Performative Work Is Killing Your Team's Trust

The Ask That Revealed Everything

A friend of mine starts work early, and he puts in a full, productive day and always gets his work done. Then his manager asks him to stay later.

Not because there's more work to do, or because a deadline shifted. It’s because his manager's boss shows up later in the day, and the manager wants everyone visible when the senior leader walks through.

That's not management, that's theater.

And I've seen versions of this story hundreds of times across a career that spans 33 years, thousands of hires, and more dysfunctional organizations than I care to count. The details change, but the core problem doesn't. Leaders confuse presence with performance, and they build cultures where people learn to look busy instead of being productive. Here's what that costs you.

Performative Work Is a Betrayal of the Deal

When someone takes a job, there's an implicit agreement. They give you their time, their energy, their focus. You give them meaningful work, fair compensation, and the opportunity to build something.

The moment you start asking people to perform effort rather than produce output, you've broken your side of the agreement.

You're telling them their time doesn't actually belong to them. You're telling them that what matters isn't what they produce. You're telling them the game is about optics, not merit. And smart people, the ones you most want to keep, will figure that out fast. Then they'll either leave or they'll learn to play the optics game instead of doing real work, and neither outcome is good for you.

I've managed hundreds of people. The ones who stayed late performatively were rarely my best performers. The ones who did exceptional work often left at a reasonable hour because they were efficient, focused, and didn't waste time.

Rewarding hours over output is rewarding the wrong behavior; it's that simple.

The Meritocracy Problem

Work should be a meritocracy, I believe that with all of my heart. The people who work hardest and smartest should advance. They should get the raises, the promotions, the stretch assignments.

But meritocracy dies the second you introduce performative standards, because now you're not measuring merit anymore, you're measuring compliance. You're measuring who's willing to play the game, and plenty of people will play the game who have no business advancing, while your actual high performers burn out trying to figure out why their results aren't enough.

I've interviewed over 3,000 people in my career, including more than 1,250 as an Amazon Bar Raiser. I can tell you exactly what happens in organizations that reward performance theater. The behavioral interview answers start sounding hollow. People describe accomplishments that are really just activities. They talk about hours and effort instead of outcomes and impact. They've been trained by their organizations to think that way.

The culture you build teaches people what matters. If you reward face time, you'll get a workforce optimized for face time, that's on you as a leader.

Face Time Is Not Real Time

Here's the distinction that matters: Face time is showing up to be seen. Real time is investing genuinely in your work and your relationships.

They look similar from the outside, but hey produce completely different results.

A few years ago, I set up weekly one-on-ones with four leaders who were above me in the organization; skip-level relationships. I didn't do this to look good, I did it because I believed those relationships mattered, and I was willing to invest real time in building them.

Three of those relationships became genuinely strong, not performative strong, where we smiled at each other in meetings. Where we disagreed, we worked through it and built mutual respect. Two of those leaders I'm still in regular contact with today, even though neither of us is at that organization anymore. One relationship started contentious because we disagreed philosophically on some things, but we kept showing up, kept talking, and eventually understood each other well enough that the disagreement became a foundation for trust rather than a reason for conflict.

The fourth leader canceled almost every week. We met maybe once every two months, and there was no relationship to speak of. Not because either of us was a bad person, but because you cannot build a real relationship without consistent investment.

That's the lesson. Not showing up performatively, but instead showing up consistently and genuinely.

What to Do Instead

If you're a leader asking people to stay late for appearances, ask yourself what you're actually measuring. If the answer is hours, you're measuring the wrong thing. Define what good output looks like and measure that.

If you're a manager whose boss is doing this to you, you have a harder problem. You can't always change the culture above you. But you can protect your team from it. You can be explicit with the people who work for you: I care about your output and your well-being, and I'm not going to ask you to perform effort for an audience.

That matters more than you think; people remember the managers who protected them from the machine.

And if you're the individual contributor caught in a performative culture, here's what I'd tell you: build real relationships, not facades. Invest actual time with the people who matter in your organization. Not to be seen, but to be known. There is a difference, and the people worth knowing will recognize it.

The Skip-Level Lesson Applied

Here's why my skip-level example connects directly to the performative work problem. The leader who kept canceling on me wasn't bad, but those cancellations sent a message. Either this isn't a priority, or I don't think the relationship is worth the time.

Contrast that with the leader who showed up every week. Some of those early conversations were awkward; we didn't always agree, but the act of showing up consistently built something real. It built trust, familiarity, and understanding of each other's thinking and values.

That's what consistent investment does. It builds the real thing.

Performative investment builds the appearance of the real thing, and the appearance is fragile. It collapses the moment there's any real pressure because there's nothing underneath it.

The Bottom Line

This is not complicated, but it requires courage to act on.

Stop measuring presence and start measuring output. Stop asking people to perform effort and start building conditions where effort produces real results. Stop showing up to be seen and start showing up to actually connect.

Work should be a meritocracy, and those who produce the most should advance. Those who invest genuinely in relationships should have strong networks; those who do the real work should win.

The moment you let performative standards creep in, you've started corroding that meritocracy, slowly at first, then faster than you expect.

Your team is watching what you reward, make sure you're rewarding the right things.