Before you make any decisions about an underperformer, read this.

Managing people is hard. And managing underperformance? It's the hardest thing you'll do as a manager because the stakes are high, the emotions run hot, and the right path forward is rarely obvious.

If someone on your team isn't performing and you're trying to figure out what to do, this is worth reading before you take any next steps.

When someone isn't hitting the mark, the instinct is to focus on the person. What are they doing wrong? Why aren't they hitting the bar? What do I need to say to them?

It's a natural place to go. But it's usually the wrong place to start.

In most underperformance situations, managers arrive at the conversation before they've done the most important work, asking themselves whether the conditions for success are firmly in place. It's not always obvious that this step is missing. Most managers are moving fast, juggling a lot, and genuinely trying to do right by their team. But skipping this step leads to the wrong diagnosis, and the wrong diagnosis leads to the wrong solution.

Start with the system.

Before assessing an employee's performance, it's worth honestly assessing the environment around them. There are four things to look at:

1. Clarity - Are expectations, success criteria, and ownership clearly defined? Does this person know not just what to do, but what good looks like?

2. Capability - Does their background and training reasonably prepare them for what's being asked? Was there enough onboarding and ramp time for this role?

3. Capacity - Do they have sufficient time, focus, and workload balance to actually meet expectations? Underperformance and overload can look identical from the outside.

4. Systems and support - Are the right processes, tools, feedback loops, and management structures in place? Is the environment set up to support the standard being measured against?

If any of these are weak, the system could be the primary issue, not the individual.

Go through this list yourself first. Then have a conversation with the employee and ask them directly. How clear are they on expectations? How equipped do they feel? You might be surprised what surfaces. Managers often discover gaps they weren't aware of, a missing tool, a competing priority, a role boundary that was never clearly defined. The answers to these questions are some of the most valuable diagnostic information you can get.

If something surfaces, that's your starting point. Fix the environment before assessing the person. Once those gaps are addressed and you've had a direct conversation about the performance issue, you'll have a much clearer picture of what you're actually dealing with.

For more on how to have that conversation, check out my post on feedback.

Now look at the individual.

If the conditions for success are genuinely in place and the performance issue persists, it's time to look more closely at what's getting in the way for this specific person. There are four things worth considering:

1. Skill - Is there a specific competency gap that's emerged in practice? This is different from capability. Capability is about whether someone was set up for the role. Skill is about a specific gap that's shown up in the work, something that needs to be developed, coached, or trained.

2. Confidence - Does this person have the ability but struggle to apply it? Confidence gaps are easy to miss because the person looks capable on paper, but hesitation, over-checking, or avoidance of certain tasks are often confidence showing up as performance issues.

3. Circumstance - Are external or temporary personal factors affecting performance? A normally strong performer who is suddenly struggling may be dealing with something that isn't visible yet. This one requires sensitivity, but it's worth considering.

4. Will - This is the most nuanced one. Sometimes disengagement is the issue, and disengagement almost always has a cause worth understanding. But sometimes the honest reality is that this person simply isn't motivated to do the job well, and no amount of clarity or support will change that. Recognizing the difference between disengagement and low intrinsic motivation matters, because the right response to each is genuinely different.

What to do with this.

You guessed it... the first step is always a conversation. You probably can't know which of these is true without asking directly, and asking with genuine curiosity rather than a pre-formed conclusion tends to surface things that change the picture entirely.

Most underperformance conversations happen too late and skip too many steps. By the time a manager sits down to address performance, they've often already decided what the problem is. This framework is a prompt to slow down, do the diagnostic work first, and show up to that conversation genuinely open to what you might find. That's usually where the actual answer is.

What's your experience with underperformance, do you find it's usually a system issue, a people issue, or something else entirely?