Shame and ultimatums don’t fix underperformance. Collaboration and resilient systems do.
When managers fix underperformance, they often overlook helping their employees succeed. It’s designed to protect companies from lawsuits.
Underperforming employees can harm teams and even entire companies. There’s no denying that. But the traditional approaches to “fixing” underperformance aren’t the answer.
There is a better way. Through creative co-creation and systematization, most employees can fix their performance and go on to be top performers.
Why Traditional Approaches Fail
Traditional approaches, such as warnings and Performance Improvement Plans (PIPs), fail because they lack collaboration and development. Instead, they offer shame-based, defensive tactics. Placing all the blame on the employee.
Employees see these approaches, not unjustly, as witch hunts designed to gather evidence for their dismissal rather than offer a path for improvement. These shame-based approaches highlight a flaw, expect the employee to correct it, and offer little in the way of support outside of a looming deadline and the threat of termination.
While some employees can come back from the brink, it’s usually through willpower and self-determination alone. And with all of the friction an underperformer faces, that’s no small feat.
To break free from the performance management rut, managers need to take a holistic view of the problem. To consider the employee’s role, but also address underlying systemic friction.
Fix Underperformance with Systems
The traditional view of underperformers is that they are flawed. They’re lazy, or undisciplined, or they don’t care. But this view has tunnel vision. By focusing solely on the employee, we miss the systems that are holding them back.
Getting an underperformer back on track is similar to other life challenges, such as getting more exercise. The traditional approach is to white-knuckle it on motivation and willpower alone.
Except that approach has an abysmal success rate, because as soon as you introduce friction, the system—if you can even call it that—grinds to a halt. Your employee loses the first draft of her 25-page client report to a cloud storage glitch, and her motivation jumps off a cliff.
Sound systems are resilient; they have backups and workarounds. Performance management is no different. To succeed, you must find the friction and plan around it.
The best way to do this is to involve the employee.
Co-create the path forward
One of the five pillars of employee engagement is input. Having a say in how things are done. Prioritizing employee input builds trust and encourages buy-in to the plan.
Traditional approaches are top-down orders. Fix this, or you’re out. PIPs don’t work because they aren’t collaborative.
I’ve seen this in my own career. I worked with an office manager who was struggling to figure out our bookkeeping system. They made several mistakes, and the CFO was livid.
We sat down with the employee, explained the issue, and informed them that we expected to see improvement within a specified number of days. That employee told us that they were moving on to another job, less than two weeks later.
When we ran into similar issues with our next office manager, I took a different approach. I sat down with them and identified the source of the friction. We worked on a solution together. That employee is still there, and they now have more responsibility.
We found success because they had input on the solution. By co-creating the solution, I was able to offer support, and the employee was motivated to pursue it because it was their solution.
Build Systems, not One-Off Fixes
Successful performance management requires a shift in mindset. If you’re committed to fixing systems so that employees can improve, you must take a holistic approach.
You start by sitting down with your employee to identify points of friction. Anything that might be getting in their way. You then co-create fixes, test them, and continue to iterate as needed, not unlike product development.
Let’s say you find your underperformer is stuck in too many meetings and not getting enough time to focus. You make a plan to carve out some deep work time each week. Then you monitor for improvement and adjust as necessary.
Performance management becomes a process loop: Identify Friction → Co-Create Fix → Monitor Improvement → Repeat. No ultimatums required. A simple loop. One that can be improved with a little added resilience.
Add Resilience with If-Then Planning
The hardest part of any improvement plan—whether it’s performance or otherwise—is making it stick. Turning fixes into habits is what separates good performance management from great. If-then planning is a method for transforming goals into habits. This is where you set out two columns, one for ‘Ifs,’ or things that trigger the habit, and one for ‘Thens,’ the habit itself.
If I’m unable to figure out a task after 30 minutes, then I will reach out to my manager for clarification. It creates a contingency for unexpected roadblocks.
It can also be set up as a motivation system. If I close five sales calls this week, then I will leave one hour early on Friday.
Incorporate if-then planning into the previous process loop to add resilience.
Systems beat shame
Shame is a weapon used to ‘fix’ underperformance. That’s the problem. A combative mindset stalls out growth.
The solution is resilient, evolving systems that identify and reduce friction. This will help you get underperformers back on track, and the rest of your team will benefit from reduced friction as well.
The next time an underperformer walks into your office, ask yourself: Am I going to blame the employee, or the system that’s holding them back?
I help managers design systems that turn underperformance into top performance. If you want to stop relying on shame and start fixing the real problems, book a free call with me.
