Your Tolerance for Underperformance Isn't Compassion. It's Irresponsibility.
You think you’re being kind. But every day you wait… you’re slowly burning trust, performance, and morale. You're becoming the weakest link.
Have you ever had an employee that just wasn’t able to do the job?
Most leaders have.
And most leaders fail to address the problem. They make a ton of excuses.
I know, I’ve made the same ones:
“I’m too busy”
“Maybe if I give them a little more time”
“Perhaps it’s me — I’m not being clear enough or supportive enough”
“Yes, it’s been multiple tasks, but perhaps I need to just find something else for them to excel at”
“Hiring a new person is so much work. And they might not work out either”
We think that if we just give it more time, the employee will turn around. And while that might make sense for some employees, it does not excuse us from giving direct feedback and escalating our approach toward exit if we don’t see improvement.
What we don’t realize is happening as we wait, is that we are not only hurting the performance of our team and all the teams around us, but we are damaging our hard-earned trust from the employees who are our stars. Counterintuitively, we are even hurting the employee who isn’t performing.
It takes a lot to make a manager give up on an employee.
Wanda threw her hands up wondering why she bothered.
She had just left yet one more meeting, perhaps her 20th, with a member of her team, Julian, who just couldn’t seem to take direction from her without asking irrelevant questions and questioning her authority.
Wanda was a VP at a consumer brand. A rising star.
Earlier this year, she inherited a team when her boss wanted to increase her scope and influence and added a new group to her purview.
The team consisted of 5 people, each with different skills and tenures.
Overall, most of the team was responsive to her leadership. They welcomed her direct but empathetic communication style and saw her as someone who could elevate the performance and recognition of their team.
The only exception was Julian.
He was the longest-tenured team member and considered the most expert team member. Wanda didn’t receive a detailed overview of the team she inherited because her predecessor had left the company before she took over and her boss didn’t want to influence her views.
So Wanda had the benefit and the challenge of developing her own view.
Early indications were not good.
Right from the beginning, Wanda got indications that were concerning.
Julian would miss deadlines and not communicate in advance. He would not answer basic questions about his workload or be able to summarize his progress and learnings when Wanda asked for more details.
When Wanda assigned him new projects, he would spend 15-30 minutes asking her questions about the assignment, often adding comments insinuating that the initiative may not be needed and that he felt she needed more data before assigning him the work.
Over time, Wanda would find that peers were finding it challenging to work with him as well.
He was also not responsive to their needs and often resisted collaborating. He would instead ask others to send him memos and then respond with more detailed questions. When they asked him to meet live, he would often say he was too busy.
In a fast-paced culture that valued live discussion and collaboration, Julian’s resistance was creating roadblocks and generating frustration.
From bad to worse, and yet sometimes, leaders will still find a way to avoid a negative confrontation.
As team morale dipped because projects were being delayed by Julian’s lack of engagement and missed deadlines, Wanda chose to spend more time with him with the hope of helping him turn around his behavior.
She tried to be patient when he asked his multitude of questions and addressed his objections to her assignments point by point.
Wanda didn’t want to assume he couldn’t do the work. She asked Julian if there were other things happening in his life that were causing him to miss deadlines and decline meeting with his teammates.
Julian shared that he was caring for an aging parent and that might have contributed, but that mostly he didn’t feel his behavior was a detriment and he would try to improve.
Julian’s responses were insufficient — he wouldn’t take responsibility and would offer up excuses or point the finger towards others, but Wanda felt empathy for his situation. She wanted to give him a chance.
She also didn’t want to rock the boat. She had seen other leaders move swiftly to remove tenured staff when they took over and she didn’t like the fear that was left in the wake of their actions.
Instead, Wanda encouraged Julian to engage more with his colleagues, and she gave him feedback on his most egregious misses. But if she was honest with herself, Wanda was not being as direct as she could be. She was certainly not consistent in her feedback. She would provide it sometimes, but not others, and it would often be wrapped in positives.
Wanda also didn’t want to alert her manager or HR because she knew that once she did, they would encourage her to move faster. She wanted to have more time to assess the situation, more time to see if she could get Julian to change his approach.
In addition, Wanda was feeling stretched. She saw hiring and onboarding as a lot of work and she was worried about losing legacy knowledge.
But after another 2 months, it was clear that the projects where Julian was assigned were moving at 50% or slower the pace they needed to and that Wanda knew was possible. Julian was also further solidifying his reputation as difficult to work with and not sharing any context with Wanda as to why.
When the pain is unbearable, we finally take action. But the negative impacts may have already taken hold.
Fast forward one year later and Wanda finally exited Julian as part of a reduction in force — a layoff.
Within a week, Wanda could see the team functioning better. The team was able to move through work faster and she felt more focused as their manager. Wanda literally felt a weight lift off her shoulders as her team was less frustrated and she felt she was no longer wasting her time trying to help a team member who wasn’t open to or perhaps capable of addressing her feedback.
But despite all of these positives, there was significant damage done while Wanda waited nearly a year to exit Julian:
Julian’s team missed their targets for the past year, impacting everyone’s performance reviews and compensation decisions
Two top performers left the team when they saw that Wanda wasn’t going to make a decision and it would impact their futures
Wanda had also lost the trust of some peers and some of her team. They just didn’t understand why she waited so long
The worst part? Wanda didn’t even realize some of these impacts were a result of her delayed decision-making. She had damaged her reputation, and she wasn’t even aware.
As leaders, our responsibility is to the team and to the mission — not to individual people.
Sadly, what Wanda lost sight of during this extended period, where she did not hold Julian accountable for his behaviors and take decisive action was her responsibility to the broader team.
As leaders, our job is to set a clear direction, and resource and direct our teams well. When you leave an underperformer on the team, you are enabling a weak link to weaken the entire team.
What results is a cascading effect with lasting negative impacts:
Top performers will feel unsupported and leave
Team operational and cultural cohesion is damaged
Your time is not optimized, but neither is your team
You are distracted and not focused on what will strengthen your team
You inadvertently sow doubts across the team about your collective ability to succeed. Strong positive mindsets lead to positive outcomes and the reverse is also true
And what about the person who isn’t performing?
You aren’t helping them either.
If you are concerned about whether you are hurting their feelings, damaging your relationship with them, or adding stress to their life, well chances are you are doing all of the above, and worrying about it won’t make it better.
They likely know they aren’t performing well, but they are confused about why you aren’t addressing it. In addition, they aren’t doing well in relation to the rest of the team and so they are building a negative reputation. It’s a form of character assassination — they are doing it, but you are enabling it.
You are creating more stress for everyone — you, your team, and the individual underperforming.
It’s a recipe for disaster.
The solution?
Setting clear expectations and communicating directly and consistently about them. And setting milestones by which if you don’t see sufficient improvement, you shift gears and exit the person.
No one wins when you wait to give feedback or to fire someone who isn’t a fit for the job — either because they aren’t performing or if they simply aren’t a fit for the role because of misaligned values or skillsets.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that you fire someone for a few misses or that you don’t allow for ebbs and flows of performance.
What I am referring to is when there is a clear pattern of behavior that negatively impacts the performance of the team, and after you provide direct and timely feedback, the individual continues to demonstrate a combination of a lack of accountability or inability to remedy it.
When you don’t address these situations quickly enough, you are setting up your team and yourself for failure.
OK, I’ve convinced you that you should not leave an underperformer on the team.
So what should you do?
First, know that compassion and maintaining strong performance standards are NOT at odds with each other. You can do both by creating reasonable standards and by communicating them clearly and consistently.
How to Reflect
Take time regularly to step back from your day-to-day activities. No, not on your nights and weekends — during working hours.
Why reflect?
You need space to integrate your observations and to ensure that you are not reacting to your emotions.
It’s natural to feel fear, frustration, and impatience, but those will not help you clarify your approach.
Giving yourself anywhere from an hour to two to three hours will help you have the space you need to create a strong decisive plan of action.
How do you reflect?
Change your context — Go to a different location than you typically work. Shifting your setting will help you shift your thinking patterns. Research indicates that a natural environment might be particularly beneficial (University of Tennessee research study)
Get moving — Research shows that our cognition significantly improves after our bodies are physically moving. Even a 10-minute walk on a treadmill in a windowless room can improve our creative thinking. (Stanford University research study) And while setting standards and communicating them might feel less like creative thinking, it might be exactly what you need to help you loosen your fears on this work.
Meditate — Quieting your mind will help you feel a bit of distance from the issue and perhaps give you more insight into both what really matters and how to address it.
Journal — Taking the time to write down your thoughts can help you connect the dots. You might not see it in one sitting, but as you revisit the topic over time, you can read your prior thoughts, and seeing your progress (or lack thereof) on paper can be incredibly clarifying.
Get input from others — You don’t have to do this work alone. Talk with your boss, HR, conduct a 360 review to get input from peers, or seek outside input from a coach. Asking for help is not a sign of weakness, it’s a sign you are resourcing yourself well.
Change your perspective — One way to do this is to pretend you are helping a friend with this issue. What would you tell them to do? Another is to jot down all of your strongest assumptions and then flip them on their head and get curious about how you react.
Reflection Questions
Here are some prompts to help you reflect more deeply. Notice that I’ll focus on the role and how the person behaves and how they impact the business.
I avoid analyzing why they are doing something because there is no way to really understand what is going through their mind. Instead, focus on the following concrete questions:
What outcomes does the role need to drive?
How is the person performing in relation to these?
Have you given feedback to them on their performance?
How long has it been since you provided feedback to them? Has their performance improved?
What skills are needed to be successful in this role?
How is the person demonstrating these skills?
Have you given feedback to them on their performance?
How long has it been since you provided feedback to them? Have their skills improved?
What behaviors are important to the productive functioning of the team?
How is the person exhibiting these behaviors and what is their impact on the productive functioning of the team?
Have you given feedback to them on their impact?
How long has it been since you provided feedback to them? Have their behaviors improved?
Have you set clear expectations on how much they need to improve on the above and by when?
Are you seeing sufficient improvement at a sufficient pace to give them more time?
Your Action Plan
Depending upon your answers to the above, you may need to take any of the following next steps or a combination:
Get more information from the person or from others to verify your assessment
Clarify or update your expectations on outcomes, skills, behaviors, and improvement timeline
Provide more direct and timely feedback
Adjust their role to scale down their negative impact while giving them time to improve
In most cases, the worst action you can take is to wait.
If you find yourself landing on “wait” as your path forward, I recommend you step away from this for a day or two and repeat the reflection process.
You don’t have to fire a person immediately when you see challenges, but you do need to address the challenges head-on and as quickly as possible.
To be truly compassionate to your team, the person in question, and yourself, you need to deal with the issues you see.
It won’t be easy, but it is the responsible thing to do.
I’d like to hear from you
This one may be hard to comment on because of privacy issues, so I won’t ask for any specifics. Perhaps instead you can share
How you make time to reflect and assess the members of your team
How you stay proactive in addressing issues you observe
Looking forward to hearing your comments and suggestions!
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I couldn't agree more. Every time I've seen a manager do this, the team suffers, the results suffer, and the leader suffers. Especially if the rest of the team have to cover the work of the poor performer, or their projects are delayed because of lack of action by the poor performer.
Yes, sometimes people go through divorce, illness and financial worries, but typically people who are good at their job will still do their best to do their work well. A poor performer makes excuses.
I've noticed that many managers are reticent about delivering feedback about poor performance because they don't know how.
Great points! Quick action is essential when team health and the mission are at stake.
My reflection system: 1:1s have played a key role for me, making sure to find time in my calendar to reflect and prepare before my 1:1s, and sometimes after depending on the outcome and if there are actions that need to be addressed.
Staying proactive: Address concerns in real-time through direct conversations/1:1s. A lot of "performance" issues can be explained and resolved with the right support. But there have been instances where people got the benefit of the doubt and we eventually parted ways, for one reason or another. The important part is prompt action and showing the team that you're addressing it.