Most Underperformance Isn't a Performance Problem
Regard your soldiers as your own children, and they will follow you into the deepest valleys.
Sun Tzu, Chinese military strategist and author of The Art of War
A staff member misses a deadline, and the easy conclusion is right there: they're not trying hard enough. It's a tempting conclusion because it points directly at the person, and the alternative is harder — it requires understanding what happened well before the missed deadline ever landed on your desk.
Over time, I've become less convinced that underperformance starts with performance. More often, it starts with information: something wasn't communicated, something wasn't understood, something wasn't surfaced early enough, or something wasn't raised at all. The missed deadline is simply where the problem finally becomes visible.
Most people want to do good work
I've managed enough teams over the years to believe that most people genuinely want to succeed. When performance falls short, I usually start with three possibilities. The first is that something outside work is demanding attention — family illness, financial stress, childcare, none of which appear on an organizational chart, yet all of which affect performance. The second is unclear direction: expectations shifted, priorities changed, or instructions landed differently than intended, and I've increasingly come to see this as a leadership problem before I see it as an employee one. The third is relationship friction — a disagreement with a colleague, a breakdown of trust with a supervisor, tension within a team — that quietly slows execution long before anyone openly names it.
Each of these calls for a different response, and the common mistake is assuming the issue is motivation before figuring out which of the three you're actually dealing with.
Trust determines how early you hear the truth
The trouble is that none of these problems announce themselves on their own. People rarely walk into a manager's office and say "I'm overwhelmed at home" or "I don't actually understand what's expected of me." Most leaders only discover these things after performance has already declined — which means trust isn't just a cultural nicety, it's an operational advantage. The more trust exists on a team, the earlier issues surface and the easier they are to address. The less trust exists, the more likely people are to wait until a situation is already hard to recover from.
I've found that trust is built less through formal meetings than through consistent, ordinary interactions over time. These days, one of those rituals is a standing monthly meal with staff. It's nothing expensive or sophisticated, but some of the most useful conversations I've had have happened over a simple meal after a shift, once the pressure of a status update has disappeared and people speak differently than they do across a conference table. The meal itself isn't the point. What matters is creating space where information moves more freely than it does through the formal channel.
The rule I don't always follow
The standard advice is to praise in public and correct in private, and most of the time I think that's right. But I've found real exceptions to it. When someone fails to act on something already understood and agreed upon, waiting too long to address it creates a different problem — standards aren't just observed between a manager and the person being corrected, they're observed by everyone else watching how the moment gets handled.
There's a second, more practical reason I don't always wait. On a Gemba walk, several observations can surface within the same hour — a lapse here, a shortcut there — and if every correction waits until a debrief at the end, the context that made the lesson meaningful has usually already faded for both of us. What remains is a list of observations detached from the specific circumstances that produced them, and a list is a much weaker teacher than a moment. None of this means public criticism should become the norm — it shouldn't. But leadership is often less about following a rule perfectly and more about understanding what the rule was actually designed to achieve in the first place.
Tell me before it's over
If there's one habit I value more than almost any other, it's proactive communication — I would much rather hear about a problem while it's still developing than receive a perfectly packaged explanation once everything is finished. Not because I expect perfection, but because options still exist while a situation is unfolding; once the outcome is already determined, the conversation becomes historical rather than useful.
I was reminded of this during a monthly review with our commercial team. They reported the number of events they'd run that month, exactly as requested. What they didn't report was attendance, spend, or customer acquisition cost. The issue wasn't that they were avoiding accountability — they were answering the question they believed leadership had asked.
That meeting reinforced something I've seen repeatedly: people optimize around whatever measure leadership emphasizes.
Ask for activity, and you'll get activity. Ask for outcomes, and the conversation changes entirely. More often than not, a communication failure like this one starts not with the person giving the update, but with whoever defined what success was supposed to look like in the first place.
Information is the real leadership challenge
I once worked alongside a senior leader who frequently bypassed management layers and went straight to frontline staff to solve problems. The intent made sense — information from the source is often more accurate than information that has traveled through several layers first. But the unintended consequence was real: managers gradually stopped feeling accountable for decisions they were no longer part of, frontline staff grew uncertain whose direction actually carried priority, and while individual problems got solved, the structure meant to keep solving the next hundred grew quietly weaker.
That experience, and most of what I've described here, points to the same underlying belief: leadership is fundamentally an information problem. People need clear expectations, leaders need accurate information, teams need enough trust to surface issues early, and the structure connecting them all needs to preserve accountability while still letting information travel freely. When performance falls short, the missed deadline is usually the last thing that happened, not the first.
The real work of leadership is finding where the information broke down long before the performance made the problem visible.