A new year is a convenient time to reset goals, refresh scorecards, and polish performance frameworks. Many leadership teams begin 2026 with the same intent: “We want a high-performance culture.”
And yet, inside most organisations, people don’t take cues from intent. They take cues from patterns. They watch what gets praised in reviews. They watch who gets pulled into “important meetings.” They watch whose mistakes get overlooked and whose results get questioned. Over time, these observations shape behaviour far more than any policy document ever will.
This is why the performance review process often becomes the most powerful culture-building tool in the company – without anyone formally calling it that.
Because employees don’t follow values. They follow incentives. And the strongest incentive in any organisation is this: WHO gets promoted, and WHY.
When promotions reward those who build capability, teams become stronger year after year. When promotions reward those who win at visibility, politics becomes rational. The numbers may still look fine for a while, but the organisation quietly loses trust, leadership depth, and resilience.
As 2026 begins, the question worth asking is simple: What behaviour does your promotion system make rational right now?
Designing a performance review process that scales in 2026
The part leaders underestimate: people learn the “real rules” fast
Every organisation has two performance systems:
- The formal system – OKRs, KRAs, competency frameworks, rating cycles.
- The observed system – what people notice actually gets rewarded.
The observed system spreads faster because it is easier to verify. A policy says “collaboration matters.” A promotion decision says “solo wins matter more.” People will believe the promotion decision every time.
This is not cynicism. It is pattern recognition.
In fact, many modern HR and leadership discussions are increasingly centred on rewarding behaviours that improve collaboration, communication, and cross-functional learning, not just individual output. So if your 2026 performance reviews are meant to strengthen execution, you cannot only measure outcomes. You must also measure the behaviours that produce outcomes without breaking the system.
Two paths to the top create two very different companies
In most organisations, two behaviours compete for influence:
- Builders: People who deliver results while building others: creating successors, reducing dependency, improving capability.
- Climbers: People who deliver results while standing on others: capturing credit, deflecting blame, using ambiguity as leverage.
Both can appear “high-performing” on paper. But only one creates an organisation that can scale without stress.
Over time, a promotion system that rewards climbers produces predictable symptoms:
- Strong performers disengage or leave.
- Managers stop developing successors because successors become “competition.”
- Teams optimise for perception instead of contribution.
- Cross-functional work slows down due to trust gaps.
- The organisation becomes dependent on a few individuals to “save” outcomes.
This is how growth becomes fragile, not because strategy is weak, but because the leadership pipeline becomes hollow.
A useful way to audit your promotion criteria is to stop asking:
“Who delivered the numbers?”
…and start asking:
“What did it cost the system to deliver those numbers?”
5 warning signals your promotion criteria is creating fragility
If you see these patterns, your performance review process is quietly rewarding the wrong game:
1) Star performers don’t create successors: when high performers keep their knowledge locked, it often means the system rewards individual indispensability.
2) Visibility beats contribution: when those closest to leadership get rewarded more than those closest to the work, people learn to prioritise proximity over impact.
3) Credit travels upward, blame travels downward: when accountability is asymmetric, learning stops. People protect themselves instead of improving the system.
4) Internal competition beats collaboration: when peers become threats, information gets withheld, handovers become weak, and execution slows.
5) Strong performers leave, survivors rise: when the safest strategy is to “stay out of trouble,” you end up promoting risk-avoidance instead of leadership.
None of this shows up overnight. It shows up gradually – in the quality of meetings, the speed of handovers, and the calibre of leaders available when you need them.
This is also where psychological safety matters, not as a soft idea, but as a performance engine. Research on psychological safety describes it as a shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking, and links it to learning behaviour in real work teams. When your promotion system rewards unsafe leadership behaviours, psychological safety becomes impossible to sustain, and the organisation’s learning rate falls.
What strong organisations should do differently in 2026
High-performing organisations do not leave culture to interpretation. They design it through incentives.
If you want a performance review process that strengthens the company in 2026 (not just this quarter), five design choices matter.
1) Promotions should include “people built,” not only “numbers delivered”:
If leadership strength is a strategic asset, then succession cannot be optional.
Practical ways to operationalise this in the review cycle:
- Include a bench-strength indicator (ready-now successors, internal role coverage).
- Track team capability growth (skills acquired, certifications, error reductions, cycle-time improvements).
- Reward leaders who reduce dependency by making execution repeatable.
This shifts the incentive from “be the hero” to “build the system.”
2) Collaboration must be measured, not requested:
Most organisations claim collaboration is important, then measure only individual targets.
So collaboration becomes a moral request, not a rational choice. If cross-functional work matters, make it measurable:
- Add shared targets across Sales–Ops–Finance for outcomes that cannot be “owned” by one function.
- Score joint delivery metrics (handover quality, rework rate, on-time closure, customer escalation reduction).
This forces the organisation to treat collaboration as an execution discipline.
3) Clarify decision rights before you expand authority:
Many internal politics problems are actually decision-rights problems.
When it is unclear:
- who decides,
- who contributes,
- who executes,
people fill the gap with influence.
Frameworks that explicitly define decision rights (and make ownership visible) reduce ambiguity and speed up execution.
For 2026 performance reviews, consider making decision clarity a promotion gate:
- Did this leader improve decision speed?
- Did they reduce escalation loops?
- Did they create clean ownership or rely on informal power?
4) Put cross-functional outcomes into reviews through stakeholder scorecards:
One of the simplest ways to reduce internal gaming is to make performance visible across boundaries.
Add structured input from key stakeholders:
- Sales rates Ops on handovers and fulfilment reliability.
- Ops rates Sales on forecast hygiene and exception discipline.
- Finance rates both on planning quality and cost ownership.
Done well, this is not “feedback theatre.” It is a governance mechanism.
It also aligns with broader thinking on creating cultures that encourage real feedback – where what you recognise and reward shapes what people repeat.
5) Unsafe leadership should block promotions, even when numbers are strong:
This is where many leadership teams hesitate.
But the cost of promoting unsafe leaders is always paid later – through attrition, conflict, silence, and dependency.
Make a small set of behaviours non-negotiable:
- respect
- ethics
- people conduct
- accountability hygiene
And apply them as assessment gates, not “nice-to-have” comments.
A leader who hits targets while breaking trust is not a high performer. They are a delayed liability.
A practical 2026 reset: the “Promotion Signal Audit”
If you want this to be actionable in Q1 (not just a philosophy), run a short audit before your next cycle:
Ask these five questions:
- Who got promoted in the last 12–18 months & what pattern connects them?
- What behaviour do employees believe gets rewarded (not what HR says)?
- Where do results repeatedly come “at the expense” of another team?
- Which leaders have successors ready & which leaders have none?
- Which behaviours are tolerated because the person “delivers”?
Then act in three steps:
- Step 1: Update scorecards to include capability-building, shared outcomes, and decision-rights clarity.
- Step 2: Add stakeholder input where collaboration is mission-critical.
- Step 3: Introduce behaviour gates so culture protection is systematic, not emotional.
If you do only one thing in 2026, do this: make promotion criteria explicit enough that politics becomes irrational.
The quiet truth about performance in 2026
Performance does not collapse because people stop working hard. It collapses because the organisation slowly teaches people the wrong game.
- When the game is: “Win visibly, protect yourself, don’t build successors,” you will still get outcomes – until you can’t.
- When the game is: “Build capability, share outcomes, clarify decisions, protect trust,” you get something rarer: a company that grows without breaking.
Culture is not what leaders announce at the start of the year. Culture is what the performance review process rewards at the end of it.
So as you begin 2026, here is the question that matters most: what kind of winners is your promotion system creating?
