Walk into any exec meeting and ask who the high performers are.

The names come fast. Revenue rainmakers. Product heroes. The person who can “just get it done.”

Now ask a different question.

How many of those same people are actually advancing the company’s real bets, not just their own scoreboard.

That list is a lot shorter.

This is the part nobody wants to admit. A big chunk of what most companies call “high performance” is misaligned output that bends the system around individual success instead of shared direction.

Your stars are winning. The company is not.

When High Performance Runs Against The Grain

Here is the hard truth. Performance that is not aligned is just expensive chaos with better optics.

Take a typical sales hero. They crush quota every quarter. They also custom promise features engineering never agreed to, discount in ways that wreck margin, and pull support into fire drills for deals that never should have been in the pipeline.

On paper they are a legend. In reality they are shredding trust across teams and yanking attention away from the strategy you keep talking about.

Or look at the product lead who ships more than anyone else. New features every sprint. Leadership loves the energy. Except half of what ships has nothing to do with the three company priorities on the offsite slide. It is chasing competitors, pet ideas, and one loud customer.

Again, high activity. Thin progress.

Here is what the research has been saying for years. Clear specific goals improve performance only when they do not fight each other and split attention. Once you overload people with competing targets, effort fragments and results drop. That is Locke and Latham’s entire point in their work on goal setting in American Psychologist which your own teams already cite in many alignment conversations.

So when you give your “best people” ten overlapping objectives and then applaud them for heroics, you are not getting more performance. You are just hiding misalignment under hustle.

The worst part. Everyone else is watching and learning exactly what this company really rewards.

The Scoreboards That Quietly Rewrite Your Strategy

Most executives swear they care about the company’s few big bets.

Then you look at the actual incentives and performance reviews.

Sales is paid on volume, not on the right segment or the right product mix. So they push anything that moves.

Product is measured on features shipped and roadmap velocity, not on adoption or impact on the flagship goals. So they pile on launches that look impressive in launch emails and do nothing for the core mission.

Operations is rewarded for cost savings in one quarter, even if those cuts cripple the very initiatives leadership called “non negotiable” at the offsite.

These are not bad people. They are rational adults responding to the scoreboards you handed them. When local targets clash with company priorities, local targets win every time.

Goal science backs this up. Shah, Friedman, and Kruglanski’s research on “goal shielding” shows that when people commit to a single focal goal, their mind suppresses distractions automatically. Start adding more goals that pull in different directions and that shield breaks. Focus scatters, and real progress slows. Their findings in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology make this painfully clear.

Now think about your “top talent.” The ones you put on every crisis, every task force, every shiny new thing. You are not just stretching them. You are destroying their ability to protect focus. You are training them to succeed at the wrong game.

Here is the kicker. When those misaligned wins are the ones that get the bonus, the promotion, and the CEO shoutout at all hands, the whole company updates its mental model of what matters.

They stop aligning to the strategy deck. They align to the people who keep winning under the real rules.

The Hidden Signal Your People Are Actually Following

You already know this from experience. Employees do not listen to what leaders say matters. They watch what leadership protects when pressure hits.

If you say “We are all in on this new platform” and then let a senior leader starve that platform while chasing their own pet initiative, you just told the entire org that slides are optional but shadow projects backed by powerful sponsors are sacred.

If you say “Customer retention is our number one metric this year” and then give the biggest bonus to the rep who slammed low quality new deals through the door, you just announced that churn is someone else’s problem.

Trust in leadership is not a mood. It is a math problem. Dirks and Ferrin’s meta analysis on trust and performance in the Journal of Applied Psychology showed that when people trust leaders, performance and cooperation climb. When they do not, execution fractures as everyone starts playing defense instead of playing for the shared win.

Nothing wrecks that trust faster than a gap between the official story and the real scoreboard.

In your own company, this shows up in small phrases that pile up.

Leaders say “we will try” instead of “we will.”

Managers hedge timelines because they know priorities will change again.

Different teams talk about the same initiative with different language, because each has quietly reinterpreted it to fit their local goals.

Workplace already measures exactly these signals across thousands of teams. Your own data shows that when ownership language drops and conflicting stories about the same goal start to spread, alignment is already breaking long before the next missed quarter.

Here is the question that should keep every CPO up at night. Who is your system actually built to serve. The strategy you talk about, or the stars who can bend the rules.

The CPO’s New Job: Audit “High Performance” For Alignment

If you are the CPO or head of People, this is where your real leverage sits.

You sit at the intersection of performance, pay, and culture. You see who gets promoted, who gets forgiven, and who gets bypassed. You see the spoken priorities and the silent ones. You see the language on the ground that never makes it onto the board slide.

Your job is not to cheer for high performance. Your job is to prove whether your definition of high performance is helping the company win or quietly tearing it in half.

1. Run a brutal high performer alignment review

Start with your top twenty rated people across the company.

For each one, map three things.

1. What are they actually measured on and rewarded for.

2. How much of their time is going to the declared company priorities, revealed in goals and exec reviews.

3. How much of their work pulls resources, attention, or people into side bets that never appear on the official roadmap.

Then take that map into the executive meeting. Do not soften it. If your stars are getting famous for work that conflicts with the core bets, say so plainly.

2. Expose the scorecard collisions

Next, line up the KPIs for each function and role against the company’s few headline goals.

Any target that pushes in a different direction is a collision. For example, rewarding sales on raw revenue while your strategy demands a shift to a more profitable segment. Or pushing engineering on feature count while the company needs reliability and adoption for a critical platform.

These are not small tweaks. These are the levers that decide what gets attention every Monday morning.

3. Protect focus for your best people

Use the research on focal goals as a design rule. When someone is a named owner on a company critical outcome, treat their time like an asset, not a free resource.

Set a simple constraint. Once a high performer is assigned to a top level goal, any attempt to drag them into a new “urgent” initiative must come with a specific answer to one question.

What stops so this can start.

If leaders cannot name what comes off the plate, the new idea does not get your star. You are not protecting that person’s comfort. You are protecting the company’s ability to finish what it starts.

4. Tie rewards to system health, not heroics

Redesign performance criteria so you cannot get the top rating unless you can prove two things.

1. You hit hard results that clearly map to the company’s main bets.

2. You did it in a way that did not trash adjacent teams or run a second agenda in the shadows.

Use data from tools like Workplace to back this up. If a leader’s org shows rising misalignment signals, high decision reopen rates, constant language drift on priorities, or spike in burnout indicators, that is not a rounding error. That is performance feedback.

When the bonus pool starts to track system health, not just silo wins, behavior changes fast.

The Question Every CPO Needs To Put In Front Of Their CEO

Alignment is not how many people hit their individual targets.

Alignment is whether the company’s most rewarded people are pulling in the same direction as the company’s bravest bets.

So here is the question you need to walk into your next one on one with the CEO and ask.

If we muted every presentation and just watched who gets promoted, paid, and protected, would we still believe this company is aligned to the strategy we keep talking about.

If the honest answer is yes, protect it with everything you have.

If the honest answer is no, you do not have a performance problem. You have an integrity problem in your scoreboards.

The good news. You can fix this.

Redefine high performance as aligned contribution. Strip out conflicting targets. Protect focus for your best people. Pay for results that match the company’s real direction, not for whoever can bend the rules and smile while they do it.

Do that and something powerful happens.

Your stars still shine. Your strategy finally benefits from it. And the word “alignment” stops living in decks and starts showing up in what your people actually do when nobody is in the room.