Someone on your team has slipped. They’re in later than they used to be, corners are getting cut, and the energy they had in their first few months has gone somewhere. Nobody has done anything dramatic. It just doesn’t feel right any more.
Most owners handle this in one of two ways. They say nothing and hope it passes, or they have one tense conversation in which they work out what’s happened, decide what to do about it and deliver the verdict, all before the coffee’s gone cold. Neither tends to end well.
There’s a simpler way to think about it, and it starts with slowing down.
Fact-find first. Decide later.
The most common mistake we see from people managing a team for the first time is trying to be judge, jury and executioner in a single meeting. It feels decisive. In practice it means you make the call before you know what you’re making a call about.
Separate the two. First, find out what’s actually going on. What has changed, and since when? What do the numbers say, what does the feedback say, and what does the person say when you ask them? Don’t try to solve anything in that conversation. Just gather the facts.
Only once you have them do you decide what happens next. And the decision usually comes down to one question.
Can’t, or won’t?
Almost every performance problem falls down one of two branches.
The first is capability. The person can’t do what’s being asked, or can’t do all of it. Maybe they were never properly shown. Maybe the role has grown faster than they have. Maybe there’s simply too much of it for the hours available. That’s a training need, a support need or a conversation about how the role is shaped.
The second is attitude. The person could do it but isn’t. Standards have drifted, the effort has gone, or the way they behave has started to pull against the rest of the team. That’s a conduct conversation, and if it doesn’t improve, a more formal one.
Getting the branch right matters because the wrong response makes things worse. Treat an attitude problem as a capability one and you’ll spend months training someone who doesn’t want to be trained. Treat a capability problem as an attitude one and you’ll end up disciplining someone you never actually equipped to do the job. Either way you lose, and in the second case you may lose someone good.
When the numbers are fine but something isn’t
The awkward case is the person who hits their targets and still makes the place worse. Every business has had one. They deliver, so it feels unreasonable to challenge them, and meanwhile everyone else is watching what they get away with.
Early in Paul’s career, before Your Guardian, he managed a salesperson who was genuinely surprised to be let go. His argument was simple: he had hit his sales numbers. What he’d missed was that sales was only one of several things he was reviewed on. Turning up on time, keeping his paperwork done and being a decent colleague were in there too, and he’d failed all of them. Everyone hit their sales numbers that quarter. Not everyone was late every day.
The lesson is to review the how as well as the what. If the only thing you measure is output, the only thing you can manage is output. A simple grid helps: does this person deliver, and do they live the values you’ve set? Someone who does neither is an easy decision. The one to watch is the person with good numbers and poor behaviour, because they quietly lower the bar for everyone around them.
The small things at the start
Pay attention to what people skip early on. The onboarding they never quite finish, the admin that’s always a week late, the bank details for their own pay that somehow never arrive. None of it is a crisis. But if someone won’t do the easy, dull parts of the job at the start, it’s worth asking what else they won’t do later.
This isn’t about being unforgiving. It’s about noticing the pattern while it’s still small enough to talk about calmly.
Make it a positive framework
Performance management has a reputation for being the thing that happens before someone gets fired. It shouldn’t be. Done properly, most of it sounds like this: you’ve gone off track, let’s find out why, and let’s agree what the next three months look like. Then you review against that.
It works both ways, too. The same regular reviews that catch a dip are how you recognise and reward the people doing well. If one-to-ones happen monthly and properly, nothing that comes up in a formal review should be a surprise to anyone.
One practical note. If the person is an employee rather than a contractor, there’s a proper process to follow, and it’s worth taking HR advice before you start anything formal. The thinking above still applies. The paperwork just matters more.
What to do this week
Pick the one person you’ve been quietly worried about. Write down, facts only, what has changed and roughly when it started. Leave out how you feel about it.
Then ask yourself: is this can’t, or won’t? You may not know yet, and that’s fine. It tells you the next conversation is a fact-find, not a verdict. But if you do know, you now know which conversation to have, and that’s most of the battle.
