If Someone on Your Team Is Struggling, Start Here
Four leadership lenses to check when someone on your team is underperforming
When someone on your team is struggling to perform, the most common instinct is to zoom in on them.
What are they doing wrong?
Why aren’t they more motivated?
Why can’t they just figure it out?
When outcomes matter, when timelines are real, when the work affects other people, it’s stressful to watch someone fall short of what’s needed.
But great leadership starts somewhere else.
It starts with ownership.
When someone on your team is struggling, the first question isn’t, “What’s wrong with them?”
It’s: “What do I need to do differently to give them what they need to succeed?”
That doesn’t mean people don’t have responsibility. They do.
And it doesn’t mean every performance issue is solved by better leadership.
But before you point the finger, before you get frustrated, before you decide this is a “them problem,” there’s a more useful move:
Audit your leadership first.
Here are four big buckets worth looking at when someone on your team is struggling.
Not as a checklist to interrogate them—but as a way to pressure-test your side of the equation first.
1. The Learning Curve & The Support They Actually Need
The first thing I want to understand is: where are they on the learning curve?
Do they actually know how to do this yet?
Or am I expecting performance before mastery?
Sometimes what looks like underperformance is just someone still learning.
Some people need more hands-on direction in the beginning.
Some people need coaching and problem-solving.
Some people need clear structure before they can confidently improvise.
Different stages require different leadership.
And this is where a lot of leaders get tripped up: we all have a default leadership style. Some of us are more hands-on. Some of us are more hands-off. Some of us jump straight to problem-solving. Some of us default to giving space.
The mistake is assuming our default style is what everyone needs, all the time.
A more useful set of questions sounds like:
What kind of support would actually help this person succeed right now?
What have I tried so far?
What’s their learning style?
Do they need more direction?
Do they need more coaching or encouragement?
Do they need clearer structure, or more ad hoc support?
Am I giving them what they need, or what I would need in their position?
I’ve written before about strategies that can make it easier for our people to tell us what they need. If we employ them, it keeps us from needing to be mind readers. The better we get at matching your leadership to where someone actually is, the fewer “performance problems” we end up having in the first place.
2. What They Actually Care About (And What Motivates Them)
The next bucket is motivation and values.
Do I actually understand what’s important to this person?
This is one of the most common disconnects I see. Many leaders are highly self-motivated. They care about growth, impact, winning, building, pushing. And when someone on their team isn’t motivated in the same way, it can feel confusing and frustrating.
So we start asking: Why don’t they care as much as I do?
When a better question is: What do they care about?
Is it:
Stability?
Recognition?
Mastery?
Autonomy?
Time?
Competition?
Belonging?
None of these are wrong. But they are different languages.
If you’re trying to get buy-in and commitment from someone, it helps to speak in terms that actually resonate with them—not just in terms that motivate you.
Useful questions here are:
What does this person value most right now?
What are they trying to protect or grow?
What do they optimize for when they make decisions?
Am I framing goals and expectations in a way that connects to their drivers—or just mine?
Clarity about motivation doesn’t guarantee performance. But misunderstanding it almost guarantees friction.
3. Clarity, Expectations, and Real Feedback
The third bucket is communication.
Have I actually been clear about expectations?
Not just “I think I said it once,” but:
Could they clearly tell you what success looks like?
Could they tell you what matters most right now?
Could they tell you where they’re falling short?
Could they tell you what “good” looks like versus “great”?
A good litmus test for clarity is this: can the other person accurately mirror it back to you?
If not, there’s probably a clarity gap somewhere.
This is also where feedback comes in—and this is hard for a lot of people.
The kindest thing you can do is be clear.
Not cruel. Not harsh. Just clear.
When we avoid being direct, we often think we’re being nice. But what we’re really doing is leaving people guessing. The fairest thing you can do is let someone know where they stand and what, specifically, they can do to improve.
So I ask myself:
Have I named the gap directly?
Have I given feedback that’s specific and usable?
Or am I hoping they’ll just “pick up the signal”?
If you haven’t named it, you can’t be surprised it isn’t changing.
4. The Stories You’re Telling Yourself
The last bucket is the quietest—and sometimes the most dangerous.
What assumptions am I making about their intent or effort?
It is incredibly easy to start telling ourselves stories about people:
They don’t care.
They’re lazy.
They’re not cut out for this.
They’re not trying.
Once we start telling those stories, they shape what we notice. They shape how we show up. And over time, they can limit what we’re even able to see in someone.
A few honest questions here:
What story am I telling myself about why this is happening?
What evidence do I actually have?
What might I not know about their context, capacity, or constraints?
If I went into this conversation assuming positive intent, what would change?
If you want productive performance conversations, you have to be able to see people clearly—including their strengths, their capabilities, and the tools they already have in their toolkit.
Because if you’re telling yourself a narrow story about someone, that’s usually the version of them you’ll keep getting.
Here’s the throughline I keep coming back to:
When someone on your team is struggling, that struggle is a signal. And the first responsibility for interpreting that signal belongs to you.
Owning that doesn’t make you weaker as a leader. It makes you more effective.
Because the moment you shift from blame to responsibility, you move from frustration to influence.
And influence is the only thing that actually changes outcomes.
That’s where better leadership—and better results—actually start.
