Before you question someone’s performance, question what’s preventing it.

Recently, I experienced something rather frustrating with my email. I have two email accounts, deliberately set up for different purposes. Yet, despite selecting the correct account, messages kept appearing to come from the wrong one.

Initially, I questioned myself. Was I selecting the wrong address? Had I overlooked something? Then I began wondering whether recipients were confusing the two accounts.

I tried correcting what I was doing, but the problem persisted. Eventually, after some investigation, we discovered the cause. A setting buried within Apple Mail was automatically selecting the sending account, overriding what I was trying to accomplish. One small adjustment, and the problem disappeared.

I had been trying to correct my behaviour when the real problem was the system.

It reminded me of something I’ve encountered more than once in leadership.

We Tend to Blame What We Can See

When something goes wrong in an organisation, we naturally look at the most visible part of the problem. Usually, that’s a person. A deadline is missed. A commitment isn’t fulfilled. Communication breaks down. A customer is disappointed.

And the questions begin. Why didn’t someone follow through? Who dropped the ball? Do we need better accountability?

These are reasonable questions. But they may not be the right questions to ask first. Sometimes good people are doing exactly what they believe they’re supposed to do, while the system around them makes success unnecessarily difficult.

When the Warehouse Dropped the Ball

Some years ago, while working as a Fractional COO and Integrator, I had responsibility for a company’s warehouse operations. I’d been away on vacation for a week. When I returned, one of the issues on the agenda for our regular Level 10 (L10) warehouse meeting was that deliveries from one of our regular delivery companies had stopped arriving.

More concerning, we’d already missed two customer deliveries. The initial assumption was straightforward: someone in the warehouse had dropped the ball. As we discussed the issue, one employee explained that the company owner had instructed him not to use that delivery company anymore.

That was news to me. And, as it turned out, it was also news to the other warehouse employee. The owner had made a decision and communicated it to one person. But the other employee hadn’t been informed, and because I was away, I knew nothing about it either.

Normally, I would have ensured that an operational change like this was communicated and coordinated across the warehouse. Instead, people were working with different information, and the consequences were already reaching our customers.

The decision had been made. But the decision hadn’t been properly implemented.

What initially looked like an employee performance problem was actually a breakdown in communication and coordination. There was another lesson. If a process only works when a particular person is present, it’s not a particularly reliable process. My absence hadn’t caused the problem. It had exposed a weakness in how we operated.

Accountability Begins with Understanding

This doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t be held accountable. Quite the opposite. Expectations matter. Commitments must be honoured. And when someone genuinely fails to deliver, leaders need to address it. But before deciding that someone isn’t performing, we need to understand what’s preventing performance.

Systems aren’t just technology. They’re the way decisions are communicated, responsibilities assigned, priorities established and work coordinated. A capable employee can appear ineffective when those systems aren’t working.

You cannot consistently coach people around a system that consistently works against them.

Before addressing a performance problem, I believe leaders should ask three questions:

1. Is the expected outcome absolutely clear?
2. Does the person have the authority, information, resources and processes needed to deliver it?
3. Are we addressing the underlying cause, or simply reacting to the symptoms?

Fix the Cause, Not Just the Symptom

Looking back at my email experience, I could have continued checking my account selection, changing signatures and reminding myself to pay more attention. None of those things would have solved the problem.

Likewise, we could have responded to the missed warehouse deliveries by demanding greater attention and accountability from the employees. But that wouldn’t have addressed the communication failure that caused the problem. Effective leadership isn’t simply about identifying when something isn’t working. It’s about understanding why.

Sometimes the answer is individual performance. Sometimes it’s a lack of clarity or accountability. But sometimes the problem is a system that’s making it unnecessarily difficult for good people to do good work.

Before you question someone’s performance, make sure you’ve understood what’s preventing them from succeeding.

 

 

Image generated by OpenAI ChatGPT