Podcast Summary: Your Next Move

Episode: The Hard Part of Leadership: Getting Performance Management Right
Date: November 25, 2025
Host: Mike Hoffman, Editor in Chief of Inc.
Guests:

• Christy Horvath, Co-founder & CEO of Wagmo
• Daniel Chait, Co-founder & CEO of Greenhouse

Overview

This episode explores the toughest aspects of performance management in leadership, especially for founders scaling their companies. Mike Hoffman, joined by Christy Horvath and Daniel Chait, delves into strategies for giving feedback, managing underperformance, supporting star employees without burning them out, and making performance management a daily, constructive practice. Audience questions on tools, transparency, and performance review best practices round out the discussion, making this episode a comprehensive guide for leaders aiming to build sustainable, high-performance teams.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why Performance Management Is So Challenging

• Giving direct feedback is inherently uncomfortable; even positive feedback can feel fraught.

• Leaders must develop the skill of navigating tough conversations and clearly defining what "good" performance even means.

• Quote:

  “At the root of [performance management] is telling someone whether they're doing a good job or not… there's a hard conversation in there.”
  —Christy Horvath [01:49]

• Daniel emphasizes that learning to give and receive feedback takes active practice, not just theory.

  “Giving feedback or receiving feedback is a skill… that you gotta put time and energy into developing. But also I would say even more fundamentally, defining what good is… isn’t always so obvious.”
  —Daniel Chait [02:02]

2. Learning to Give Feedback: Practice and Support

• Both guests recount their first difficult feedback situations and how experience reduces discomfort with time.

• Daniel shared an exercise where executives practiced giving real feedback in a safe, facilitated environment; it made nervous leaders more capable when high-stakes conversations occur.

• Christy actively coaches her team through role-play to build feedback skills in newer managers.

• Memorable Moment:

  “Her hands were literally shaking… and she gives feedback… It was like, oh, wait, like it’s okay to say a thing like that to you.”
  —Daniel Chait on an executive learning to give feedback [03:48]

3. Letting People Go: The Timing Dilemma

• Both leaders advocate for decisiveness when performance doesn't improve after clear feedback.

• Every time a firing has to happen, it's always in hindsight wished it happened sooner.

  “Always sooner than you think, always faster than you want to do it… your company is so much more resilient than you think.”
  —Christy Horvath [05:40]

• Daniel stresses that hesitation often stems from fear of not being able to hire a good replacement, tying effective performance management to strong hiring practices.

4. Managing High Performers & Avoiding Burnout

• Christy highlights the danger of overburdening "stars" and the value of redesigning roles to keep top talent engaged and energized.

• Example: She shifted her chief of staff's workload because OKRs drained her, thus retaining an exceptional team member and boosting her satisfaction.

• Quote:

  “For your top performers, it’s like, tell me what you need and I’ll do my best to make it happen and I will stay out of your way in the meantime.”
  —Christy Horvath [07:27]

• Daniel shares a story about reframing undesirable tasks, hiring for role fit, and noticing that what drains one person might excite another.

• Both emphasize structure and true role fit to sustain high performance without burning people out.

  “If you’re doing that [working at crunch mode] constantly, if that’s the default, I just don’t think that’s sustainable… You’re creating a risk for the business in the way you’re working.”
  —Daniel Chait [10:25]

5. The “Middle Performer” Challenge

• Christy admits the “middle” is the toughest to manage: they aren’t failing, but aren’t excelling.

• Cultivating more “A players” and limiting mediocrity can reduce bureaucracy and raise the bar. Leveling frameworks are helping her team distinguish between truly good and merely adequate performance.

• Daniel’s chief people officer introduced the phrase “good is good”—meeting expectations is positive, but clarity is needed on what makes someone great.

  “If everybody at the company did their job to a good level, we’d be in a really good spot. But it’s not great.”
  —Daniel Chait [12:13]

6. Making Performance Management a Daily Practice

• Christy models regular feedback, retros, and monthly check-ins to ensure ongoing, strategic feedback beyond just annual reviews.

• Daniel warns against over-systematizing, cautioning leaders to value qualitative inputs and cultural fit over pure metrics.

• Quote:

  “There can be a risk of overdoing it… I don’t want to undersell the qualitative stuff, that’s maybe harder to measure.”
  —Daniel Chait [14:13]

7. Leaders Doing Their Own Performance Management

• Christy mandates 360 reviews for herself, using an executive coach to gather and filter upward feedback.
• Daniel feels he hasn’t “cracked the code” but relies on overall company scorecard as a proxy.
• Quote:

  “I have a coach… she will… interview [my reports and board members], get constructive feedback… and then she will give me my review for me.”
  —Christy Horvath [15:26]

8. Culture and Performance Management: Two Sides of the Same Coin

• Christy codifies radical candor in their company values to reinforce feedback culture, especially in a remote setting.
• Daniel disputes that culture and performance management are opposites—he wants a “high performance culture,” where helping people succeed lifts the whole company.
• Quote:

  “Sometimes culture is shorthand for being nice to employees and performance management is shorthand for being mean… That’s wrong… They’re intertwined.”
  —Daniel Chait [17:12]

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Your company is so much more resilient than you think.”
  —Christy Horvath [06:00]
• “Part of the fear people always have is, gosh, if I get rid of this person, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to hire the person… That inability… really holds you back from great performance management.”
  —Daniel Chait [06:26]

Noteworthy Timestamps

• Personal firsts in feedback: [02:34]
• Difficult offsite feedback exercise: [03:14]
• Role fitting & job redesign stories: [08:31]
• Burnout and high performers: [10:25]
• Managing “middle” performers: [11:22]
• Day-to-day performance management habits: [13:16]
• 360 reviews for CEOs: [15:26]
• Culture vs. performance: [16:34]

Audience Q&A Highlights

[22:25]

• Training managers:

  • Daniel: Train only what’s most important, then let managers do their jobs.
  • Christy: “Skip levels” — leaders should talk to people at all levels, not just direct reports.

• Making reviews constructive:

  • Christy: Reviews are pointless without action and follow-up.
  • Daniel: Reinforce clarity, as Patrick Lencioni advises.

• Tools for performance management:

  • Christy: Uses Lattice, but Google Docs sufficed early on.
  • Daniel: The tool is less important than the structure and usability.

• Transparency on company info:

  • Daniel: Be transparent—but always provide context.
  • Christy: Frame information with the “why” and tie back to mission to avoid confusion or panic.

Actionable Takeaways for Leaders

• Practice giving and receiving feedback regularly, ideally in low-stakes environments.
• Be decisive and timely in letting someone go if performance doesn't improve with clear feedback.
• Customize roles for top performers to keep them engaged and prevent burnout.
• Make performance management habitual, not just an annual process.
• Use clear frameworks and values to reinforce your feedback culture.
• Incorporate feedback mechanisms for top leaders themselves.
• Balance qualitative and quantitative performance indicators and resist over-structuring.
• When sharing sensitive company information, always provide necessary context for understanding.

This episode delivers a masterclass on the mindset and mechanics of effective performance management—from confronting discomfort to fostering honest dialogue, and from supporting stars to tackling mediocrity. For founders and leaders, it’s a robust playbook on building high-performing, resilient organizations.