Building a Performance Culture from the Ground Up
HR Strategy · Org Design · Executive Coaching · 18-Month Engagement
Summary
When the President of a 300-person, family-owned salt production company recognized that her people deserved more structure than they had — and that her growth plans required it — she needed a partner who could build what was missing without disrupting what was working. Over 18 months, Lindsey Honari Advisors designed and implemented a complete performance infrastructure: a custom competency framework, a twice-yearly performance and bonus program, redesigned job descriptions for every salaried role, and a manager training program built for this workforce — not a generic one. The result was a system the organization could own, sustain, and build on for years to come.
The Client
A Culture Worth Protecting
The client is a salt production company with approximately 300 employees, operating as part of a family-owned holding company with more than 70 years of history. HR is a shared service at the parent company level and focused on operations, meaning leaders did not have dedicated HR staff to address the full range of strategic people needs.
The President came from a world leader in chemical processing, where dedicated HR infrastructure and rigorous people systems were simply part of how the company ran. Three years into her tenure, she had driven meaningful operational and financial results. She also saw clearly what was missing — and what it would cost the organization if it went unaddressed much longer.
She was not looking for someone to impose a system from the outside. She was looking for a partner who could bring the rigor of a large-company HR function to a family enterprise that had built something genuinely worth protecting.
The Challenge
The Gap Between Instinct and Infrastructure
Building a performance system from scratch in a manufacturing environment is not a theoretical exercise. It is deeply human, deeply political, and deeply practical — all at once.
The workforce spanned multiple plant locations across different states, each with its own culture and rhythms, alongside a corporate team managing commercial, sales, and administrative functions. For some employees who had been with the company for decades, a structured performance conversation was an entirely new concept. Most managers had risen through the business rather than through formal management training. Giving structured, documented feedback — especially feedback tied to compensation — was not part of the established culture.
At the center of the work was a tension that had to be held carefully: how do you introduce systems and standards without sacrificing the family culture and personal trust that had always been the company’s competitive advantage? How do you create accountability without becoming cold, rigorous without becoming corporate?
These were not abstract questions. They were the concerns of real leaders who cared deeply about their people and understood that a performance system, handled badly, could damage something irreplaceable.
The Approach
Built With, Not For
The engagement began with listening. Before any framework was drafted, Lindsey Honari Advisors spent significant time with the leadership team — understanding the culture, mapping the organization, and identifying what was working and needed to be preserved. The goal was never to import a system and ask the organization to conform to it. The goal was to build something that felt native.
Managers, HR staff, and employees were brought into the design process, not handed a finished product. Competencies were developed through dialogue rather than dictated from above. A pilot launched before full rollout, with structured feedback gathered from every participant and specific changes made in response. Training was designed for how performance conversations would actually unfold in a plant manager’s office in rural Virginia or New Mexico, not a hypothetical corporate setting.
That co-creative approach had two important effects. It produced a better result — one that fit the organization’s actual needs rather than a consultant’s assumptions about them. And it produced genuine buy-in. When people feel a system was built with them rather than imposed on them, they use it, sustain it, and advocate for it. In a culture that spans three generations, that distinction is the difference between a program that takes root and one that quietly fades.
What We Built
From Blank Page to PERKS
The centerpiece of the engagement was PERKS — the Performance Employee Reward System — a twice-yearly, competency-based performance and bonus program deployed through the company’s existing HR platform.
PERKS was built around a custom competency framework developed specifically for this organization. Eight core competencies — including Accountability, Big-Picture Thinking, Communicates Effectively, and Customer Focus — were defined with enough specificity to be meaningful and enough flexibility to apply across a workforce that ranged from plant operators to vice presidents. Each competency was anchored by a five-point behavioral rating scale that made the difference between meeting and exceeding expectations concrete and documentable, removing the subjectivity that so often undermines performance conversations.
The system ran twice a year. The first cycle served as an informational baseline — giving employees and managers a check-in for development conversations without the pressure of immediate compensation implications. The second tied to the annual review and bonus decisions. Between cycles, both parties had access to a shared Notes feature: a running record of accomplishments and observations that addressed the recency bias inherent in traditional annual reviews.
Alongside PERKS, job descriptions were redesigned for every salaried role in the organization — from assistant plant managers to senior vice presidents — developed in close collaboration with the relevant manager and employee, creating a consistent, defensible standard across all locations. Manager training, a feedback skills workshop, and a step-by-step Employee Guide rounded out the implementation.
The Outcome
What Becomes Possible
When a performance system is designed with care — built around an organization’s actual culture rather than imposed from outside — something shifts. Employees stop wondering where they stand and start focusing on where they’re going.
High performers gain a roadmap. A well-designed competency framework gives top talent something specific to work toward, and gives managers a consistent, documentable way to recognize strong performance and communicate it upward; visibility that becomes essential as an organization plans for growth.
Succession planning becomes easier. With standardized performance data across locations and functions, an organization can begin identifying its strongest contributors systematically, building the bench it will need before leadership gaps become urgent.
And structure does not have to come at the expense of culture. A performance system designed with genuine respect for what makes an organization work can introduce rigor without becoming cold, create accountability without becoming transactional, and bring consistency without erasing the warmth that family-owned companies spend decades building. The goal is never to corporatize a culture. It is to give that culture the infrastructure it needs to endure.
What This Engagement Demonstrates
The Work Beneath the Work
Not every organization needs a Chief People Officer on staff. But every organization serious about growth needs what a great people leader does: systems that make performance visible, infrastructure that makes development possible, and a culture that makes great people want to stay.
This engagement is what that work looks like when it is done collaboratively, with genuine respect for what already exists. Lindsey Honari Advisors does not arrive with a template. We arrive with a process — one that begins with listening, earns trust before making recommendations, and ends with something the organization can own and build on long after we’re gone.
If your organization is outgrowing informal systems, preparing for significant growth, or simply recognizing that your people deserve more structure and clarity than they currently have, we would welcome the conversation.