Growth is the default narrative in business. Profit grows, teams scale, market share expands, and naturally, organizational maturity increases. In performance management, this logic runs deep: maturity scores are tracked over time, targets are set as "increasing," and reassessments are expected to show progress. This is often reasonable—and frequently necessary.

But not always.

Maturity as a KPI

We're comfortable with nuance when it comes to KPIs. We know that different metrics require different interpretations of "good performance." KPIs have different "good" directions. Customer complaints should decrease. Revenue should increase. Budget variance should stay within range. Each serves a different purpose, and each requires a different interpretation of "performance."

Performance management maturity scores can function as a KPI themselves. Some of our clients have formalized this, tracking their maturity index the way they track revenue or customer satisfaction. And like any KPI, the question becomes: How to set the target? 

Performance management maturity is typically treated as an increasing KPI. Organizations aim to move from Level 2 to Level 3, from Level 3 to Level 4, with each reassessment marking progress toward recognized best practices. This approach brings real value: continuous improvement, structured transformation roadmaps, and predictability in system design. It's especially appropriate when organizational complexity is rising, coordination costs are climbing, or informal practices no longer scale.

But what happens when we treat maturity as a "within range" KPI instead?

What It Means to Set Maturity as an Increasing Target

Before challenging the default, let's acknowledge what makes it valuable.

Setting maturity as an increasing KPI drives continuous improvement. It creates momentum. It establishes a clear trajectory from current state to aspirational state, with each maturity level representing a milestone. Organizations can plan multi-year transformation roadmaps, aligning resources and timelines to move from Level 2 to Level 3, from Level 3 to Level 4.

It also provides structured progress toward recognized best practices. Maturity frameworks distill decades of organizational learning. They represent patterns that have worked across industries and contexts. When an organization commits to increasing maturity, it commits to adopting practices that have been validated elsewhere. There's comfort in that—and often, real value.

Finally, increasing maturity targets create predictability. Leadership knows what to expect. Change management efforts have clear goalposts. External stakeholders—boards, investors, regulators—can see evidence of systematic improvement.

This approach is especially appropriate when organizational complexity is genuinely increasing. When a company grows from 50 people to 500, informal performance conversations stop working. When product lines multiply or geographic footprint expands, coordination costs rise sharply. In these situations, performance management practices must evolve to match the new reality. Setting maturity as an increasing target makes sense because the context demands it.

An Alternative Use Case: Maturity Within Range

Now consider a different framing.

What if an organization set its Performance Management Maturity Index target as "within range"—say, between Level 3 and Level 4—and actively maintained that position over several assessment cycles?

This is not stagnation. It's not complacency. It's not accepting "good enough" when better is possible.

It's something else: maturity aligned with organizational context.

Setting maturity within range means the organization has determined that its current level of performance management sophistication matches its actual needs. It has the practices required to operate effectively, to make good decisions, to engage employees appropriately. Adding more sophisticated approaches—more advanced analytics, more complex cascading mechanisms, more formalized calibration processes—wouldn't necessarily improve outcomes. It might, in fact, introduce unnecessary complexity.

This framing enables conscious restraint. Not every organization needs predictive analytics at every level. Not every organization benefits from competency-based goal-setting. Not every organization should implement multi-rater feedback systems simply because they represent "higher maturity." The question becomes: what does this organization actually need?

It also supports capacity-aware design. Organizations have limited absorption capacity for change. Every new process, every additional tool, every expanded reporting requirement consumes attention, time, and energy. When maturity is set within range, organizations can invest in depth rather than breadth—refining what they already do, embedding practices more fully, ensuring high-quality execution rather than chasing the next maturity level.

This allows space for internally driven innovation. Instead of following a predetermined maturity roadmap, organizations can experiment with emergent solutions to their specific performance challenges. They can innovate in targeted areas that matter most to them, even if those innovations don't neatly align with maturity level progressions. They can advance selectively, increasing sophistication in strategic performance management while keeping operational performance practices intentionally simple.

Maturity Can Decrease—and That's Not Always Failure

Here's something rarely said out loud: maturity scores might also go down from time to time.

This can happen when organizational complexity increases faster than practices can adapt. Or changes are implemented mechanically, because a roadmap says so rather than because the context requires it. It can happen when engagement drops because transformation becomes a compliance exercise.

Maturity scores can decrease when organizational complexity increases faster than practices adapt. A company doubles in size through acquisition. Geographic footprint expands. Product complexity multiplies. The performance management system that was perfectly adequate at the previous scale suddenly shows gaps. The maturity score drops—not because practices got worse, but because the demands got higher.

In this case, the decreasing score is information. It's telling the organization that its performance management system hasn't kept pace with environmental changes. The appropriate response might be to increase maturity—or it might be to simplify other aspects of the organization to reduce coordination demands.

Maturity scores can also decrease when changes are implemented mechanically, without context. An organization receives a maturity assessment and a roadmap for improvement. Recommendations are clear: implement calibration sessions, introduce predictive analytics, establish competency frameworks. The organization executes the roadmap dutifully. But the changes were designed by external consultants who didn't fully understand internal culture. Engagement drops. Managers experience the new processes as bureaucratic overhead. Employees stop taking goal-setting seriously because it feels like compliance theater.

At the next assessment, maturity scores decrease. Not because the organization failed to implement recommendations—it did—but because implementation without internal buy-in degraded the overall system quality.

This is counterintuitive but important: a decreasing maturity score can be diagnostic, not punitive. It can signal misalignment between practices and culture. It can reveal that absorption capacity has been exceeded. It can show that the wrong problems are being solved.

The problem in these scenarios isn't the decreasing score. The problem is the assumption that maturity must always increase, which leads organizations to pursue higher levels even when their context doesn't support it.

Context Matters: One Maturity Profile Does Not Fit All

Let's make this concrete.

Large, complex organizations operating across multiple markets, product lines, and regulatory environments often require the highest maturity levels. Coordination challenges demand sophisticated cascading mechanisms. Data volumes require advanced analytics. Stakeholder needs necessitate formalized processes that create consistency and transparency. In these organizations, "within range" will likely mean Level 5. The complexity makes advanced practices necessary, not optional.

Startups and emerging organizations face different realities. A 30-person company with a single product and flat hierarchy might not even need competency-based performance management. It probably doesn't need formal calibration sessions. It might not even need structured goal-setting beyond basic OKRs. In this context, Level 2 or Level 3 maturity can be entirely appropriate—even healthy. Over-sophisticated systems would consume disproportionate time and energy better spent on product development or customer acquisition.

The middle world—and this is where most organizations actually live—is more nuanced. A 500-person company with moderate complexity, established markets, and stable growth. A regional organization with three business units and conventional performance challenges. These organizations don't face startup constraints, but they also don't face enterprise-scale coordination demands.

This is where "within range" maturity matters most.

Consider predictive analytics as an example. For some organizations, predictive analytics are essential—forecasting future performance trends, identifying flight risks, optimizing talent allocation. These are Level 5 capabilities, and they genuinely add value.

But predictive analytics might be essential at the strategic level while remaining unnecessary at the employee level. A company might benefit enormously from predicting which high-performers are likely to leave, while gaining little from predicting individual employee performance next quarter. If maturity is set as an increasing target, the organization might push for employee-level predictive analytics simply to raise the overall score—even though simpler statistical analysis meets actual needs.

When maturity is framed as "within range," the organization can make these distinctions. It can adopt Level 5 practices where they matter and maintain Level 3 practices where they're sufficient. The maturity profile becomes heterogeneous, intentionally varied across organizational levels and functions.

Closing: Maturity as Alignment, Not Escalation

The real risk in performance management maturity is treating maturity as a race, pursuing higher levels as a competitive reflex, adding capabilities the organization cannot actually absorb, or implementing sophisticated practices because a framework says Level 5 is "more mature" than Level 3.

When maturity is framed as a KPI that can legitimately be "within range," the fundamental question shifts.

From: "How do we increase our maturity score?"

To: "Is our maturity appropriate for our context and ambitions?"

This shift matters because it reframes what "mature" actually means. Mature performance management, or at least how we see it at GPA Unit, is knowing what your organization needs and building a system that delivers it—no more, no less.

Mature performance management systems know when to evolve and when not to. They know that adding complexity is sometimes the wrong choice. They know that staying within range can be the strategic decision.

This isn't about pauses or stillness in the sense of stopping. It's about recognizing that not all movement is progress. Sometimes the most sophisticated choice is restraint. Sometimes the highest performance comes from systems that resist the pressure to become more elaborate than necessary.