Managing poor performance can feel like functioning in a vacuum—where the air and any ideas for resolving the situation have been removed. As a leader, you are left feeling helpless and frustrated. Worse, if the poor performance continues, you may fear it reflects negatively on your leadership.

It’s tempting to over-personalize the performance and try “fixing” the employee. They don’t need to be fixed; they are not broken. They simply need to meet the requirements of the position. 

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Managing the performance of any employee means setting the standard and regularly communicating specific feedback about success and opportunity for growth. Meeting the requirements of the position means the employee shows up, interacts with others politely, and completes designated tasks of the role with quality and timeliness. Good performance is not a comparison to high performers or achieving aspirational goals of the organization. 

When an employee’s performance falls below expectations, you may make assumptions about the person and overlook other factors. Typically, the symptoms and struggles are most visible. It is more complicated, but essential, to uncover the root cause of a performance issue.

For example, an employee may be grappling with challenges outside of work or feelings of burnout that may not be visible. They may not wish to share these challenges with you. That’s a reasonable choice for them to make and those concerns are not yours to fix. The employee’s performance, however, is appropriate to address. 

Regardless of cause, what you may see with the employee is a late start time, a lack of focus, and delayed deliverables. Further, they may use a sharper-than-usual tone or withdraw during meeting discussions, which compromises relationships on the team. When asked about it they say, “I’m fine. I’ll get the deliverable to you tomorrow.” Then, they are distracted, late, and incomplete again.

The default approach

As a manager, you have likely tried to get more involved or directive in how the work gets completed. You may also start checking in with more frequency to assure yourself the employee is on track. Perhaps you are even doing part of the task based on the assumption they will not deliver. 

With this high involvement approach, the employee often doesn’t feel supported. In fact, the employee feels devalued and less trusted. The shadow you create by looking over their shoulder creates even more stress and anxiety. 

From the employee’s perspective, they see a leader micromanaging their efforts and redoing their work. They ask, “Why should I bother to do the work if my boss is just going to re-do it anyway?” Levels of engagement will only drop in that environment.

The default approach also isn’t great for the leader. You are spending extra time doing work that others have been hired to do, which leaves you less available to carry out your own responsibilities. You also need to be leading and developing other team members while executing on your own deliverables. This approach won’t resolve the performance gap, which leads to frustration within yourself and the employee.

The alternative

Consider an approach to regain your time, hold the employee accountable to performance, and empower them to do the required work. Here are steps to do so: 

1. Recognize your assumptions. 

Take the time to consider what assumptions you’re making about who the underperformer is and the quality of their work product. You may be telling yourself that they don’t care enough to do a good job and complete things on time. Maybe you believe they are slacking off or getting lazy in the role. 

2. Evaluate each of those assumptions. 

Is the assumption true? If yes, what facts do you have? If not, is the thought serving you or the employee in any way?

Being lazy or slacking off is a judgement and not a fact. It’s a personality characterization that is not helpful for resolving the situation or providing as feedback. Don’t judge yourself for being judgy, dig deeper and find the source thought behind the judgement.

Underlying facts are useful examples for feedback. Collect what is verifiable that led you to the judgement. How often were they late to work and how late? What are examples of work that were not timely and did not meet the agreed expectations?

3. Engage with the employee

Share your factual observations with the employee. Ask if they are aware of the frequency and severity of the issues. As a leader, you may be surprised to find they had no sense of missing the deadlines or being late. Alternatively, they may be apologetic or defensive about the feedback. 

While they share their perspective, give them time to speak. You are not obligated to agree and do not need to point out the difference between excuses and reasons. 

Acknowledge what they say to indicate what you have heard. Depending on what they share, you can also validate their feelings and emotions about how they view the situation. Again, this does not require your agreement and simply recognizes that you hear and understand that they are feeling a certain way.

4. Re-establish expectations with the employee

The more involved the employee is in designing the journey forward, the more productive and successful it is likely to be.

The leader’s role is to ask open-ended questions and add perspective or clarifying questions. The employee spends time reflecting on what needs to change for them to be successful.

Open-ended questions may include:

• How will you organize yourself to ensure that all requirements are met in your deliverables?
• What will you do to hold yourself accountable to project timelines?
• What obstacles do you face that I might help you navigate?
• What training, tools, or resources will help you be successful?
• How will you communicate about needing more perspective or less input from me?

5. Schedule time to follow up

Ideally, you have regular check-ins with your team members. Invite the employee to bring successes and challenges to your next meeting. Let them know that you will be watching for improvement based on the commitments to action that have been made.

Trust the process

These journeys don’t always end with strong performance, though that is the best outcome. A positive result may be that the employee is more successful elsewhere. As a leader, the task is to support the employee in finding their path to success. 

This process is the same with all employees. It is about leading your team with clear goals and objectives, removing obstacles and partnering in problem solving as needed, and providing feedback and reinforcement. Ideally, this leads to celebrating successes and milestones.

Managing performance doesn’t need to feel like functioning in a vacuum when you forgo the default approach and explore the alternative. You can shift the dynamic and return accountability to the person who owns the performance—the employee.