There's a belief that quietly runs through most organizations: You can either push for high performance or you can be a caring, people-first workplace. Pick one.
If you hold people accountable and deliver tough feedback, you're not the "nice" kind of leader. If you prioritize relationships and care about people as humans, you must be soft on results.
This is one of the most damaging false choices in leadership. And the organizations that figure out how to reject it—how to be both high-performance and deeply caring—are the ones that build cultures people actually want to be part of.
Culture is defined by what you celebrate and what you tolerate
Here's a useful way to think about culture: It shows up in every single thing you do as an organization. Not just the values on the wall or the language in your mission statement, but in the daily decisions about what gets rewarded and what gets ignored.
What do you celebrate? What do you tolerate? The answers to those two questions tell you more about your culture than any offsite or engagement survey ever will.
If you celebrate individual wins but tolerate people who undermine their teammates, your culture is competitive in the wrong ways. If you celebrate collaboration but tolerate mediocre results, your culture is friendly but not effective. The gap between what you say you value and what you actually reinforce—that's where culture lives.
The formula: Simple, but not easy
Leaders at the Philadelphia 76ers have a straightforward approach to this challenge: treat people like people. That's it. That's the formula.
But treating people like people isn't about being nice or avoiding hard conversations. It means setting real expectations about what really matters. It means holding people accountable. It means delivering feedback—direct feedback, the kind that makes people better even when it's uncomfortable to give.
And at the same time, it means taking a genuine interest in someone as a person. Not just their output or their role, but who they actually are.
This is the part that takes curation, as they describe it. Building a culture that's high-performance driven and also loving and caring requires ongoing attention. It doesn't happen by accident, and it doesn't sustain itself without effort.
The shift: Direct conversations become acts of care
Here's what changes when you get this right: Direct conversations stop feeling like confrontations and start feeling like investments. You're using honest feedback to make each other better, not to prove a point or protect your position.
When people know you authentically care about them as human beings, they can receive almost anything from you. The accountability doesn't feel punitive—it feels like support. The high expectations don't feel like pressure—they feel like belief in what someone is capable of.
And when that's the environment, something powerful happens: People are surrounded with the resources, the people, and the trust to actually go do their jobs successfully. They're not navigating politics or protecting themselves from criticism. They're just doing the work, knowing that their team has their back.
The takeaway: Caring is what makes high performance sustainable
The formula is simple, even if it's not easy. Treat people like people. Set real expectations. Hold people accountable. Deliver feedback. Take an interest in who they are beyond their job title.
If you try to build high performance without genuine care, you might get short-term results, but you'll burn people out and lose your best talent. If you try to build a caring culture without accountability and high expectations, you'll have happy people who aren't actually achieving anything meaningful together.
The goal is both. And the path to both starts with seeing the people around you as people—not as resources, not as roles, not as obstacles to your objectives. When you authentically care about them as human beings, you're well on your way to creating a culture worth being part of.
Scott O'Neil gave each of his new employees a copy of Leadership and Self-Deception. Get your sample chapters below.
Send me the Leadership and Self-Deception Sample Chapters!
Frequently asked questions
Q: How do I give tough feedback without damaging the relationship?
A: The relationship is what makes the feedback possible. If someone knows you genuinely care about their success, they can hear hard things from you. The damage usually comes when feedback feels like an attack rather than an investment. Before you deliver tough feedback, ask yourself: Does this person know I'm for them? If the answer is no, start there.
Q: What's the difference between high expectations and unrealistic pressure?
A: High expectations come with support. Unrealistic pressure comes with judgment. When you set high expectations, you're also providing the resources, trust, and coaching people need to meet them. When you apply pressure without that support, you're just setting people up to fail—and they know it.
Q: How do I know if my culture is actually high-performance, or just high-stress?
A: Look at what happens when someone makes a mistake. In a high-performance culture, mistakes are opportunities to learn and improve—people own them, discuss them openly, and move forward. In a high-stress culture, mistakes are threats to be hidden or blamed on others. The response to failure tells you everything about which culture you actually have.
.webp)
