Handling Underperformance

🚧 Expanding

Underperformance is the work managers avoid the longest and regret avoiding the most. Every week you don’t name it, it gets harder to name — and it’s unfair to the person, who deserves the chance to fix something they may not even know is a problem. The kindest thing you can do is be early and be clear: name the gap directly, make sure they truly understand it, and find out why before you decide what to do. Most of that early naming is just ordinary feedback done honestly — and if you’ve done it well all along, the eventual performance review holds no surprises.

When this page is filled in, it’ll cover how to diagnose the real cause (is it skill, will, clarity, or something happening outside work?), how to separate a temporary dip from a genuine pattern, what a fair improvement plan looks like and when a formal PIP is the honest move versus a box-checking exercise, how to document along the way, and how to handle the outcome — recovery or exit — with dignity for everyone. Until then, the Go Deeper links carry it.

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Before you build any plan, answer one question honestly: have I ever told this person, in plain words, that there’s a problem? Surprisingly often the answer is no — and you can’t hold someone accountable to a bar they were never told existed. Fix that first. Sometimes that conversation alone is the whole fix.

📚 Go Deeper

Books

Crucial Conversations — Patterson et al.The toolkit for the hardest conversations of the job — staying honest and humane when the stakes and emotions are both high.
Radical Candor — Kim ScottWhy "ruinous empathy" — withholding hard feedback to be nice — is the most common way managers fail an underperformer.

Tools

Lara Hogan — Resources for managersPractical scripts and frameworks for difficult management conversations, including performance and feedback situations.

Last updated on June 25, 2026

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