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What drives employee performance is often invisible. It’s not individual effort, but the systems quietly shaping how work gets done. In this episode of Bring Out the Talent, Justin Robbins, Founder and Principal Analyst at Metric Sherpa, explains why most engagement and performance problems are really system problems, and how leaders can redesign the structures that teach people what matters. Robbins has spent more than two decades helping organizations strengthen customer experience and optimize operations, with work featured by NBC Nightly News, The New York Times, and Forbes.
Almost every organization makes the same quiet assumption: that engagement and performance are, at their core, people problems. When results slip, the instinct is to look at individuals. And yet, despite years of investment in culture, leadership, and development, only about 23% of employees worldwide are engaged at work, a number that has barely moved.
What if we’ve been looking in the wrong place? In a recent episode of our podcast, Bring Out the Talent, we sat down with Justin Robbins, Founder and Principal Analyst at Metric Sherpa, who has spent over two decades helping organizations turn insight into execution. Robbins describes himself, warmly, as an “experienced mutt”, a career spanning operations, training teams, and technology. The thread clicked into place a couple of years ago, when he noticed how often the people he’d worked with felt that “work was working against itself.” Understanding why became his life’s work.
Robbins’ answer to what drives positive performance comes down to two words: clarity and consequence. More specifically, it comes down to whether people can confidently answer one deceptively simple question, how will I know when I’ve done good work? When they can, performance follows. When they can’t, and most can’t, you get hesitation, self-protection, and a slow erosion of momentum.
The reason is that the real teacher inside any organization is not onboarding or the one-on-one. It’s the work itself: what gets measured, rewarded, escalated, or ignored is what quietly instructs people on what actually matters. So the first question Robbins puts to a leader is not “what’s wrong with our people?” but “what structure have we built, and how is this behavior an output of it?” Most people aren’t wired to be apathetic. When he sees the same roles hemorrhaging talent, the same complaints surfacing year after year, or energetic new leaders leaving defeated, he doesn’t diagnose bad people, he looks for the “accidental rhythms”: the meetings, decisions, and silences that were never designed, but formed out of urgency, habit, and pressure.
When leaders tell Robbins they have an engagement problem, he first untangles two ideas. Satisfaction is about conditions — pay, hours, tools. Engagement is about investment — meaning, belonging, and impact. Many organizations respond to an engagement problem by improving satisfaction, then wait for commitment to follow. It rarely does.
Underneath most engagement complaints, there are one of four gaps: a clarity gap about what matters, a recognition gap (not high-fives, but the fact that so much meaningful work feels invisible), a lack of autonomy, or thin psychological safety amid rising cognitive load. None are solved by perks or another survey. This is where a thoughtful learning and development strategy earns its keep, not by adding programs, but by aligning how people are developed, supported, and measured with what the business actually needs. Tellingly, Robbins notes that one of the steepest engagement declines shows up among managers and leaders themselves, the very people responsible for creating everyone else’s conditions.
Few things shape behavior more than the everyday structures we stop noticing. Professionals can spend up to 23 hours a week in meetings, many without a clear decision or owner, and these patterns quietly train people. Meetings that end without a decision teach that preparation is optional. Feedback that arrives only after failure teaches people to minimize risk. Priorities that shift week to week teach people to narrow their focus and wait things out. He evaluates organizations through three lenses: clarity, discipline, and accountability.
Metrics do the same, often unintentionally. Robbins invokes Goodhart’s Law, when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure, and offers a humbling story from his own career. Wanting to be the supportive manager, he built a dashboard and happened to place average handle time in the top-left corner. His team read that placement as the priority, no matter what he’d said in coaching. He contrasts Wells Fargo, which preached trust while rewarding aggressive quotas, with Costco, which pays above-market wages and treats employee longevity as a core metric — intentional design that shows up in 90%-plus customer renewal.
One of the episode’s sharpest insights is that every organization runs two systems at once. There’s the formal one leadership designed, the hierarchy, the processes, the stated values, and the informal one people actually use: who really makes the decisions, where the rules quietly bend, whose opinion carries weight regardless of title. Most performance lives in that informal system and most leaders have no way to audit it. That gap between what a business promises and what it practices is where culture is really made.
Nowhere is that misalignment costlier than in burnout. The loudest signal most organizations send is celebrating the heroic firefighter who stays late and saves the day, while rarely recognizing the people who quietly prevent crises in the first place. And burnout tends to strike top performers first: they stretch to fill gaps and become reliable, until reliability hardens into expectation while investment in them flatlines. “People don’t burn out because the work is hard,” Robbins says. “They burn out because so much of the work feels invisible and underappreciated.” Equipping managers to actually coach and develop their teams, the capability TTA’s corporate trainers and managed learning services help build, is one practical way to close that gap before it breaks people.
Robbins’ closing challenge is to stop treating performance and engagement as separate disciplines. They spring from the same source, work design, and no amount of training or messaging can substitute for it. Culture and engagement can’t be installed; they emerge from what we prioritize, reward, ignore, and excuse every single day. So his advice is refreshingly modest: name one place where work is working against you, where your promises don’t match your practice, and spend 30 days there. Not ten fixes at once. One, done consistently.
That is what it means to drive employee performance from a systems perspective — closer to the work, where growth actually happens. To hear the full conversation and insights from Justin Robbins, listen to the Bring Out the Talent episode, What Really Drives Employee Performance: A Systems Perspective.
