still there, performing their assigned functions, but the quality of their participation has changed; and because the performance indicators may continue looking healthy, leadership may have little reason to question the conditions producing those results.
The Contribution We Don’t Always Measure
The mechanical comparison also assumes that replacing a component restores the system to its previous level of effectiveness.
Organizations rarely work quite so neatly.
An employee’s contribution is not limited to the responsibilities contained in a job description or the outputs captured in a performance review.
People accumulate knowledge about how things actually work, develop relationships that make coordination possible, understand the history behind decisions, and recognize patterns that may never appear in a formal report.
Some employees become the people others turn to when established processes fail. Others help resolve tensions, interpret uncertainty, or preserve continuity through periods of change. These contributions may not attract much attention because they are embedded in the ordinary functioning of the organization.
Their value often becomes apparent only after the individual has left.
I am not suggesting that organizations should retain people indefinitely because of their history or relationships. That would create its own problems. Roles change, capabilities become outdated, and difficult personnel decisions are sometimes necessary.
But when leadership evaluates people exclusively through the lens of immediate, measurable performance, it may overlook contributions that are essential to the organization’s longer-term effectiveness.
A replacement may possess the same technical qualifications and still be unable to reproduce the contribution of the person who occupied the role before them.
The position has been filled. Whether the organization has recovered what it lost is another question.
The Success We Leave Behind
I keep returning to the final condition in Friedrich’s declaration.
“But only so long as I win.”
It places his victory at the center of the entire arrangement. The rewards, the relationships, and the continued participation of everyone involved are contingent upon that outcome.
In the fictional world of Kill Jackie, this is entirely consistent with the nature of the enterprise. The characters are professional assassins, not participants in a democratic institution. Friedrich is not interested in developing a shared organizational purpose or creating an environment in which everyone feels valued.
But in ordinary organizations, where people are expected to contribute not only their labor but their judgment, initiative, creativity, and commitment, I think we have to ask whether that philosophy is sufficient.
- An organization can achieve its targets while weakening the relationships that made those achievements possible.
- It can deliver impressive financial results while creating conditions that discourage honesty, experimentation, and independent thinking.
- It can win the immediate race while gradually compromising its ability to compete in the next one.
Equally, organizations can maintain demanding standards, reward exceptional contribution, and make difficult decisions without treating people as disposable instruments of someone else’s ambition.
The difference lies in what leadership understands about the relationship between people and performance.
If people are regarded primarily as resources to be deployed, managed, and replaced, the organization will tend to develop systems that reflect that understanding. If they are recognized as contributors whose judgment, relationships, and capabilities influence the quality of organizational outcomes, different choices become possible.
Neither perspective eliminates the need for accountability. Both must confront the realities of performance and economic sustainability…but they are likely to produce very different experiences of work and, over time, different organizational capabilities.
Friedrich’s Formula One analogy leaves us with an uncomfortable question about what we choose to value.
Winning matters. Organizations cannot survive indefinitely without producing results. But the conditions under which those results are achieved influence what the organization becomes, what its people are willing to contribute, and whether its success can be sustained.
Strategic Reflection Prompt
How does your organization define winning, and what does that definition communicate about the value of the people expected to deliver it? Consider not only the results being achieved, but the behaviors, relationships, and organizational capabilities being strengthened or weakened in the process.
About Giselle
For nearly three decades, I’ve worked with leaders across the Caribbean facing problems that keep returning, solutions that haven’t delivered the expected results, or changes that prove difficult to implement.
When I ask business owners what problem they can’t seem to solve, the answer is usually “people.”
So I ask them to tell me more, because people and businesses are rarely as simple as they first appear.
I help them understand what’s really causing the problem before they spend more money trying to fix it. And where needed, I help design an appropriate solution and work with their teams to implement it effectively.
What are you trying to make sense of right now?
