How To Figure Out Why Your Employee Isn’t Performing

Is it an issue of skill or a will?

I still remember the first time I hired an employee on my team who wasn’t performing. The temptation to ignore the situation and hope it went away was very real. At the time, it felt so personal as if this employee was doing something to me by failing to meet expectations. Frankly, I remember it feeling a lot like a kick in the gut.

I also remember the choice that my boss gave me in dealing with it.

She told me that I could choose to ignore it, compensate for it, work around it, and accept the toll it will take on the rest of my team’s morale, or I could opt in to having the difficult conversation needed to address it.

When she put it that way, it didn’t feel like much of a choice.

The issue with ignoring performance problems is that doing so always ends up causing more damage than addressing it head-on does, and I didn’t want to be the kind of leader that avoided the tough stuff. I decided to address it.

The first step of dealing with a performance problem is uncovering why the employee isn’t performing. And there are only two options — skill or will.

A skill issue is about “an individual’s capability or proficiency to complete a specific task.” When an employee fails to meet expectations due to skill, it means that they do not possess the competencies needed to do the work required of them.

On the other hand, a will issue has nothing to do with the employee’s abilities and everything to do with their motivation or willingness to do the work. A Will issue is about “an individual’s desire to complete a specific task based on attitude, incentives, confidence, and personal feelings about completing the task.” An employee with a will issue can complete the work… they just aren’t motivated to do so.

Like all coaching, the trick to figuring out which problem your employee has is by doing less talking and more question-asking.

Diagnosing a skill problem

I recently worked with a client who had hired an analyst responsible for compiling reports for customers. The first few reports this leader received from his new hire were concerning, as she had not accounted for many of the fundamentals they had discussed during training.

The client wasn’t sure where he’d gone wrong. Did this new hire not have the ability to do what he was asking for, or had she disregarded the direction he had given her? This was an exercise in diagnosing skill or will.

A skill problem is easier for most leaders to remedy. After all, if you can identify where someone needs more support or training, you can pretty easily devise strategies to bridge that gap through a development plan.

Knowing this, we started by trying to ascertain whether the new hire possessed the ability to complete the work she was responsible for. To do this, my client started the conversation by using a couple of the dialogue starters from my favorite feedback framework, Brag, Worry, Wonder, Bet.

He simply said, “I noticed that some of the things we talked about weren’t included in these reports. I’m worried that if we distribute these to clients as-is, they won’t meet their expectations. I wonder if you feel the training you received was sufficient, or if you struggled with the technical elements of building the reports?”

This employee shared that she did, in fact, need more repetition to feel confident in how to build the reports. She knew what she should include, but she didn’t always know how to build-in those elements. This was an issue of skill and was easily fixed through a targeted training plan.

Diagnosing a will problem

My former employee, on the other hand, did not have a skill problem. She was experienced in her line of work and possessed the abilities needed to do the job and do it well. Her work was of high quality… when she did it.

She had a will problem. Unlike a skill that you can train someone on, motivation is a tougher issue to overcome. After all, you can’t read someone’s mind to understand what will or will not motivate them.

No matter how often we talked about the impact her actions had on the team or our work’s purpose, she simply wasn’t motivated to do the work. Despite my best efforts, I was never able to uncover what motivated this particular team member, and we ended up having to part ways.

The reality is that a leader alone cannot motivate someone. Motivation, by definition, comes from within and each of us is driven by something different. If you’re unable to diagnose exactly what it is that motivates someone, it’s nearly impossible to tap into those motivations and use them to drive performance.

Doing so requires self-awareness on the part of the employee to articulate what motivates them, trust and transparency between you and the team member for them to share this with you, and dedication on your part to connect the employee’s work to what matters to them.

Too often, we jump into problem-solving mode before cultivating a full appreciation of the problem at hand.

Doing something feels better and more productive than doing nothing, and so we fail to slow down enough to seek information before diving into advice-giving.

Next time you encounter an employee who isn’t performing, take the time to ask questions and determine whether the performance problem is an issue of skill or will.

Because it’s only when you have a full appreciation of the problem that you will be able to offer an appropriate solution targetted at either skill or will.

Not a member of Medium yet?

Join here to directly support my work and get access to every story on Medium. You can also subscribe to my free newsletter or connect with me on Linkedin.