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How many apparent performance problems begin with work that has nowhere sensible to land?
You have someone on your team who cares about the business, works hard, and wants to succeed. Yet important decisions keep coming back to you. Deadlines slip, problems remain unresolved, and you find yourself wondering why this person cannot take more ownership.
You have explained what you need. You have offered support. Perhaps you have started checking in more often. Still, the results are disappointing.
Before deciding that the person is the problem, it is worth examining the job you have asked them to do. Is the work appropriate for their capability? Have you clearly delegated the expected results? Can they make the necessary decisions? And is their manager leaving enough room for them to do their job?
In the previous article, we explored how growth changes the work of leading an organization. Those changes reach beyond the CEO’s office. As the organization becomes more complex, roles and management relationships also need to evolve. When they do not, capable people can find themselves struggling inside a structure that makes success unnecessarily difficult.
Does the work match the person’s capability?
We often describe people as capable without being specific about what we mean. Someone may have excellent technical knowledge, considerable experience, and a strong commitment to the organization. Those are valuable qualities, but we also need to understand the complexity of the problems the role requires them to solve.
Consider an operations supervisor who is very good at keeping today’s production moving. They respond to equipment problems, arrange coverage when someone is absent, and help employees resolve immediate difficulties.
As the business grows, the role expands. The supervisor is now expected to anticipate capacity requirements, connect production plans with sales forecasts, and develop approaches that will work across several teams over the coming year.
The title may have stayed the same, but the work has changed.
As we discussed earlier in this series, problem-solving capability matures over time. Being effective with one level of complexity does not automatically mean someone is ready for the next. Additional training can strengthen skills and knowledge, but it does not necessarily resolve a mismatch between the complexity of the work and the person’s current problem-solving capability.
There is another question to ask here: have we designed a sensible role in the first place?
One person may be expected to solve immediate operating problems while also developing the systems that should prevent those problems from recurring. The urgent work consumes the day, and the longer-term work remains untouched. We then conclude that the person lacks strategic thinking, when we may have combined more work than one role can reasonably carry.
Before assessing the individual, make sure you understand the job.
Have we made the expected results clear?
“Take ownership of operations” sounds like a clear instruction until two people explain what they think it means.
The CEO may expect the operations manager to improve reliability, develop supervisors, and anticipate capacity problems. The manager may believe success means personally resolving every production issue and keeping customers happy today.
Both can be working hard toward different definitions of success.
Delegation needs to establish the result the person is accountable for delivering, when it is required, and the boundaries within which they must work. It also needs to make priorities clear when competing demands arise.
For example, asking an operations manager to “improve delivery” leaves important questions unanswered. What improvement is required? By when? What must be protected along the way, such as quality, safety, or cost? How should the manager balance a rush order against existing customer commitments?
The conversation also needs to distinguish the manager’s work from the work of their team. If the operations manager spends every day doing the supervisors’ jobs, who is improving the operating system across those teams?
A useful check is to ask the person to describe the results they believe they are accountable for delivering. Then compare that description with your own.
Any difference gives you something concrete to resolve before the next performance conversation.
Can they make the decisions their accountability requires?
Now imagine that the operations manager understands the expected results perfectly. They know delivery performance must improve and have identified several changes that would help.
However, adjustments to staffing require the owner’s approval. Changes to the production schedule must be cleared with sales. Even modest spending to address a recurring bottleneck needs another conversation.
The manager remains accountable for delivery, but much of the authority required to improve it sits elsewhere.
When approvals take time, work stalls. When someone overrides a decision, priorities shift. Eventually, the CEO asks why the manager keeps bringing problems back instead of solving them.
The answer may be that the manager cannot resolve those problems within the authority they have been given.
Sufficient authority does not mean unlimited discretion. It means having the decision-making authority and access to resources needed to deliver the assigned results, within clear limits.
Those limits should be understood by everyone affected. If an operations manager can assign work within an agreed production plan, other people need to respect that authority. If an exception requires escalation, the manager needs to know when and how to escalate it.
Accountability becomes difficult to sustain when people are expected to deliver results through decisions they are not authorized to make.
Are the manager and the employee trying to do the same job?
Sometimes the difficulty lies in the relationship between two roles.
A manager and their direct report may be working at essentially the same level of complexity. There is too little distinction between the work each should contribute. We refer to this as role compression.
The CEO appoints an operations manager but continues directing the daily schedule, resolving routine staffing issues, and telling supervisors what to do. The operations manager also tries to manage those activities.
Before long, employees learn to check whose instruction will prevail.
The CEO becomes frustrated that the manager does not take initiative. The manager becomes cautious because decisions are frequently revisited. They begin second-guessing what the CEO will want, while the CEO checks more closely because confidence in the manager has declined.
Each person’s response reinforces the other’s concern.
A manager should add value through work that provides the context and direction their team needs. That includes resolving more complex problems, integrating work across roles, and looking further ahead. When the manager remains absorbed in the same decisions as their direct report, that additional contribution can disappear.
The answer is not simply to tell the manager to stop micromanaging. We need to examine whether there are two distinct jobs and whether the manager is doing the work their own role requires.
A missing management level can create a related problem from the other direction. The CEO may be working on the organization’s longer-term direction while supervisors concentrate on daily delivery. Important work between those levels, such as integrating capacity, processes, and resources across teams, has no appropriate owner.
That work keeps returning to the CEO, being pushed onto already busy supervisors, or remaining undone.
Adding another box to the organization chart will only help if we first identify the work that needs to be owned.
What should we check before deciding it is a people problem?
When results fall short, three questions provide a practical starting point.
Is the person capable of doing the job?
Consider the complexity of the work as well as the skills, knowledge, and interest it requires. Check whether the role has changed and whether it contains a reasonable combination of responsibilities.
Is there clarity in delegation to the person?
Make sure the expected results, priorities, timing, and boundaries are understood. Examine where their work ends and their manager’s work begins.
Has the person been given sufficient authority to deliver?
Look at the decisions and resources required to achieve the result. Are those within the person’s authority, or does progress depend on repeated approvals and informal negotiations?
These questions help determine what action will actually improve performance. The answer may involve development, clearer delegation, different authority, a redesigned role, or a change in the management structure.
It may also reveal that the person is not suited to the job. That remains a legitimate possibility. The point is to understand the cause before choosing the remedy.
Final Thought
A performance conversation becomes much more useful when we can distinguish what the person needs to change from what the organization needs to change.
Replacing someone without examining the role can leave their successor facing exactly the same difficulties. Closer supervision can deepen role compression. More training can disappoint when the real obstacle is a lack of authority.
As the head of the organization, you are accountable for creating a structure in which people have appropriate work, clear expectations, and the authority to deliver.
These situations can be difficult to assess from inside the business. You know the people, remember their contributions, and have often helped shape the roles yourself. A trusted peer group provides a place to examine your assumptions and learn from leaders who have faced similar challenges.
That is one of the advantages of membership in a Vistage peer advisory group. Confidential conversations with other business leaders, supported by one-to-one coaching, can help you work through difficult decisions and hold yourself accountable for taking action.
Who in your organization is being asked to improve their performance when what they may need first is a better-designed role?
If you would value a conversation about the support a peer group could provide, learn more about my Vistage groups.
