A client came to me because he was struggling with performance management across his team. He was pretty sure somebody on his team was not working out, and he could not tell me why. Which meant he couldn’t have the right conversation with the team member. He knew it was affecting the rest of the team.
He had symptoms. Mistakes that should not be happening. Work coming back for rework. A general sense that she was not where she needed to be. What he did not have was a cause, and without one he had been circling the same conversation with himself for weeks.
Just telling someone they’re making too many mistakes is OK. They’ll respond that they’ll ‘do better’ and you’ll believe them. Maybe it gets better for a while. But it never fully goes away.
That is a common pattern for leaders. A performance problem feels like a diagnosis. It is a symptom with a label on it, and you cannot act on a label. A doctor who hears “tired all the time” does not prescribe sleep. The symptom is where the work starts: list everything that could cause it, then rule each one in or out. So he did what everybody does. He reran the last few months looking for the moment it started, and got nowhere, because the thing he was looking for was not in his memory. It was in a category he had not checked.
HR departments have plenty of performance management tools, and over many years I have used most kinds of them. They are good for getting through performance management season. They are not good at diagnosing what is really going on. A rating tells you how somebody is doing. It does not tell you why.
Stop describing. Start scoring.
I gave him six things and told him to mark each one green, yellow or red.
I use six. There could be more. These are the six I think matter most and the ones I have learned to rely on over the years.
I didn’t tell him to discuss. I told him to score. The whole discipline is in being made to commit to a color, because the moment you commit you have to defend it, and the defending is where the truth turns up.
Commitment. Is she willing to go after it, beyond the minimum the job asks for? This is not hours. It is whether she cares how the work lands. I once had someone who felt underpaid and stopped putting in anything extra. It became a spiral: low commitment, a weak review, a small raise, lower commitment. We never agreed on which came first. By then it did not matter.
Capability. Does she have the skills the role needs? This role, today, not in general. An engineer who was great with customers asked to move into technical marketing. He could answer any technical question anyone put to him. He could not lead, and leading was the job.
Capacity. Does she have the room to do it, in time and bandwidth? I watched someone struggle because they kept taking on other people’s work, and their own was paying for it. Capable, committed, and red on capacity, because much of the load was not theirs.
Contribution. Is what she produces moving the business? Not activity. Output that the next person can use without fixing it first. Some people are always busy and nothing ever gets done. Busy is not a score.
Criticality. Does the work she owns actually matter? One person was nice to have around. Always on time with email, at every meeting, first to turn in the self-assessment. None of it was the core of the job, and none of it grew the business. They had drifted to the fringe of the role and stayed there.
Culture. Does she work well with the people around her, inside the company and outside it? One person did great work, and nobody wanted to work with him. Anyone who did not do it his way was stupid. Great work does not make up for a team that routes around you.
Two of them might be yours
Two of the six might not really be about her. Criticality is a property of the work, and capacity is a property of the workload. Both are set by the manager.
Sometimes a red on either means the job was set up badly. Somebody capable pointed at work that does not matter, or buried under more of it than anybody could carry. That is yours to fix, and it is not a problem with the person.
Sometimes it means something worse. Did her work get less important as time went on because your trust in her went down? Then criticality scores low, and the cause is a performance problem you stopped confronting. Did her assignments thin out because fewer assignments meant less rework? Then capacity scores green, and it is green for the wrong reason.
Nobody decides to manage around a performance problem. It happens one small adjustment at a time, until the job has shrunk to fit the person. Lowered expectations make the scores look better and the problem harder to see. That is how an issue goes unchecked for a year.
So when criticality or capacity looks off, ask why before you score anything else. It keeps the exercise from turning into a character assessment, which is the thing it must never become. It also keeps you honest about your own part.
Five greens
Capability, green. She has the skills.
Capacity, green. She is not drowning, and the volume is reasonable.
Criticality, green. The work she owns matters.
Culture, green. She gets on with everyone and clients like her.
Contribution, green.
Commitment, red.
It took a few minutes. He had been carrying it for weeks.
The greens are what had made it hard. Every comfortable explanation was false. He could not say she was out of her depth, because she is not. He could not say she was buried, because she is not. He could not say she was in the wrong seat, or that she was difficult to work with. Those are the four a manager reaches for, and every one of them arrives with a remedy attached. Training. Reallocation. A different role. A conversation about how she shows up.
Take all four away and what is left is the one nobody reaches for first.
He got two of them wrong
Contribution went down green. Then he sat with it.
Her work needs rework. Other people absorb that, so it never appears anywhere as her problem, and his first instinct was to call her output fine. It is not fine. Contribution should have been yellow.
Criticality went down green too, and it took longer to turn. Her work mattered, so he scored it as mattering. Then we went through what she actually owned. Without ever deciding to, he had been relying on her less and less, and the work that mattered most had been moving to other people. Criticality should have been yellow as well.
That is the shrinking job from the section above, happening to a manager who would have told you he was not doing it. The score hid it until he had to defend it.
Those corrections are worth more than the six categories are. The scoring is not an instrument that returns an answer. It is an instrument that makes you argue with yourself, and your first pass will be too generous. It will be too generous in exactly the places where the gap is being quietly covered, by somebody else or by you, because those are the places where the cost is invisible to you.
It also completes the picture. Contribution is where the problem was showing. Criticality is where he had been compensating. Capability is where he kept looking. Commitment was what was driving it. Four different categories, and you only see the relationship between them by scoring all six.
The one you cannot train
Managers get to commitment last, and it is not squeamishness. It is that the other five come with a fix.
Capability has a course. Capacity has a reallocation. Criticality has a reassignment. Culture has a conversation, sometimes a hard one, but a conversation. Commitment has none of that. There is no course for caring. Naming it means accepting that every tool already in your hand is the wrong shape.
So you go looking for a capability problem instead, because a capability problem is one you know how to solve.
Be precise about what the word means here, because it is the one most likely to be misread. He is not saying she works too few hours. She is not short of time, and capacity was green. She treats it as a job and does the job. What is missing is attention, not attendance. She makes mistakes because she is not trying hard enough, and more hours would not produce more care.
Before you act on the person
He did one more thing before he did anything, and it is the part most people skip.
He brought the team together and went back over his direction and his expectations, to find out whether they had been clear. Not to canvass opinion about her. To test whether the failure was his.
They were clear. The team confirmed it, and confirmed she had been given plenty of chances.
That order is not optional. Structure, then process, then people. If the expectations were never set, the red you just scored belongs to you rather than to her, and acting on it would be the most expensive mistake available to you that week.
There is no course for caring.
Where it ended
She is being exited.
That is not what the exercise is for and it is not where it usually goes. Five of the six have a remedy. This one did not, and the only thing resembling a remedy had already been tried more than once.
The scoring did not fire her. It told him which conversation to have. The conversation, and a record of chances already given, did the rest.
The same symptom, twice
I have written before about somebody who worked for me and owned our marketing collateral. Poor attention to detail. Mistakes that other people caught, and sometimes nobody caught. The same symptom, almost word for word.
She was a completely different case. Hers was capability. She was a starter, not a finisher, and finishing was most of that job. The answer was to move her somewhere that getting things started was the work, and she has been highly successful ever since.
Two people, one symptom, opposite causes, opposite endings. One of them could not. The other would not. You cannot tell which from the symptom, and if you guess you will spend a year sending the wrong person on a course. A doctor would not try. Same symptom, two causes, two different treatments.
That is what six categories and three colors are for. Not to produce a verdict. To stop you acting on the first explanation that happens to come with a fix attached.