Guide for CEOs on Managing Under-Performance

We have a business culture that has driven under-performance issues underground for far too long.

In low trust organisations, it simply isn’t on to expect top Directors to volunteer anything to their Chief Executive that reflects badly on their own performance.

Hence the eight-point guide below that is designed for CEOs who see themselves leading a high trust organisation and heading up a top team that tries to work in an open and trusting way together and sometimes commits time to working as a mutual support team.

The impact of this approach on performance can be quite dramatic, remarkably quickly.

Taking under-performance out of the world of concealed behaviours is liberating for everyone.

The key is to create an organisational culture in which everyone is expected to own any under-performance on their part, on the basis that they’re working to deal with it and leave it behind.


Eight point Guide

  1. Talk about under-performance as something that we all have to grapple with, including YOU. Anyone who doesn’t own the fact that they occasionally under-perform is deceiving themselves as well as you
  2. At meetings with your top team, make clear that you RATE Executives who own up to under-performance. And encourage them to adopt this approach with their teams once they have made it their own
  3. Two or maybe three times a year arrange special sessions for your top team when you encourage each of them to bring a tricky problem and invite the advice of other members of the team about how best to deal with it. It’s very difficult to make this work if you combine it with a routine Exec meeting; it’s best as a dedicated problem-sharing and problem-solving meeting. And you need to make a point of telling your team that if any of them say that they haven’t got any serious problems where they would value the guidance and insights of others, as far as you’re concerned they’re not looking hard enough
  4. At the first problem-solving session of this sort there’s a lot to be said for YOU starting off. How about, say, raising a problem with the Board or some key partner that you are genuinely worried about and where you feel you’ve got stuck? Once you’ve outlined the problem, it’s good if you can offer a couple of possible options for dealing with it. And stress that you’d love it if one of them came up with option 3 rather than feeling limited to the two options that you’ve offered them
  5. It’s best to deal with a small number of problems so that you have time as a team to offer genuine support to the Director raising the issue and help them with moving forward in a significant way. There’s no need to insist that EVERYONE brings a key problem for the others to take apart and put back together again. At the end of your first meeting you can make a point of asking those who didn’t bring a problem to share to lead off next time
  6. Introduce this problem-solving spirit more into your one-to-ones with members of the Exec team, once you have established it as a way of working with the team as a whole. Make a point of offering your feedback on any areas where you get the impression that the Director concerned isn’t performing in the way you would want. And make clear that as a general rule, the first time you raise any sort of problem with a member of your team it’s completely off the record and nothing goes on their file for HR or anything like that. You raise the issue NOT to trigger a defensive justification of why they did what they did (or didn’t do what they should have done!) but to offer YOUR SUPPORT in moving things forward. Even the “strongest” Directors need to be reassured that your view of them hasn’t been changed by what you think might be an under-performance on their part and NOTHING WOULD PLEASE YOU MORE than to support them in leaving this behind
  7. At the end of each informal feedback session of this sort, agree a 15 minute follow-up 10 days or so later when they can come back to you with their considered response and HOPEFULLY a summary of what they are now doing differently to deal with the under-performance that you discussed together
  8. If you are not satisfied with their response, you need to tell them and almost certainly make clear that this will now need to go on the record, with a note from you specifying the actions and behaviours that are causing you concern and proposing a date for a more formal one-to-one to discuss how to proceed from here. In this way you signal that what you will NOT do is let this issue go, because top performing organisations keep on and on at tackling under-performance. It’s one of the key characteristics that create the sense of hunger and ‘drivenness’ that are at the heart of the culture of any top performing team.


Establishing collective responsibility for dealing with under-performance

If you follow through this approach, you should put yourself in a position to establish a vital principle with your top team:

  • that where there is undeclared under-performance that Directors are aware of and not dealing with, that becomes a collective responsibility of the team and is no longer just the responsibility of the individuals who are under-performing.

Too often members of teams are aware of others under-performing and do not see it as their responsibility to engage with that under-performance. In work with Boards and top teams I have found it a very powerful proposition to argue that in situations where people “walk past on the other side of the road” they are actually colluding with the under-performance. They see it going on and yet they deny any responsibility for doing anything about it.

For high performing teams that really want to become top performers, it can help a lot for the CEO to argue that every member of the Exec team has a responsibility to discuss how to support individuals and sub-teams that are under-performing, even where they don’t have direct management responsibility for them.

This is all about every Executive Director stepping into their collective responsibility as members of a single unified team.

This is because in most organisations, the vast majority of under-performance is concealed. As soon as it’s out in the open, it is so much easier to deal with it.


Pete Ashby
pete.ashby@2waytrust.com
01364 631310