How can leaders tell whether poor performance is an individual employee issue or a sign of a larger team problem?
When an employee begins missing deadlines, producing inconsistent work, or falling short of expectations, the natural response is to focus on that individual. What has changed? Are they disengaged? Do they need more direction? Is this simply a performance issue that needs to be addressed?
Sometimes it is. But when I work with executives and leadership teams, I encourage them to resist reaching that conclusion too quickly. What appears to be an individual performance problem can also be the visible symptom of something happening within the team, the organization, or even the leader’s own approach to management.
That distinction matters because the intervention depends on the diagnosis. Coaching an employee will not resolve an unrealistic workload. A performance improvement plan will not clarify competing organizational priorities. Replacing one person will not repair a team that has learned to avoid accountability. Before deciding what needs to change, leaders need to understand what they are actually dealing with.
Start by Looking for Patterns
One of the first questions I ask a leader is whether the problem is isolated or whether there is a pattern. If one employee is consistently struggling while colleagues working under similar conditions are performing successfully, there may be an individual issue involving capability, motivation, role fit, or expectations.
If several capable people are struggling in similar ways, however, I would look more closely at the environment around them. Perhaps responsibilities have expanded without additional resources. Priorities may be changing faster than the team can reasonably execute them. Employees may be receiving conflicting direction from different leaders, or responsibilities between departments may be unclear.
Patterns are valuable because they move the conversation away from Who is the problem? and toward What is contributing to the problem?
This connects closely with what I explored in The 4 Pillars of Effective Team Development. A team can be made up of highly capable individuals and still struggle when trust, accountability, communication, or alignment begins to break down. In those situations, underperformance may be what gets the leader’s attention, but it is not necessarily the root cause.
Approach Underperformance With Curiosity
When leaders believe someone is underperforming, they often enter the conversation with a conclusion already forming. They may assume the employee is not motivated, lacks ownership, does not understand the urgency, or simply is not capable of performing at the required level.
Those conclusions may ultimately prove accurate, but beginning there can prevent a leader from learning what is actually happening. A more useful starting point is a specific observation followed by genuine curiosity: “I’ve noticed we’ve missed the last two deadlines. What’s getting in the way?”
The answer may reveal that the employee is struggling with an aspect of the role and has been reluctant to ask for help. It may uncover conflicting priorities, dependencies on another department, or an unrealistic workload. It may also confirm that expectations are clear, adequate support has been provided, and the employee is simply not meeting them.
Curiosity is not the opposite of accountability. In effective leadership, curiosity makes accountability more precise because the leader understands what they are holding the employee accountable for and what factors may sit outside that employee’s control.
This is also why listening plays such an important role in leadership. As I discussed in Why Strong Leaders Listen More Than They Speak, being in a senior position does not guarantee that you have access to the full picture. Leaders often need to deliberately create the conditions in which employees can tell them what they are experiencing rather than simply what they believe the leader wants to hear.
Would Your Team Tell You If You Were Part of the Problem?
This is one of the more difficult questions for a leader to consider, but it is an important part of diagnosing team performance.
Imagine a team whose priorities change frequently, whose workload has steadily increased, or whose leader reacts defensively when challenged. The employees may understand perfectly well what is interfering with their performance, but that does not mean they feel comfortable raising it.
Harvard Business Review2 describes psychological safety as an environment in which people can “take risks, express ideas and concerns, speak up with questions, and admit mistakes” without fear of negative consequences. That becomes especially relevant when a leader is trying to understand declining performance. If employees believe that identifying a problem will be interpreted as complaining, making excuses, or challenging authority, valuable information may never reach the person who is in the best position to act on it.
For executives, the question is therefore not simply, Have people raised any concerns? It is also, Have I created an environment in which they reasonably could? Silence can mean that everything is functioning well, but it can also mean that people have learned there is little value in speaking.
Examine the Leadership Dynamic
Sometimes the performance issue is neither entirely individual nor entirely organizational. It develops through the relationship between the leader and the team.
Consider a leader who is uncomfortable with conflict. An employee misses an important target, but the leader decides to give them another chance rather than addressing it directly. When it happens again, the conversation is postponed because the timing does not feel right. Meanwhile, other team members begin compensating for the missed work. Over time, the strongest performers carry more responsibility while expectations for the struggling employee become increasingly unclear.
Eventually, the leader may describe the team as having an accountability problem. Technically, that may be true, but accountability did not disappear on its own. The leader’s reluctance to engage in difficult conversations helped create the conditions in which expectations became negotiable.
People-pleasing can create a similar dynamic. A well-intentioned leader wants to be supportive, so they repeatedly extend deadlines, take work off an employee’s plate, or step in to solve problems themselves. None of those behaviors is inherently problematic. In the right circumstances, they may represent thoughtful and responsive leadership. The concern is when they become a pattern that protects the leader from the discomfort of disappointing someone, setting a boundary, or holding a difficult conversation.
At that point, the issue is no longer simply How do I get my team to be more accountable? A more useful question may be What happens for me when I need to hold someone accountable?
That is the kind of distinction I explored in The Leadership Trap No One Talks About. Leadership development requires more than evaluating the behavior of other people. It also requires the willingness to examine our own assumptions, reactions, and patterns and understand how they may be influencing the environment around us.
The Manager Is Part of the System
There is good reason to include leadership in any assessment of team performance. Gallup1 has reported that “70% of the variance in team engagement is determined solely by the manager.” That statistic should not be interpreted to mean that every performance issue is a manager’s fault. Employees remain responsible for their own behavior, decisions, and performance.
What it does illustrate is the significant influence managers have over the conditions in which performance occurs. Leaders clarify expectations, determine priorities, respond to mistakes, coach development, allocate resources, and establish what will and will not be tolerated. They also influence whether employees feel comfortable raising problems before those problems become performance issues.
For that reason, when several people on a team begin struggling, I would rarely look only at the individuals. I would also examine what has changed around them and what the leader may be unintentionally reinforcing.
Sometimes It Really Is an Individual Performance Problem
There is an important caution on the other side of this conversation. Leaders can become so focused on understanding the context behind underperformance that they avoid acknowledging when an individual simply is not meeting the expectations of the role.
If expectations are clear, the employee has appropriate resources and support, colleagues operating under similar circumstances are performing successfully, and the individual continues to fall short after receiving direct feedback and a reasonable opportunity to improve, then the issue may indeed be individual.
Continuing to search indefinitely for an organizational explanation can become its own form of conflict avoidance. Compassion and curiosity are important leadership qualities, but neither requires a leader to remove accountability.
The objective is not to explain poor performance away. It is to diagnose it accurately enough that the response is fair, proportionate, and useful.
A Better Way to Diagnose Performance Problems
When performance begins to decline, leaders can slow the diagnosis down by asking several questions. Is the issue isolated to one person, or is it appearing across the team? What changed before the decline began? Are expectations genuinely clear, and would employees describe the priorities the same way leadership does? What does the employee believe is getting in the way? Are resources, workload, or organizational structures contributing? Finally, is there anything in the leader’s own behavior that may be reinforcing the pattern?
These questions do not eliminate the need to make difficult decisions. In many cases, they make those decisions clearer.
An individual performance issue may require direct feedback, coaching, clearer expectations, or formal accountability. A team dynamic may require work around communication, trust, conflict, roles, or shared accountability. An organizational problem may require changes to resources, structure, or priorities. And sometimes the work begins with the leader recognizing a pattern in themselves that is shaping how the team operates.
The right intervention depends on understanding which of those problems you are actually trying to solve.
If you are leading a capable team but finding yourself repeatedly dealing with the same performance challenges, executive or team coaching can create space to look beyond the immediate symptoms and understand the dynamics underneath them.
Schedule a complimentary 20-minute Zoom call with our Executive Coach to explore what might be happening beneath the surface.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you know if poor performance is an individual or team problem?
Start by looking for patterns and comparing the conditions under which people are working. If one employee consistently struggles while colleagues with similar responsibilities, resources, and expectations perform successfully, the issue may be individual. If several people are experiencing similar difficulties, it is worth examining workload, priorities, communication, resources, leadership, and broader team dynamics.
What should a leader do before addressing an underperforming employee?
Begin with specific observations rather than assumptions and give the employee an opportunity to explain what they are experiencing. Leaders should also confirm that expectations are clear, appropriate resources have been provided, and there are not organizational barriers interfering with performance.
Can leadership style contribute to poor team performance?
Yes. Leaders influence expectations, accountability, communication, trust, priorities, and the way conflict is handled within a team. That does not make a leader responsible for every employee’s performance, but leadership behavior should be considered when the same problems appear repeatedly across a team.
Does approaching underperformance with curiosity reduce accountability?
No. Curiosity helps a leader understand why the performance issue is occurring before determining the appropriate response. Once expectations, barriers, and available support are understood, leaders can hold employees accountable with greater clarity and fairness.
When is team coaching appropriate for performance problems?
Team coaching can be particularly useful when performance challenges involve multiple people or appear connected to communication, trust, conflict, accountability, leadership behavior, or unclear team dynamics. Rather than focusing exclusively on one employee, team coaching can help identify the patterns affecting how the group functions as a whole.
Sources:
- Gallup — How to Engage Frontline Managers — I verified the page is live and it explicitly states: “70% of the variance in team engagement is determined solely by the manager.”
- Harvard Business Review — What Is Psychological Safety, Really? the live HBR page defines psychological safety using the same language referenced in the blog around taking risks, expressing ideas and concerns, asking questions, and admitting mistakes without fear of negative consequences.
