Li Hongyi: Defining Real Performance, Avoiding Burnout & Building Accountable Teams – E638
episode
BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech: Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand & Malaysia Startups, Founders & Venture Capital VC (English)
48 min
1 speaker
7 chapters
transcribed 16 days ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What does “performance” really mean for a high‑performing team?
Hey Hogie, good to see you back again. Good to see you too, Jim. I think we caught up for SQL because you've been writing a series of LinkedIn posts about performance management, promotion, and
then I was like, oh, this is really good. And you stopped writing. I've taken the George R. R. Martin hiatus. You have ideas, but you need time to put them into a form that you're proud of. Totally understand. So I was like,
Wait, where's the next chapters? I thought this would be a good way to go through some of those posts, maybe from a bottom up perspective, but also talk about some of it in our real lives as well. So I think we will link in the description obviously the written posts uh that you've done so that people can dive deeper. But I think we were about performance, measuring performance, promotions and also to some extent hiring and retention. and burnout, all those different dynamics. Lots of the dig in. I think that's interesting because everybody belongs to some organization that measures the performance. At job I have to go through a performance review every six months and then you're making me remember primary school, secondary school, academic performance.
Yeah. Singaporean Singaporeans
are aware of yeah performance being judged to their entire childhood. And the worst part is when there's some dinner conversation, someone's So what was your PS L E? I know when you tell your foreigner friends that the government asks you for your PS L E when applying for a job in your primary school grades, you're like, Are you crazy? Like why does anyone care? I guess I always just played live computer games. I
know, I was not a model student. So we were hanging out at the time. Let's talk about it, which is obviously there's so much talk about all of that, but I think the first question that I gotta ask is a philosophical one, which is what is
Performance. That is a very good question. The most correct answer is that it depends on what you're trying to do. Seemingly trivial point that I found a lot of people miss when they're trying to run their organizations. If you ask anybody, do they want their organization to be high performing, they'll almost certainly say yes. But then when you ask perform at what? A lot of times they haven't even thought about it. I think there's a kind of implicit, oh yeah, high performing organization. We're fast, we're efficient, but a lot of people skip that first step of really just defining what does it mean to be high performing. And once you skip that step, everything you're doing downstream is just vibes. Because you're not clear on this goal.
And and I'll give you an example. Conversations with the product teams is about tracking metrics. And a lot of teams are like, oh yeah, should we track BAU, MAU, total users? Should we track like revenue? Should we track what should we track? And my answer to that is what are you trying to do? Because, to give you an example, let's say you're working on one of our AI tools, pair, to be like the best damn AI tool for a government officer that could be. Is the objective of it to not be the best AI tool ever, the most powerful one, but just to be pretty simple so that a lot of government officers can get like a very introductory usage of AI? Is it to fulfill a niche in the market that other AI tools The commercial industry is not filling, these could be reasonable objectives.
Each would be a different measure, right? If trying to be the best AI tool for government officers you could possibly be, then you would compare like the performance of whatever you built versus Claude and ChatGPT and all these other models and try to beat them. I don't think we should be in the business of doing that, but if that's what you're trying to do, that's what you would measure. Similarly, if you're just trying to get government officers familiar with AI, but not necessarily be the pro tool that they eventually use for the whole career, then you're measuring Monthly active users, people who are using it somewhat, and it doesn't really matter whether you use it like 10 times a month or one time a month, you just want to build familiarity across the public service, which is a reasonable goal.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What does “performance” really mean for a high‑performing team?
0:00–7:53
2
Why is a clear purpose more important than profit in the public sector?
7:53–13:56
3
How should leaders choose the right metrics to avoid failure?
13:56–20:57
4
What is sign‑posting and how does explicit communication reduce confusion?
20:57–26:02
5
How can performance reviews be designed to inform decisions instead of becoming political rituals?
26:02–35:12
6
What are the risks of over‑promoting employees and how can they be avoided?
35:12–43:30
7
How can leaders prevent burnout while still driving sustainable skill growth?
43:30–48:46
Speakers
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