As a leader, you’ve faced your share of challenges, but few are as frustrating or complex as poor team performance. It’s not just about the missed targets or deadlines; it’s about the silent ripple effects that spread across your organization: strained team morale, wavering customer trust, and stalled momentum.
What makes it even more challenging is pinpointing the root cause and taking decisive action without derailing progress. Is it a lack of skills? A misalignment of priorities? Or could it stem from something deeper, like unclear expectations or leadership blind spots?
The truth is that addressing poor performance requires more than surface-level fixes. It demands a blend of data-driven analysis, mutual accountability, and a willingness to reflect on one’s own leadership. When done right, this challenge can become an opportunity to transform one’s team, culture, and business outcomes.
Let’s dig into actionable insights to help you identify the real causes of underperformance, reflect on your role, and create a roadmap to reignite team success.
The Leadership Imperative: Acknowledging the Challenge
Dealing with team performance issues can feel deeply personal. After all, as a leader, you’ve hired and invested in these individuals. When things go wrong, it’s natural to ask:
- “Is it them, or is it me?”
- “What’s holding us back?”
Research from McKinsey & Company suggests that leaders often underestimate the systemic factors impacting performance. For example, 70% of transformations fail to meet objectives due to cultural and behavioral barriers, not technical shortcomings. Poor performance is rarely a singular fault—it’s often the result of misalignment between people, processes, and leadership.
Acknowledging this complexity is the first step. Great leaders understand that performance issues present an opportunity to reset expectations, systems, and relationships.
Step 1: Diagnose the Root Cause with Checks and Balances
Before taking action, it’s crucial to assess what’s really happening within your team. This requires a balance of data-driven analysis and empathetic inquiry.
Evaluate Performance Metrics
Start by objectively reviewing key performance indicators (KPIs):
- Are the metrics clear, measurable, and aligned with the team’s capacity?
- Are underperforming individuals facing unique challenges outside their control (e.g., resource limitations or market changes)?
Avoid relying solely on high-level data. Instead, dig deeper into trends happening among your team or with specific individuals to uncover where performance is slipping.
Gather Feedback from the Ground
Ask the people closest to the issues for their perspective. This could involve:
- Conducting one-on-one meetings to understand obstacles or frustrations.
- Running anonymous surveys to capture candid input.
Employee insights often reveal unseen roadblocks, such as unclear priorities, inefficient workflows, or inconsistent communication. Gartner research shows that employees who feel heard are 4.6 times more likely to deliver their best work.
Analyze the Leadership Factor
Be prepared to examine how leadership practices might be contributing to the problem. Are there areas where you or other leaders:
- Haven’t communicated expectations effectively?
- Haven’t provided the necessary resources or training?
- Haven’t fostered a culture of trust and accountability?
This self-assessment can be uncomfortable, but it’s essential. As Peter Drucker famously said, “The bottleneck is always at the top of the bottle.”
Step 2: Embrace Mutual Accountability
Once you’ve identified the root causes, the next step is to create a shared culture of accountability across the team. Accountability isn’t about assigning blame; it’s about fostering ownership at every level.
Clarify Roles and Responsibilities
A Boston Consulting Group study found that 72% of employees cite role ambiguity as a major barrier to performance. As a leader, it’s up to you to ensure every team member understands the following:
- What success looks like in their role.
- How their work contributes to the broader mission.
- What support they can expect from leadership.
Set Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound (SMART) goals for individuals and teams and revisit them regularly to ensure alignment.
Implement Real-Time Feedback Loops
Traditional performance reviews are often too infrequent to address challenges effectively. Instead, focus on real-time feedback loops that:
- Provide immediate recognition or redirection.
- Encourage two-way dialogue to surface challenges early.
- Reinforce accountability by tying feedback to specific outcomes.
Foster a Growth Mindset
Accountability thrives in a culture where mistakes are seen as opportunities for growth rather than failures. Model this mindset by:
- Acknowledging your own missteps as a leader.
- Encouraging your team to take calculated risks.
- Supporting development through coaching and training.
Step 3: Take Action to Resolve Challenges
Armed with insights and a commitment to mutual accountability, it’s time to take action. This step is about creating both immediate and sustainable improvements.
Prioritize the Quick Wins
Identify changes that can deliver rapid performance gains. Examples might include:
- Streamlining processes that create unnecessary bottlenecks.
- Providing additional resources or staffing to address workload imbalances.
- Reassigning tasks to better match individual strengths.
Quick wins not only improve performance but also build momentum and confidence.
Provide Tailored Support
Recognize that underperforming individuals may need more than generic guidance. Tailor your approach by:
- Offering targeted training to address skill gaps.
- Pairing team members with mentors or coaches.
- Giving struggling employees the time and space to reset and refocus.
Rebuild Trust and Motivation
When performance issues persist, trust within the team can erode. Rebuilding it requires deliberate action:
- Celebrate small wins: Recognize progress, no matter how incremental, to reinforce positive behavior.
- Show vulnerability: Be honest about what you’re learning as a leader and invite your team to do the same.
- Empower autonomy: Give team members the freedom to make decisions and own their work.
Harvard Business Review notes that empowered employees are 50% more likely to deliver above-average performance.
Step 4: Monitor, Adapt, and Sustain Progress
Performance improvement isn’t a one-and-done effort; it’s an ongoing process. Leaders must continuously evaluate progress, adapt strategies, and reinforce the systems that support high performance.
Track Leading Indicators
Rather than focusing solely on outcomes, monitor the behaviors and processes that drive results. For example:
- Are team members meeting deadlines?
- Are they collaborating effectively?
- Are they actively engaging in problem-solving?
Conduct Regular Check-ins
As a part of your operating rhythm, use weekly or biweekly check-ins to assess progress, address roadblocks, and maintain alignment. These meetings should be forward-focused and constructive.
Stay Self-Aware
Self-awareness can be a superpower for a leader. Be sure to revisit your performance periodically. Ask yourself:
- Am I providing the guidance and resources my team needs?
- Am I maintaining a balance between oversight and trust?
- Am I fostering a culture of accountability and empowerment?
The best leaders continually refine their approach to meet evolving challenges.
Step 5: Getting Comfortable with Letting Go
As leaders, one of the hardest decisions is recognizing when someone is no longer the right fit for the organization. It’s an uncomfortable topic, but sometimes, the greatest act of leadership is making tough calls for the greater good of the team and the business.
Poor performance isn’t always about skills or effort. It’s often about alignment. When an individual’s goals, values, or capabilities are no longer in sync with the organization’s mission, it can have a compounding negative effect on morale, productivity, and culture.
The Bigger Picture: Transforming Challenges into Opportunities
Dealing with poor team performance is never easy, but it’s also an opportunity to strengthen your organization’s foundation. By addressing root causes, fostering accountability, and embracing self-awareness, you can turn underperformance into a catalyst for growth.
Remember: as a leader, it’s not up to you to have all the answers. Your job is to ask the right questions and create the conditions for your team to thrive.
So, the next time you face performance challenges, take a step back, assess the full picture, and focus on building solutions that drive long-term success.
TeamRevenue, empowers businesses to drive sustainable growth. We provide our clients with the revenue enablement experts, best practices, and an accountability framework to optimize revenue teams, systems, and processes to drive results. We’ve worked with hundreds of B2B companies worldwide, breaking the cycle of underperformance. Helping them grow faster, communicate better and bring new energy to their organizations.
