Your Next Move - The Hard Part of Leadership: Getting Performance Management Right

Episode Date: November 25, 2025

Clarity, accountability, and trust aren’t easy to build, but they’re essential. Daniel Chait of Greenhouse and Christie Horvath of Wagmo share how they’re rethinking performance management to help their people grow and their companies thrive.

With the VentureX business card from Capital One, you earn unlimited double miles on every purchase. Plus, the VentureX business card has no preset spending limit, so your purchasing power can adapt to meet your business needs. Capital One, what's in your wallet? Hi, I'm Mike Hoffman, editor-in-chief of Inc. And welcome to your next move, produced by Inc. and Capital One business. Today we're going to talk about performance management. Without good performance management, your best people might leave, and your worst habits stick around.

So today we're joined by two founders, Chrissy Horvath, co-founder and CEO of Wagmo, and Daniel Chait, co-founder and CEO of Greenhouse. And we're going to talk about how founders can build a sustainable and effective approach to managing performance as their company scale. Daniel, Chrissy, welcome to your next move. Thank you. Excited to be here. Thanks. Great to be here.

Before we get started, let's hear a little bit about your companies. Chrissy, let's start with you. Tell us about Wagmo and tell us how many employees you have and how many direct reports. So Wagmo is a pet health care company. We have a mission to empower and inspire responsible pet parenting. Amazing. I've got 40 employees at the moment, and I generally have about five direct reports.

And Daniel, what about you? Tell us about Greenhouse. Yeah, so Greenhouse is a hiring platform, companies of all sizes and shapes around the world, use Greenhouse to help get better at hiring. The company right now is about 700 employees, and I have about seven direct reports right now. Amazing.

So performance management, this is something, obviously, that every leader faces and many leaders struggle with. Christy, let's start with you. What do you think performance management is something that is so tricky? It's uncomfortable. I think performance management at the root of it is telling someone whether they're doing a good job or not. And unless they're doing a perfect job,

there's a hard conversation in there. and I don't think people generally love having hard conversations. You know, having difficult conversations, whether it's giving feedback or receiving feedback, is a skill, and that's a skill that you've got to put time and energy into developing. But also, I would say, even more fundamentally, defining what good is. Like, even knowing what are you trying to manage that person to do isn't always so obvious. And what good versus great actually means requires a lot of thought. It's not always easy to get right.

You've both acknowledged that it's a skill to learn for a leader how to give feedback and give sometimes tough feedback. How did you hone that skill and can you give examples even of conversations that you've had that went well or didn't go well and why? Well, man, I mean, I remember clear as day the first time I either had to let someone go.

Like, I know what I was wearing. I know the room I was in. I had a script. And, I mean, I hate to say it, but you just sort of get used to it at a certain point, to the point where it almost becomes muscle memory. Now, I'm so used to just picking up the phone

and saying, that was not your best. Like, let's talk about what you could have done better. And for a VP or someone who's reporting directly into me, that's totally normal and they're used to it. But to do that to someone who's newer to the company or younger, that's a very scary phone call to get, even though I don't think less of them. It's just very clear feedback that I'm trying to give. But that's been a needle that I've been trying to thread. You talk about a moment you remember so clearly, we had an executive team that was not good at giving and receiving feedback to each other. And so we brought in an outside expert. We had an offsite.

And one of the things we did was we practiced. So she gave us a little framework of how to give feedback and how to receive it. And the framework was, you know, get a micro-yes and then talk about the behavior and then how it made you feel on these things. And so you have this little checklist in your head and how to receive the feedback. And then she made us do it live. So we sat her on a table and she asked everyone on the team, write down one positive and one critical piece of feedback about everyone else in the room. One thing we learned was not everyone has the same responses to these things. Some people were extremely uncomfortable giving critical feedback.

There was a woman on our team, I remember, who was and is one of the smartest and hardest and hardest working executives I've ever met. One of these people, you just think, like, wow, if there's an obstacle between you and your goal, like, I feel sorry for the obstacle kind of person. And it came time to do this exercise and her hands were literally shaking. And she gives you back to this one other person on our team and said, you know, this person was habitually late to our weekly meetings. I said, you know, when you show up late to the meetings, you know, it makes us feel like you're not prioritizing the team and you're disrespecting. He's like, yeah, I know that. obviously everyone says it about me and it was like oh wait it's like it's okay to say a thing like that to you and and so there was this moment in her experience where and you said like getting more

experience practicing these things you think about any high level athlete i mean you know they don't just go out in the field and run they practice same thing with being a leader and so practicing these things and giving ourselves the chance to do it wrong in the training session or do it in a safe space where we're all expecting it makes it so that when you do have to do that live If it's not your first time, you got a little bit more comfort with it. I'll even help my direct reports practice feedback conversations with their teams. Like I remember, I helped coach this one woman on my team who never managed anybody before she had a consultant or a contractor that she was managing part-time.

She wasn't doing well, and she never had a feedback conversation. So we fully role-played, how are you going to tell her she's not doing well? How are you going to set expectations? And she was so uncomfortable at first, and then she had the conversation. And I don't know, it was a very cool moment to see someone actually like practice that and then go put it in place. And now she does it all the time. Let's say that you have an employee who you've given a lot of feedback to, you've given very direct feedback to and it's still not clicking. What timing do you hold yourself to in terms of thinking about when it's time to maybe make a change in a position?

Always sooner than you think. Always faster than you want to do it. Every time I've ever had to exit somebody, I've always wished we'd done it sooner. and it's the advice every founder gives you and everyone tells you the same thing and somehow every time you're like, man, I wish I would have made this decision sooner. Right, you're like, oh, their dog is sick.

I should wait a while. There's always a reason to postpone it. I'm in a fundraise. I'm about to land this client. Like there's always something. Morale is low and it's never worth waiting. Your company is so much more resilient than you think. Your team is so much more resilient than you think.

It really detracts from your top performers. So it is your job to make the unpopular decision, to make the heart decision, to make sure that your top performers are surrounded by other top performers. It is the right way to think about it. And I do think that at the moment you start asking this question of, you know, should I get rid of this person or should I exit the person? Like, it's often the answer is you probably should. It's both for the organization.

It's also for the person. If they're not succeeding in their job, they also could probably fulfill their potential better somewhere else. And so I think it's easy to think, oh, I want to be nice to the person or whatever. But I think ultimately putting the right person in the right role, is hopeful, one thing that I can do to make it easier to get there is be great at hiring. Why? Because if I knew that I could hire an amazing A player, the minute this person's out of that seat, I feel much more comfortable about making that change, whereas part of the fear that

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. I don't know if the next person will be as good. And that inability to have confidence that you can always hire a great person really holds you back from great performance management in the first place. How do you think about performance management for your stars, right? Someone who's doing great and you want to encourage them to keep going or take the next step in their career or certainly make a big impact on the business. I think your stars are the ones that have the tendency to burn out because they're the ones that have passion for what you're doing. They're self-motivated. And those are the ones that will run themselves to the

very end. And so if I can figure out what's energizing to you, what's draining to you, I can almost help structure your days so that you can do more of the energizing stuff, less of the draining stuff. that, one, you have more fun. Two, you're better at your job, even better than before. And hopefully you retain with the company and continue to grow. I think 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. Can I ask, are there some interesting, surprising examples of something that was draining or something that was energizing that you heard from Star employees? My chief of staff is exceptional. And she's the kind of person where she will take anything that you throw at her. But there's

things that she enjoys doing more than others. And once we had a conversation, she was on the verge of burnout. And she was answering emails at midnight. It's like, what are you doing during the day that's really exhausting to you? And she's like, I really hate OKRs. And this was setting OKRs for other people. Yeah, this is like running the OKR process for the company, which, you know, is just a project management. I know. Nobody loves doing OKRs. She was grinning and burying it, but I didn't want her to have to struggle through that because she was so excellent at other things. So we fully changed her job description so that someone else does OKRs. She can specialize and she really wanted to flex into people op stuff. So we gave her more of that. That's the beauty

of being a smallish company is that you can be nimble like that. I don't know if that still translates when you're 700 employees. Yeah, does it? It can get a little harder because, you know, you tend to hire mostly people that are there to fulfill a role. But even so, I mean, I love the idea that really it's about making sure you have the right person in the right role. When we get a new customer, often they have an existing product or tool that they've been using that they move off of. And they have to migrate all this old data. So they've been recruiting.

They have old resumes and interview notes and candidates for however many years. We've got to bring all that forward into Greenhouse's kind of a job for each new customer. And our engineers were doing it. And they hated it. And so we said, well, we need to hire a specialized person just to do these kind of data migrations. And they were like, we'll never hire them to do that's the worst job. Nobody's going to want to do it.

Whoever were going to hire me terrible. And I reframed it entirely. I said, no, you don't want to do that job. I get that. I don't want to do your job. There's someone out there who thinks this is the coolest job they could ever get. Let's go find that person, put them in this job. And we did.

And they saw each new customer data migration as kind of a puzzle to figure out. And they challenge themselves to automate the parts of it that they could and to do them quickly. And they really enjoyed that opportunity. And so when you think about performance and high performing teams, high performing people, I think it's really important to figure out, do you have the right person in the right job? When we talk about a star, you know, it's about making sure that that person can continue to contribute at whatever role that they're in. But high performance is tricky, right?

Because you do then run the risk of burnout. And I'm curious, how do you manage that? Look, sometimes there's a lot of work to do. Sometimes there's crunch motor raising around the money or we've got a big product launch or a big conference we're putting on. Everyone's got to burn them in that offer a little bit. If you're doing that constantly, if that's the default, I just don't think that's sustainable. It's not recognizing the human beings are the ones doing the work. And if you're not healthy, and if you're not ready for those moments, you're not going to be able to step up.

And so I've had conversation with people in my teams where I've told them that. I said, you're creating a risk for the business in the way you're working. You haven't taken a Saturday or a Sunday off in three months. One day you're going to come to me when I don't know what's going to happen and you're going to catastrophically explode and quit. And that creates a big problem for me. So I think you have to have a sustainable work culture or else people are going to burn out and create risks. We've talked about performance management for stars, and we've talked a little bit of about performance management for folks who are struggling.

But I'm curious, how do you think about performance management for those people in the middle who are meeting expectations, but sort of like the median employee? Someone's got to be that, right? That's honestly the hardest part of it, I think. And to be totally honest, we try really hard to avoid that. And I know everybody wants to build a culture of all stars, but we really try to encourage A players to hire A players

and to not have too much sort of middle level. I think the middle level is where things slow down. The middle level is where bureaucracy comes into play. We haven't honestly perfected it, but it's something I take a look at. And especially now that we have our leveling and competency diagrams, it's now starting to be a little bit more obvious who's just getting by. And it's a real challenge to the managers. If you replace that person with someone exceptional, how much more can you do? How much of your time are you spending on that individual? And it's nuance. There's no calculation to it. So I don't. I don't know that I've cracked that one. My chief people officer who I hired this year was helping us grapple with this very problem. And one of her observations was someone is asked to give a presentation and they do a bunch of work and they make a bunch of slides and they show up at the groom and they give a presentation. And everyone says to them, that was great.

Great job. And she says, well, that was good. And so we have the saying good is good. Yeah. Like, good's not bad. Yeah. Good is good. I'm glad you did a good job.

You did what you were supposed to do. That is good. everybody at the company, let's be really clear. If everybody at the company did their job to a good level, we'd be in a really good spot, right? But it's not great. And so firstly establishing that good is good and what do we mean by that? And why is it, you know, why is it that most people are going to do a good job? And it's a high bar. If you're not doing a good job, we have a different conversation. And then from there, what does it really mean to be transformational? What does it really mean to be great? All of a sudden becomes even rarer and sort of harder to accomplish. I think

that's a better place for us to find ourselves in. How do you think about making performance management a day-to-day task? I think it is top-down. You have to model it. And for us, we try to practice as much as we can. Ideally, you've just had a pitch, you get off the phone, you talk about how that went. So we do a lot of retros, we do a lot of debriefs. I spend a lot of time with our sales teams.

And then one thing that I've started doing is asking my direct reports to, on a monthly basis, one of our one-on-one times to talk about how they're doing at a slightly more strategic level. So intentionally getting us out of the weeds of how did that one call go or how did today go and more let's take a step back. How are you feeling about how you're doing this month? Are you feeling supported? That way when you get to that semi-annual or whatever performance review where it's all documented and it's a whole process, there's no surprises. It's a lot harder to scale. So we'll see how this holds as we go beyond 40 employees, but that's what we're trying to institutionalize now. Yeah, and I think there can be a risk of overdoing it, too. I think it's like everybody has

this idea that at some point you're just going to have like a number and that's, you know, there's like a little needle and like that's how good you're doing. Like, well, I think jobs are often complicated and there's a lot of nuance. And so I think it's important to put some structure in place and make sure people know here's a metric for good and here's a metric for great. But at the same time, a lot of it is very qualitative in nature. And so I don't want to undersell the qualitative stuff. And I don't want to undersell the stuff that's maybe harder to measure. What if we invested elsewhere to make the culture better, to hire people that were better aligned with our company in the first place, to make it more likely that people would

stay and grow here and not leave? What if we did those things? And this is the paradox. Better long-term investments, better for employees, better for the business, and harder to measure. And so I think you have to resist the temptation to just do the measurable stuff. Yeah. One of the the unusual aspects of being a founder and CEO of a company is that you not only do performance management for everyone at the company, but you also do performance management for yourself. I'm curious, how have you thought about that? Are there ways that you spread that through the organization so you can get feedback, or where do you go for your own performance management?

Yeah, so I was very intent on doing 360 reviews from day one. So I do performance reviews for myself. I have a coach, I have an executive coach that I've had now for almost four or five years. So she actually will orchestrate it. So she will set up one-on-ones with my direct reports and with my board members. And she'll basically interview them and get constructive feedback as well as things that I should continue doing. And then she will basically give me my review for me and then will show me snippets of, you know, the actual responses that people submit for that so that I can actually reflect on how I've done. And it's something I do twice a year now to make sure that I at least understand how people are perceiving me.

I don't know if you could ever get like a fully honest answer, but that's what we do. That's really smart. I'm not doing any of that. I really wish I was. Yeah, I don't know that I've really cracked the code on that. I think in a lot of ways, it's hard to separate like my performance from the company and the team's performance. So I mostly just look at kind of the company's scorecard and ultimately that's what I'm accountable to. At what point do you sort of think, well, we're doing this for culture. We're doing this performance management. We want the Venn diagram to overlap a lot. I mean, I believe that so much that we codified it in our company values. One of our company values is radical candor because what we were finding, especially, you know, we accidentally ended up building a remote company for a while there during COVID. Like we were four employees pre-COVID and then all of a sudden raised a round of capital and had to scale. And so it got to the point where we had to instill some sort of common language or common expectation of how we approach feedback and how we communicate.

And so we actually built it into our company. values. So it is both how we run performance management, but also an expectation of how we show up, not just with ourselves, but also with our customers. I guess I would maybe challenge the frame a little bit if I could. You know, I think sometimes culture is sort of shorthand for like being nice to employees and performance management is sort of shorthand for like being new employees. Yeah. I think that's wrong. So I guess I think about it a little bit differently. I want a high performance culture. I think if the company is doing well, it means the people are doing well. There's no such thing as, like, the people not succeeding and the company succeeding are vice versa.

So they're very intertwined. But really, the culture is about how we do things around here. And, you know, what's good and what's acceptable. So I don't think that they're necessarily the opposites or you have to choose, do I want culture or do I want good performance? I actually think if you think about them as really the same thing, then you can get somewhere quite different. As you think about your company where it is today, Christy, what's your next move with blackmail? We've been focusing hugely on distribution. Next up for us is turning back to product enhancements,

and now it's time to continue to innovate to make sure that we stay fresh in market. Great. Daniel, what's next for you and for Greenhouse? Well, the world of hiring has changed radically. And so at Greenhouse, we're really thinking about how are AI, how are changes in the job market, globalization, affecting the ability of companies to hire the right person and for people to get the right job. And right now, there's this kind of AI doom loop where it's bad and getting worse. And so we're really trying to solve both the process.

that companies are having and trying to identify and hire that right person. But we've come to see that it's inextricably linked with solving the problem for job seekers, that if they can't see a path to getting the right job for themselves in a way that they trust, that's safe, that they're not going to get scammed, and that's efficient and a good use of their time, that the whole market just doesn't work. And so we're really interested in making the whole job market safer and more efficient beyond just the day-to-day kind of hiring process within an organization. Daniel, Christy, thanks so much, and we'll be back with you in just a minute.

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Capital One. What's in your wallet? Terms and conditions apply. Find out more at Capital One.com slash VentureX business. And now we're excited to welcome Ami VDak, VP and head of business cards and payment credit card segment Capital One. Thanks for joining us today, Ami. Thanks so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here. Now, at some companies, employees are asked to evaluate themselves as part of their performance reviews. What are the benefits of incorporating self-assessments into the regular performance review process? Self-assass assessments are a really great opportunity for employees to reflect on their achievements,

their strengths, and their opportunities for improvement. The assessments encourage employees to take a step back from their work, pause, and think about what's going well and where they might need more focused, training, or support. The reflection is not only an exercise and accountability, but also professional growth, and self-assessment. advocacy. And when it comes to self-assessments, where are some of the challenges or drawbacks? Well, being objective about yourself can be really challenging. So employees may not see their strengths and contributions through the same set of filters that their managers do. They might struggle to evaluate how they're performing in light of the organization's overall goals.

And employees also sometimes struggle with bias, where they overrate or underrate their value or contributions. And this kind of misalignment can lead to inaccurate evaluations that affect both individual and organizational goals in development. One way that employees can align their perspective with their managers is by taking time to talk through self-assessments together, identify any gaps in perspective, and use it as an opportunity to get on the same page. And what are some ways that leaders can proactively help employees address some of these challenges?

Managers can help employees be more objective and pointed in their self-assessments from the start by providing really clear guidelines or benchmark behaviors to use for measurement and evaluation. Setting clear expectations is absolutely critical to align employee perspectives with their managers. So, for example, set objectives and metrics for performance expectations. Then provide constructive and actionable feedback on performance against those expectations. Also, make sure that individual goals are aligned with the company's priorities. Each one of these steps gives employees the specific criteria that they can use to measure their own performance based on their defined role.

And as a leader and a manager, what else can you do? Managers can encourage open communication and cultivate trust through authenticity. It's easier for your employees to be open and honest with you if you build that line of honest communication and regularly connect with them. I have personally found that being transparent about my own development goals, even as a leader, is really helpful in building that trust with my team. Well, these are great insights. Thanks so much for joining us today on me.

Thanks so much for having me, Mike. In this season, we want to give our audience access to founders like you. Here are some of our readers' questions about performance management. Our first audience question is this. How can you, as a founder, ensure that your managers are trained properly to manage their teams? Daniel, let's start with you. Well, it starts with hiring the right people. And from there, I think don't overwhelm them.

You want to train in the things that are the most important, but nobody wants to sit through classes all day. They've got a job to do. Christy, what about you? To compliment that, I would say do skip levels to make sure it's actually sticking you're never too senior to sit down and have a 15-minute check-in with all levels of the company and just see how they're doing. Great. Our second viewer question is this. What's the best way to make performance reviews constructive

rather than people feeling like it's a chore? Christy, let's start with you this time. If a performance review is a thing that happens once a year and no one ever thinks about it or does anything with it ever again, it's a waste of time. You've got to follow through, whether it's coaching, promotion, bonuses, there's got to be something that comes from it. Yeah, Patrick Kalenzhenyone.

that reinforcing clarity. You got to create the clarity, but then you have to reinforce it in the day-to-day and the way that you work. Our third viewer question is this. What tools and software are the most helpful when it comes to tracking and staying on top of performance management? So we use lattice for our performance management, although, to be honest, we started in Google docs, and that worked just fine, too, for quite a long time. Right. And, Danielle, you might have a dog in the spine. Well, greenhouse, we're hiring. We don't go beyond the onboarding process, but I will say it's less about what tool that you're using. It's more about the structure of that tool and make sure that it's working with you. I think sometimes those things can become their own project

and their own paperwork and bureaucracy. I think that's where you end up fighting the system. And our final viewer question is this. How transparent should a founder be with their team about things like finances and company challenges? Daniel, we'll start with you this time. As transparent as you need to be, but I think there's a little bit of a worry about being too transparent without context. What do I mean by that is as a founder, your highs are high and lows are low and you kind of used to that. You're in these rooms or you're say raising money or winning and losing big deals. Every employee doesn't necessarily have that context. And so if you're talking about a fundraise and maybe it's not going well, it's taking longer, they may not have the context for what does that

really mean? Are we going to run out of money? I'm going to lose my job. And so if they're not prepared with the right context, the transparency is actually not going to help. So I always think make sure you marry the transparency you provide with the context that they need. to understand it. And Christy, what's your experience with that? I honestly echoed the same philosophy. If you don't have the narrative and the story behind the information that you're sharing, you're going to stress people out. And so that's been a big practice of ours is every comms, whether it's positive, negative, just run-of-the-mill routine day-to-day. There's a why, there's a tying it back to our strategy, our vision, and our mission. And that helps at least give people that

like through line of all the decisions we make. Great. Well, Christy, who heard about co-founder and CEO of Wagmo, Dale Chake, co-founder and CEO of Greenhouse. Thanks so much for being here today. Thanks for having me. Thanks so much. This was great. Thank you for watching. Tune in next time for more industry leaders,

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