Goggans Consulting
Take the Snapshot
October 12, 2026

Performance Thermostat: Why Improvement Gets Pulled Back to the Old Normal

I have watched leaders do the right things on paper and still end up frustrated.

They’ve clarified what they expect, worked with people on the behavior, and followed up. For a while, the team responds and performance improves enough to suggest the change is taking hold.

Over time, though, familiar patterns begin to return. Someone who had started contributing in meetings goes quiet again, or a manager hesitates over a decision they had seemed ready to handle.

That is what I mean when I talk about the Performance Thermostat.

It is a practical way I examine a pattern I have seen in leadership and team performance: people and systems often regulate back toward what has become familiar, even when everyone says they want something better.

The question is not only, “How do we raise the standard?”

The deeper question is, “What keeps pulling this team back to the old normal?”

A spike is not the same as a new normal

Temporary improvement can be misleading.

A leader can create a short-term lift through pressure, attention, incentives, a new meeting rhythm, or a visible push from the top. Those things are not automatically wrong; at times a leader needs compliance, structure, and clear standards.

But pressure can also hide the real issue.

In my Why Effort Is Not Enough talk, I used the image of a car that is out of alignment. At a low speed, the pull is easy to correct. At a higher speed, the steering wheel starts to shake. By the time the driver reaches the destination, their arms are tired because they have been correcting the whole way.

That is what a lot of leaders are doing. They are not leading a stable system. They are constantly correcting a misaligned one.

I have seen the same thing in teams. We would put an incentive in place and people would own it for a while. The numbers would move. Then the incentive went away, the focus moved somewhere else, and the numbers dropped back. Individually, it could happen the same way. We would focus on a specific area of performance, watch it improve, remove the focus, and then watch the person fall back toward the old pattern.

That kind of cycle is exhausting because it looks like progress and regression at the same time. The effort and improvement are real, but the set point has not moved yet.

Pressure can produce a result for a while. It rarely produces ownership.

The old normal usually has reasons

I do not like treating performance patterns as character defects too quickly.

Carelessness or avoidance can be part of a performance problem, and understanding the cause does not remove a leader’s responsibility to address it.

But in my experience, many “performance problems” are also familiar-system problems.

A team may have learned that speaking up creates more work but not more influence. A manager may have learned that asking for help makes them look unprepared. A high performer may have learned that slowing down to build a better process only earns them more pressure. An organization may say it wants ownership while rewarding the people who quietly absorb dysfunction.

If that has been the environment long enough, the old pattern starts to feel normal, not because it is good or healthy, but because people know how to operate inside it.

When a system has a familiar baseline, a new behavior can feel risky even when it is objectively better. A person may want to operate differently and still feel pulled back toward the identity, habits, expectations, and relationships that have helped them succeed or survive so far.

That is why the Performance Thermostat is not just about behavior or reinforcement. It is identity driven. The surrounding system matters because it can either support a new identity or keep confirming the old one.

Identity is the governing mechanism

The thermostat is often visible in behavior, but the set point lives deeper than behavior.

A person may say, “I want to lead differently,” while still seeing themselves as the person who must have every answer. A team may say it wants ownership while still carrying the identity of people who wait for permission because initiative has not been safe. An organization may say it wants development while people believe their real value comes from absorbing pressure without asking for help.

That is not just a reinforcement problem. Reinforcement is part of it, but it is not the whole thing.

The Performance Thermostat is concerned with the identity that makes a pattern feel believable, safe, and familiar. If the new standard requires people to see themselves differently, then the work cannot stop at pressure, reminders, incentives, or a better meeting cadence. Those may create movement. They do not automatically create a new set point.

This is why Maxwell Maltz matters to my thinking. Maltz was a plastic surgeon before he wrote Psycho-Cybernetics, and his writing about self-image grew out of what he observed in his clinical work: outward change did not always become inward change. The part that stayed with me was the relationship between self-image and action. If a person still carries the old picture of who they are, a new result can feel temporary, undeserved, or unsafe even when the opportunity is real.

I see a leadership version of that all the time. A person can receive a new title, a new expectation, a new metric, or a new opportunity and still operate from an older picture of who they are. The environment, role, and language may have changed, but the person can still be regulating from the self-image that has felt true.

That is the thermostat.

Research supports the identity question

The phrase “Performance Thermostat” is my language for a pattern I have seen in myself, in teams I have led, and in the leadership work I now teach. The mechanism underneath it connects to serious work on self-image, identity, motivation, and behavior.

Maltz’s Psycho-Cybernetics helped popularize self-image as a practical way to understand why people can struggle to live into a new result after an external change. I use that influence as conceptual language for something I was already seeing: people often return to the level of performance that matches the identity they still believe.

Modern identity research gives that question stronger empirical support. Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius described “possible selves” as the selves people might become, would like to become, or fear becoming, and argued that those self-images link cognition and motivation. Daphna Oyserman’s identity-based motivation work goes further: people are more likely to act and interpret difficulty in ways that fit identities that are active and relevant in the moment.

If the desired behavior feels like “what people like us do,” friction can become part of becoming. If the desired behavior feels identity-incongruent, the same friction can become evidence that the change is not really for us.

Self-verification research points in the same direction from another angle. William Swann and colleagues have shown that people often seek, prefer, and create feedback environments that confirm their existing self-views, even when those self-views are limiting. That does not mean people are trying to fail. It means a familiar identity can feel coherent, predictable, and socially safer than an unfamiliar one.

This is one reason temporary improvement so often fades. Even a clear goal and a supportive leader may not resolve the tension between a new behavior and someone’s existing self-image. When that tension is not addressed, people can drift back toward the version of themselves, the team, or the organization they already know how to be.

The thermostat is often set by identity and confirmed by the system

Leaders usually notice the behavior they want to change.

They see the missed deadline, the avoidance, the low initiative, the meeting silence, and the lack of ownership.

What they may not see is the identity the system has been confirming.

If every honest mistake becomes a reputation mark, people may learn to hide uncertainty and begin seeing themselves as people who cannot afford to be seen learning.

If the person who rescues every broken process gets praised while the person trying to fix the process gets ignored, people may learn that heroics matter more than improvement and begin seeing their value as absorbing dysfunction.

If leaders ask for initiative but override every decision, people may learn to wait and begin seeing themselves as people whose judgment is not really trusted.

If the organization says development matters but only rewards immediate output, people may learn that growth is decoration and begin believing that becoming better is less valuable than staying useful in the old way.

That is the thermostat at work.

The set point is not always written in a policy. It is often carried in the stories people tell, the risks they avoid, the behavior that gets rewarded, and the identity people believe they must protect.

So when a leader asks for a higher standard without changing any of that, the organization may comply for a while. Then the old identity starts looking for confirmation again, and the old reinforcement pattern is ready to provide it, pulling people back.

How I start uncovering the pullback

When I see a team return to an old pattern, I do not want to begin with another speech about accountability. I want to understand the pull.

In practice, that has meant asking people about more than the metric. I would ask team members what they were aspiring toward and why they wanted it. Then I would ask who they believed they needed to become to have it, and who they knew or looked up to who had achieved something like what they wanted. From there, we could name the aspiration self and the current self, then look at the gap without turning it into shame.

That changed the work. Instead of only saying, “Hit this number,” we could ask, “What has to grow in you for that number to become normal?” The answer might involve skill or confidence, but it might also involve an internal narrative or limiting belief that was pulling the person back before the behavior ever changed.

A few questions usually tell me more than another performance review:

  • What behavior improved temporarily, and what pulled it back?
  • What identity did the new behavior require people to step into?
  • What did people have to risk in order to maintain the new behavior?
  • What does the old pattern protect?
  • Who benefits from the old normal, even unintentionally?
  • What does the system reward when pressure increases?
  • What belief would have to change for the new behavior to feel normal?

Those questions are not excuses. They are a way of uncovering what is happening beneath the visible behavior.

This inquiry helps a leader understand what makes a standard difficult to sustain without excusing a person from taking responsibility for their development.

Leaders have thermostats too

This part is harder because a team is not the only thing with a familiar baseline. Leaders have one too, and it can hide inside the behaviors they defend as responsibility, standards, or protection.

A leader may want a more empowered team and still route every decision through themselves. They may call that stewardship, quality control, or keeping people from getting hurt, but the team experiences the pattern differently. Over time, people learn that ownership is welcome only until a decision feels uncomfortable, and the leader’s need for control becomes part of the team’s set point.

I have to look at that in myself as much as I look for it in a team.

In the same talk, I said, “If we shrink, our team shrinks. If we expand, our team expands.” I still believe that a leader can become the ceiling without meaning to. If my identity is tied to being the rescuer, I may unintentionally create a team that keeps needing rescue. If my comfort is tied to control, I may call people unready when I have not created enough room for readiness to develop.

The Performance Thermostat is not a tool for blaming the team; it is a mirror for the leader, the individual, and the system at the same time.

Raising the set point requires more than intensity

The way through is not to push harder forever.

A higher performance baseline usually requires a different kind of work:

First, name the old normal honestly and clearly, without turning it into drama or blame: “This is the pattern we keep returning to.”

Second, identify what the old pattern has been protecting. People rarely repeat a pattern for no reason. It may protect speed, status, certainty, belonging, reputation, or control.

Third, connect the new behavior to identity. If the desired behavior remains an external demand, it will depend on external pressure. If people begin to see it as part of who they are becoming, it has a better chance of lasting.

Fourth, build evidence. Identity does not usually change because someone says a better sentence about themselves one time. It changes as people take aligned action, see themselves act differently, and gather believable evidence that the new identity is not just aspirational language.

That evidence often comes through repeated awareness, not one dramatic breakthrough. In my teams, the work became a series of conversations around the one or two growth items a person was working on. We would talk through what they were experiencing so they could recognize the internal shift before the old response took over. The point was awareness rather than judgment: learn the triggers, adjust, celebrate wins, and analyze the rest. Eventually they started to show up that way habitually, and then we could move to the next gap.

Fifth, change the reinforcement around the behavior. The surrounding conditions need to support that development. A leader asking for ownership while rewarding dependence makes the new behavior harder to sustain.

Finally, expect friction. A new normal will feel unstable before it feels normal, which does not mean it is failing; it means the system is being asked to regulate differently.

The real question

The Performance Thermostat is one of the ways I make sense of repeated performance drift.

It helps me slow down before I assume the issue is effort, character, or commitment. Sometimes the visible problem is not that people do not care. Sometimes the old level of performance is safer, more familiar, more reinforced, and more consistent with the identity people have been operating from.

That does not mean leaders should lower the standard. It means they should stop confusing temporary pressure with durable change.

If a team keeps returning to the old normal, the work is not only to raise the target. The work is to understand what made the old normal feel normal in the first place, and what identity would make the new standard feel true enough to sustain.

If you are trying to name that kind of repeated friction in your own leadership environment, the Leadership Friction Snapshot is a practical place to start. If you want the broader Lab context behind this idea, you can also explore DUMB Leadership Labs™ and the related article on Compliance Cannot Carry Commitment.

Sources and further reading