Hey, it's Laura and Jason.
Welcome to Issue #2 of The Weekly UNLOK — where human potential meets organizational performance.
In this week’s issue, we’re talking about what six people at a backyard party revealed about the way many companies think about performance.
P.S. In case you missed it, the Peak of the Week is now The Weekly UNLOK.
BEFORE WE GET INTO IT
A few weeks ago, Laura joined Jay Olson and Lena Scullard on ‘What the HR’, one of the top HR podcasts in the country. They discussed what alignment looks like at work and why the gap between strategy and results is almost never about the people.
If you’re a leader ready to love your work again, this one’s for you.
[LISTEN HERE] →
FROM LAURA: THE BACKYARD CONFESSION
Eight people were sitting in a backyard.
Six of them were complaining about their jobs.
I was one of the quiet two, just taking it all in.
One person’s company had started measuring whether remote employees were 20% more productive than their in-office counterparts…
The reason: If you’re working from home without distractions, you should be producing more. Prove it.
What that told people was… we don’t actually trust you.
Another person said nothing she did seemed to matter unless it showed up in a number. The relationships she’d spent years building. The judgment calls that kept clients from leaving. None of it was visible anywhere.
A third had stopped bringing ideas to her manager months ago.
It just wasn’t worth the energy.
You’ve probably been in a version of that backyard. Maybe you were one of the people talking.
Six talented, capable people. Extremely capable people. All steadily withdrawing.
And their companies have NO IDEA.
Their leaders aren’t villains. They genuinely believe they’re building high-performing teams. The numbers look fine, for now.
What the numbers aren’t measuring is the ideas and creativity that stopped coming. The effort that moved from “all in” to 50% there. Three of the six people admitted they are actively looking for a new job.
I sat there thinking about what those six people were truly capable of.
All that potential. Sitting in a backyard. Feeling defeated.
FROM JASON: A PERSPECTIVE
Most leaders I’ve worked with want their people to succeed.
The problem is diagnosis.
When performance dips, the instinct is to reach for control. More check-ins. Tighter processes. More metrics.
I’ve been there myself.
But the harder I squeezed, the less I actually got.
The mental model driving most performance management is extraction. The idea that performance lives inside your people, and your job is to draw it out. If you’re not getting enough, tighten the grip.
That model is wrong.
Performance is created. Your people are not a resource to be drawn down. They are a capacity to be cultivated. The conditions you build around them are either growing that capacity or destroying it.
The costs don’t show up cleanly, but they’re there, and they accumulate.
The institutional knowledge that walked out the door. The innovation that never made it into a meeting room. The best hire you ever made, now doing their best work somewhere else.
So what does a leader actually do differently?
Let’s follow our framework…
Belonging first.
Belonging is whether people feel safe enough to tell you what’s actually true. If your team gives you clean, positive updates while the real conversation is happening somewhere else (like the parking lot), that’s a Belonging problem.
The fix starts with what you do when the truth arrives.
Do people see honesty received well? Or managed and minimized?
Then Authority.
Micromanagement isn’t a personality flaw, it’s a design failure.
Decisions float up because ownership was never clearly defined, and trust was never established. So leaders fill the vacuum.
If you’re constantly being pulled into decisions your team should be making, ask yourself: did I ever actually design who owns what? (and then trust them to fail and learn)
Write it down. Make it explicit. Then get out of the way and watch what happens.
Then Mastery.
Do your people know what excellent looks like in their role?
If your only feedback mechanism is a dashboard metric, you’re managing outputs.
The difference between a team that compounds over time and one that plateaus is almost always whether people can see themselves getting better.
Real feedback that develops people, not just evaluates them.
None of this is complicated, but all of it requires intention.
Your people are already telling you which of these is missing. Sadly, we’re seeing companies fail in all three. But there’s a fix, and it’s a lot simpler than you think.
You just need to know what to listen for.
NOW IT'S YOUR TURN
Inner Game: Think about the last time someone told you the truth about how work was going. What did you do with it? Do the people around you believe it’s safe to be honest with you?
Outer Game: Pick one person on your team. You probably know their numbers. Can you describe what excellent looks like beyond the numbers? Can they? If the answer gets fuzzy, that’s a signal.
With belief in our collective rise, one person at a time,
Laura & Jason
P.S. - Did this message resonate? Reply back and let us know, we read every reply.
BEFORE YOU GO: HOW WE CAN HELP
FOR COMPANIES: There’s a better way than squeezing. Let’s talk about what that looks like for your organization.
FOR INDIVIDUALS: If you’re looking for one-on-one support, Laura works with a small number of people personally. Book an activation session and let’s get into it.