Are they really not up to the job?

In most teams that we lead, at some time or other, there is a problem team member whose work is not up to scratch.

You find yourself constantly rewriting their work (and telling yourself it is quicker that way) and, over time, you realise that you avoid giving them the work that matters.

Maybe you have had a friendly word with them about how they can improve. But you know it wasn't really the feedback you needed to give. And because this stuff is hard to resolve, you let things drift, giving them the benefit of the doubt long past the point where it is fair on everybody else.

You get increasingly anxious about how you are going to deal with it and then you probably become frustrated with yourself for letting things drag on. When you finally resolve to confront the problem, you have already reached your verdict: they are just not up to it.

And that, if you are not careful, is where your problems can really start.

But before we get into why, I want you to know that if you recognise yourself in anything I have described above, it doesn't make you a bad person or a bad leader. The evidence is that we are all inclined to let things drift in this situation. Leaders faced with poor performance often avoid giving feedback, delay giving it, and water it down when they finally do (Moss & Martinko, 1998).

So, the friendly word that was a bit too soft is the normal response, not a personal failing.

It is what you do next that matters.

When we reach the conclusion that a team member just can't do the job, we essentially make a judgement about them as a person, without any regard to external factors that might be at work. This is what Lee Ross called the 'fundamental attribution error' (Ross, 1977). This is the human tendency to explain other people's behaviour by what they are like as a person, and our own behaviour by the circumstances we were in.

So, when your own work slips, you know it is because you had a migraine for most of the week (that is usually what my problem is). When theirs slips, you think they haven't made the effort.

And a verdict like this is not neutral. Once you reach it, everything you say and do when dealing with the person is grounded in that conclusion.

Terence Mitchell and Robert Wood looked at what managers do with these judgements. They found that:

Thus, the worse the situation is, the more likely we are to blame the person for it, and the more we blame the person the more punitive we may be.

What is more, other research found that leaders reached much the same conclusions about the causes of a poor piece of work whether they liked the person or not, but they were more inclined to punish the ones they did not like (Dobbins & Russell, 1986).

This matters, then, because if our person-focused verdict is wrong, there is a real risk that we will end up doing some significant harm to the person and their career. And we will probably damage our own standing as a leader a long the way.

It is therefore critical to understand if your verdict is correct or a misattribution.

Harold Kelley set out how we can work out whether to attribute something to the person or to their situation, using three categories of information (Kelley, 1973). This was later shown to be valid when tested on supervisors judging the performance of their own team members (Ashkanasy, 1989).

For our purposes, this translates into three questions. Try to answer all three before you put a meeting in the diary to discuss your verdict.

1. Consensus: Do other people in this role struggle with this too?

If they do, you likely have a problem with the role, the brief they are given or the workload. It could also mean the whole team needs training in this specific aspect of the work. The resolution lies with you or your boss, not with them.

2. Distinctiveness: Is it this one thing, or is it everything?

If it is a particular thing that they struggle with, you are probably looking at a skill gap or some capability they need and have not got. In that case you need a conversation about training not performance.

3. Consistency: Has it always been this way, or did it start at a point in time?

If it started at a particular point in time, something must have changed. Ask what has been going on, before you make assumptions. This is the question that most often has a less obvious answer. If what you are seeing is the quiet withdrawal of effort it may have nothing to do with you at all, and it may be something you can help fix.

If the answers to the 3 questions take you to the circumstances, rather than the person, your next steps, as we have seen, will involve taking action to deal with what is not right. But, sometimes you will do the analysis and the diagnosis will confirm what you thought: they probably aren't in the right job.

In that case, you still have a difficult conversation ahead of you, but you can approach it from a more balanced and sympathetic starting point.

There is more on how to approach this type of conversation here.

Dealing with poor performance is one of the most difficult aspects of people management and what we have discussed here is a starting point, a way for you to order your thoughts and avoid acting on the unfounded assumptions that we can all be guilty of making.

Over the next few weeks, we'll look at some other aspects of this and we'll see how you can establish an approach that is fair and supportive but also effective.

Please hit reply and let me know any specific performance issues that you are dealing with or any performance management questions you'd like me to address.

All of my posts for new leaders are here.

Coaching. If you have somebody in your team whose work is below par, and you are not sure whether the problem is them, you, the job or something you have not been told about, I can help. That is precisely the kind of thing that it is helpful to work through with somebody before you have the conversation. There are more details here.