Many of us have experience working with and for people who underperform in one way or another. That can be a frustrating experience. What can be even more frustrating is when that underperformer works for you. It’s one thing to have the luxury of complaining about underperformance; it’s another if fixing the issue falls on your plate.
If that’s a position you’ve ever found yourself in, you know how difficult it can be to decide if the person is able to be coached, mentored, or developed into what you need them to be – or whether it’s better to part ways. As you can imagine, this can be a very complex decision, weighing the impact on the organization, team, and loss of productivity (whether the person stays and underperforms or is let go and the team absorbs that work).
While the full scope of all the factors to consider is beyond the purview of this post, here are three questions to consider before letting someone go for poor performance:
1) Is poor performance related to a character issue?
There are, unfortunately, occasions when someone’s character (or moral and ethical qualities) negatively impact their work ethic or performance. For example, there are times when someone commits what’s called ‘time fraud’, meaning their getting paid for full-time work, but they’re not putting in full-time hours. There are several leaders who I’ve coached who get frustrated when seeing their employees putting their phones down every time they stop by their office. This puts obvious doubts in the leaders’ minds about how much work the employee is actually putting in. While this could be simple procrastinating or even disengagement, it could also be something more deceitful – time fraud. Time fraud occurs when employees pass off their work as done when it actually isn’t and then try to cover their tracks so as not to be discovered. One leader I coached began to find evidence that his director of operations hadn’t been doing the work that she claimed and continued to find evidence of this after he had let her go.
All this to say, sometimes underperformance is the result of a problematic character in the workplace. In these situations, it may be best to cut ties with the person (depending on the severity of the issue), as it’s not really your job to attempt to rehab someone’s moral character.
2) Is poor performance related to a competence issue?
There are times when someone moves into a position, and they’re not completely up to par on all the aspects of the job. In fact, this is a pretty common occurrence. If you waited until you had the 100% solution before hiring someone for a job, you may be waiting for a long time. It would be extremely unusual to put someone into a position where they are completely unprepared to succeed, but there are many times where someone needs help to grow into a skillset that will make them the most successful in this job. With that in mind, there are two common developmental mistakes leaders make when someone has areas of weakness when it comes to competence:
- Not screening for weaknesses during the onboarding process. It’s vitally important to understand where people need development right off the bat so you can plan accordingly and won’t be surprised later. We actually have an article on how to do this well that can be found here.
- Having an incomplete development plan. Even if you’re aware that there’s a development issue that needs to be addressed, many leaders will demonstrate how a task should be done, then delegate the task, expecting a good level of performance. In reality, this skips two steps. The first step is instruction, which is the demonstration mentioned above. The second step should be guided practice, which exposes the employee to immediate feedback after they begin to apply what they’ve been taught. The third step is mentorship, which is taking a step back, allowing them to complete the simple tasks, and coming alongside them to help them with more complex tasks. Only after these three tasks have been completed should they be delegated to. This is essentially the problem with trusting them too soon to be able to complete a task on their own. The other side of this coin is holding on to tasks too long and not delegating them to the employee, which never lets them gain expertise in the area. Either way isn’t setting the person up for success.
Your job as a leader is to determine whether or not you’ve been effective in training the employee to be competent in the task or skill where they’re struggling. There are times when the employee was afforded every chance to learn the skill and execute it with support until they’ve learned it, and they’re still not getting it. If that’s the case, then it may be better to part ways. However, based on my experience, there are many leaders out there who can’t look themselves in the mirror and say that they’ve set the employee up for success, from a development perspective. If that’s the case, it does the organization no good to part with the employee who is struggling, because the next one who comes along will likely struggle with the same training issue. Make sure you’re a leader who sets your people up for success.
3) Is poor performance related to a clarity issue?
Sometimes a performance problem is because of a lack of clarity. I worked with a leader once who was very frustrated with an employee of his who would often delay doing certain bits of work because, as it turned out, he didn’t have clarity on what was supposed to be done. The leader would wait and wait on this employee to complete the task. When he finally got tired of waiting, he would go down to the employee’s office and see what was taking so long. Almost invariably, the employee would say something like, “Well, now that you’re here, I wasn’t really sure exactly what you wanted done with that.” This would frustrate the leader even more, because the employee knew about the lack of clarity and wouldn’t ask for details or bring up the confusion until the leader came to see what the hold-up was. This highlights one of the most common responses employees have to lack of clarity:
- Overthinking – One type of response (as described above) is called procrastination. Employees sometimes don’t feel empowered to ask for clarity, could be anxious about the response they’ll get from their leader for not understanding, or could simply be intimidated with the prospect of admitting they don’t understand. Regardless of the reason, the net result is they tend to ‘sit on’ the task and hope that inspiration strikes them, so they can figure out what needs to be done on their own.
Another type of overthinking is when people do extensive analysis, or in other words, ‘overworking the problem’. For example, if someone is told to write a proposal but isn’t given much clarity, they might write three proposals, hoping one of them hits the mark. This might get the job done, but it’s a big waste of time.
- Wrong direction – There are two types of this response as well. The first is when someone isn’t intimidated by lack of clarity; rather, they see it as a way to creatively fill in the gaps and come up with something they think is amazing. I call this the ‘make it up as you go along’ approach. If you’ve ever had someone do this, you know what the risk is – they may come up with something that doesn’t even vaguely look like what you thought it was going to. These folks may have a reputation for going off script, but it really may just be a clarity problem.The second type of ‘wrong direction’ caused by a lack of clarity is autocratic approach. This type of person is also not troubled much by lack of clarity, and that’s because they’re decisive and action-oriented. They’ll just make their own decisions and plow ahead in the direction that makes sense to them. Because these folks are so action-oriented, they can be well down the wrong path before anyone knows it. For anyone who has seen this happen, this can create a lot of inefficiencies undoing what has been done.
So, before you just assume that underperformance comes from a skill deficit, consider that there may be a clarity issue. This can be addressed by increasing your level of specificity (and thus clarity) right from the beginning and/or by intentionally empowering people to ask questions and increase clarity for themselves.
Ultimately, this framework is designed to help you think through performance-related decisions. It can be very tempting to simply label someone as an underperformer, but this may not be the full picture. If they underperform because they lie, manipulate, take advantage, etc., it’s probably a character issue that may be too risky (and not very likely) to remediate. However, if you can identify that it’s a training issue or a clarity issue, it may be easier than you think to help the employee get to a satisfactory level of performance.