How do you instill excellence and a performance culture across a company?

The challenge

Every Scale Engine runs on one fuel: excellence.

Getting ahead of your market, growing faster than your competitors and scaling without operational friction take many actions and best practices across the five Scale Engines: revenue, customer, operating, technology and AI, and organization. But none of them works at full power unless excellence, as the source of performance, is wired into the DNA of the company and of every employee.

Excellence is also what keeps a company standing when the market turns. A buoyant market hides weaknesses; a difficult one exposes them. A company where excellence is built in keeps executing, protects its margins and wins market share while others slow down or cut back.

That was the group's challenge. As it grew internationally, across business units and functions, performance became harder to keep consistently high. Each team had its own way of working. The best practices lived in the heads of the best people. Performance data was fragmented, so managers spent their time collecting information instead of improving results. Each function optimized its own targets. What worked in one country was rarely copied in the next.

Then a quieter risk appeared: the organization became comfortable with “good enough”. Targets were met, but rarely exceeded. Existing ways of working were protected rather than challenged. Problems were spotted too late. Employees had ideas, but no way to turn them into action.

The result: improvement happened only when management pushed it. Every initiative needed a sponsor, a project and a deadline, and when the project ended, the organization slowed down again. The company moved forward in jolts, at the speed of its leaders' energy.

A company that improves only when pushed will always move at the speed of its leaders.

The answer was not another performance program, and certainly not more pressure. A company does not improve by itself: its people improve it. The answer was to create the conditions for every employee to excel, because it is their excellence, day after day, that keeps the whole company improving. Those conditions had to be built into the company: its processes, systems, data, governance, management, talent, learning, recognition and culture.

The CEO's ambition

Make the excellence of every employee the engine of continuous improvement.

The goal was not a culture of pressure. It was a company where every employee knows what excellence looks like, sees their own performance, spots the gaps, acts on them and raises the bar, without waiting to be asked. When thousands of people do that every day, the company is constantly in motion.

For the CEO, it meant a change of role: from pushing every improvement to creating the conditions for every employee to excel. That meant three shifts:

The transformation

Excellence cannot be decreed. It comes from people. Nine levers created the conditions for it, in three layers: design the system that shows every employee where to improve, raise the ambition that makes them want to, and raise the talent that makes them able to.

1Standardize: build best practices into daily work

Instead of asking thousands of people to remember the right process, let the process guide them. Best practices have little value when they sit in procedures, slide decks or the experience of top performers. So the group modernized its core business systems across functions: ERP, CRM, CPQ, ITSM, PSA, HRIS, business intelligence and collaboration tools.

But this was not a technology project. Processes were first redesigned around the best ways of working, and the systems were then configured to make those practices the default. The CRM carried the expected sales practices. The ERP enforced financial and operational discipline. Service management was standardized. Digital workflows structured approvals, responsibilities and escalations.

Adoption, not deployment, became the measure of success: the group tracked whether the expected practices were actually used, country by country and team by team. And every improvement found by one team could be built into the standard, so the whole company moved up at once.

System implemented ≠ best practice adopted.

2Visualize: make performance visible at every level

People cannot improve what they cannot see. Performance cockpits were deployed for every major domain: finance, sales, marketing, delivery, customer care, people, operations and strategic initiatives. The same performance system ran from the group down to business units, functions, teams and, where relevant, individuals, and back up again. Everyone saw the indicators they could influence.

The cockpits were built for action, not reporting. Each performance gap was linked to an improvement plan:

Managers and employees no longer waited to be told that something was wrong. They saw it, understood it and acted at their own level. Performance stopped being something people were judged on and became something they managed every day.

3Align: share KPIs across functions

Make functions succeed together, not separately. Performance management can create perfectly optimized silos. Sales hits its numbers while creating problems for delivery. Delivery maximizes utilization while customer satisfaction falls. Marketing generates leads that never become pipeline. Every function is green, and the business outcome is not.

So shared KPIs were introduced wherever success depended on collaboration:

4Manage: install a performance rhythm

Act on performance earlier, not review it more often. A company cannot stay in motion on annual reviews and occasional interventions. A governance rhythm was set from the board down to operational teams, each cadence with one purpose:

The rhythm is what keeps the company moving: every week, every month, every quarter, gaps become decisions and decisions become actions. Governance moved from explaining past performance to shaping future performance.

Every meeting in the rhythm stayed consistent with the others: the same KPIs, the same priorities and the same direction, from the board down to the teams. A change of course was decided explicitly and explained, never discovered through contradictory messages.

5Challenge: make “good enough” unacceptable

Systems show where to improve. They do not create the desire to. A few principles were repeated by leaders and managers until they became reflexes: do not settle for good enough, go beyond the target, challenge the existing way, learn from the best, take ownership, raise the bar.

The aim was not perfectionism. It was to make sure that hitting the target never ended the desire to improve. Teams were regularly asked: What could we do better? Faster? What should we stop? What could we simplify? What would it take to be one of the leaders of our industry?

Managers changed role: less control, more challenge, coaching and development. Their job became keeping their teams in motion.

Market leadership requires standards above the market average.

6Amplify: make excellence visible

Culture is what leaders repeat, what the company celebrates and who gets recognized. Internal communication became a performance lever: a yearly Kick-Off with a theme that ran all year, a regular newsletter, an internal show, and monthly lunches between small groups of employees and executives. Top performers were recognized at the Kick-Off for both their results and their values, and their portraits were displayed in the offices.

The message was not “these people performed well”. It was “this is what excellence looks like here”.

7Recruit: raise the bar with every hire

The question is not “Can this person do the job?” but “Will this person make the team stronger?” A performance culture starts before people join. Every important hire had to raise the collective level, judged on expertise, track record, learning agility, ambition, ownership, collaboration, the ability to challenge and alignment with the company's values.

Growth creates pressure to hire fast, and each compromise lowers the standard a little. So the rule became: grow headcount without diluting excellence. Hiring quality became a management responsibility, not only an HR one.

Strong people challenge standards, transfer knowledge and attract other strong people. That creates a second flywheel:

8Develop: give people the capabilities to outperform

You cannot raise the bar without helping people reach it. Learning and certification ran through the company's e-learning platform and were linked to business priorities. When a practice proved itself, it was built into training and certification.

New hires reached the expected standard faster. Experienced employees kept upgrading. Top performers' know-how became company knowledge.

Beyond their day-to-day role, employees were also entrusted with topics, initiatives or missions of their own, giving them room to stretch, gain visibility and grow.

9Reward and improve: make performance matter, and let everyone improve the system

This is where the organization becomes self-sustaining: the people who run the system also improve it. Annual reviews assessed two dimensions: what people delivered (results, objectives, contribution) and how they delivered it (values, behaviors, collaboration, leadership). Exceptional results achieved by undermining teams did not count as excellence. Strong contributors saw their performance recognized: variable pay, awards, career moves, more responsibility, development opportunities and visibility.

Improvement also had to come from the field, not only from management. Idea boxes gave every employee a way to propose improvements, because the people closest to customers, systems and processes often see opportunities first.

The message: you are not only expected to run the system. You are expected to improve it.

Two flywheels keep the company in motion

People are the engine. The system is what lets their excellence spread from one person to a team, from one team to the whole company. Once both flywheels turn, they no longer need to be pushed.

Talent raises the system. The system raises the talent.

What AI changes

This transformation was built before AI agents became available. Today, AI makes the same system move faster, at a lower cost:

• From monthly to continuous: agents read the cockpits every day, flag a gap as soon as it appears and draft the root-cause analysis before the monthly review.
• Best practice at the moment of work: assistants built into the business systems suggest the proven way of doing things when it is needed, instead of a procedure people have to remember.
• Learning tailored to each gap: each person's performance gaps generate a personal learning path.
• Ideas processed at scale: AI sorts, groups and assesses employee ideas so that none are lost.

AI does not create excellence. It amplifies the excellence of people, and lets it spread at the speed of the business.

The operating model shift

From managing performance to a company kept in motion by the excellence of its people.

The impact

Not more process: more performance.

The point was never more dashboards, meetings, systems, training or communication. Every mechanism existed to keep the company executing, learning and growing.