Your Employees Aren’t the Problem. Your Workplace Might Be.
The Blame Game
Somebody missed a deadline.
- Maybe a sales rep didn’t meet their quota.
- Perhaps a customer service associate started making mistakes.
- Mayhaps a project that seemed like it was a winner suddenly tanked.
- Perchance a government department that consistently hit its KPIs suddenly started missing them.
- Possibly a construction site that was on track suddenly started falling behind schedule.
- Presumably a real estate project that looked like a sure success suddenly stopped attracting buyers.
What’s the first question that pops into most organizations’ minds at that very instant?
“What’s wrong with the employee?!”
It can be a myriad of matters, ranging from motivation, discipline, lack of care, or just a rough attitude. It’s an easy question to ask. When things aren’t going well, after all, our first inclination is to examine the person at the center of the work. It feels equally easy to answer, too. Unfortunately, it’s often the wrong question to ask.
In our last piece, we examined the oldest myth in performance management – the one about great performers simply being born with more talent. While talent plays a role, it’s not the full picture. You can develop skills, acquire knowledge, improve abilities, and gain experience nowadays more than ever before in the history of humanity.
So, if performance isn’t just about raw talent, though, what is it about?
The answer is a bit more intricate and poses several interesting questions, more than many people like to admit, because often, questions don’t give answers, but open up more of the same.
Performance isn’t created in a vacuum. It’s not the sum total of how smart, hard-working, or driven someone is. Performance is moreso the result of dozens of forces (seen and unseen) acting upon a person on a daily basis. This has been repeated thousands of times, but it’s valuable to look at it from different angles.
For example, think about growing a plant. If a plant isn’t growing well, we don’t assume it’s a “bad plant,” with a “bad attitude” or a “lack of drive.” We examine everything that has to do with the plant: the soil, sunlight, water intake, temperature exposure, and whether anything is getting in its way.
However, when an employee isn’t performing well, we tend to examine the person first.
Sometimes that’s appropriate; that much is true. Other times, more often than not, the environment has already created the conditions for poor performance, and this is the myth that we aim to bust in this article: employee performance isn’t primarily determined by attitude.
All of the internal elements matter: attitude, effort, accountability, and resilience. Yet, in addition to all these, we also have external elements: bosses, peers, organizational systems, cultures, and outside influences. Understanding the role these external forces play doesn’t mean absolving employees of their responsibility, but rather explaining their performance in relation to all of them.
Once we can explain performance by taking into account every layer that can sway it one way or another, we can finally do something about improving it.
Layer 1: The Individual – Capability Is Only the Starting Point
You can’t talk about employee performance without talking about the employee (duh).
Each employee comes into a workplace with a unique set of knowledge, technical skills, experience, personality, motivation, and natural talents that undoubtedly play a role in how well they perform. To ignore that fact would be as foolish as saying talent doesn’t matter at all…which is where something breaks in a lot of organizations, and the collective thought bubble pops.
If someone isn’t performing, the quick assumption becomes the person lacks something, and they need MORE of something else: more motivation, more discipline, more commitment, more resilience, more passion, more energy, more footwork, like the workout videos of old.
Now the environment has become a weird gymnastics exercise of jumping through mental hoops to reason something that might be true, but may not, into a definitive state of truth.
One of the most surprising findings from recent research on workplace wellbeing is how much of an employee’s performance is affected by things that their manager may never see. Research from Humankind found nearly 73% of employees felt personal stress was hurting their ability to focus, engage, be motivated, make good decisions, and perform well at their job. Whether it was finances, poor sleep, childcare duties, health concerns, or emotional burdens, these personal factors were quietly depleting the cognitive bandwidth individuals have to deploy at work. None of these struggles will ever show up on a performance review.
- A manager doesn’t see the parent who spent the night up with a sick child.
- A manager doesn’t see the employee who’s losing sleep over bills.
- A manager doesn’t see the hours spent in transit to a job, taking care of aging parents, managing relationship drama, or coping with illness.
What a manager does see is work that’s slowing down, deadlines being missed, less enthusiasm, and lower productivity. By the time that these performance indicators appear, the underlying causes may have been developing for weeks or months.
This is not to say organizations should be tasked with fixing every one of a person’s personal challenges (that’s neither realistic nor appropriate), but it does mean that we must stop deluding ourselves into thinking that individuals somehow become different human beings the moment they enter our buildings. Employees don’t leave their lives at the door; they merely get better or worse at hiding them. Even if there’s nothing overtly going on in a person’s life, we fall into another trap when discussing performance.
We often assume that if someone has enough talent, performance will automatically follow, but that’s not how real, everyday life functions. We’ve covered previously how Gallup has long pushed for the argument that while natural talent is a relatively stable proclivity, knowledge and skills can be acquired over time, rendering talent-only advantages null.
Thus, while hiring individuals with a high natural ability does increase your chances of having a top performer, it’s far from a guarantee. Likewise, a person with only average natural abilities may exceed expectations if they’re placed in the right role, have the right skills, and work within the right environment.
The same principle is emphasized by management professor Morten Hansen in his research of thousands of professionals. Hansen discovered that how people work accounted for more of the difference in performance than almost anything else. While talent mattered, it was far from the single largest differentiator. High performers didn’t simply outwork the competition; often, they were outworking their competitors more strategically, since capability only sets potential; it doesn’t guarantee performance.
Two people with very similar backgrounds and intellectual capabilities can perform in vastly different ways. If we’re only focusing on the person, those discrepancies can seem baffling, yet in truth they are being influenced by forces that we have yet to examine.
This is because, after the person, perhaps the single biggest factor affecting performance is their manager.
Layer 2: The Manager – The Greatest Performance Multiplier or Subtracter
If you ask someone why they love working for their company, they’re likely to mention their team or their opportunity to learn & grow. If you ask someone why they left, you’ll notice that a very consistent answer emerges: “my manager.“
Oh, the age-old truism that people don’t leave companies, they leave managers. It’s not universally true, of course, but there’s a reason this saying endures. Managers are our window onto the company. They are responsible for our expectations, the feedback we receive, our access to opportunities, the obstacles we must overcome, and the emotional temperature of the place we work each day.
Two employees can be in the same company, earn the same salary, work with the same policies, have the same benefits, and yet have drastically different experiences because they have different managers.
Psychologist Amy Edmondson has devoted decades of research to identifying a critical ingredient of high-performing teams: psychological safety. In a nutshell, it’s the belief that people can be their genuine selves at work without fear of embarrassment or punishment, can take risks without fear of repercussion, and can challenge one another without damaging personal relationships.
Notice what psychological safety is not: it’s not a lowering of standards. It’s not about avoiding accountability. It’s not about making people comfortable all of the time. Instead, it is about enabling them to contribute without fear of appearing incompetent, even if it feels inherently risky. This is a crucial distinction, because fear changes our behaviour. When we’re afraid of appearing incompetent, we stop asking questions. When we’re afraid of being criticized, we stop pitching new ideas. Eventually, our performance begins to dip because fear has begun to eclipse curiosity.
In fact, a well-known Google study called Project Aristotle, which investigated the reason behind their consistently high-performing teams, came to a strikingly similar conclusion. After scrutinizing hundreds of teams, Google’s researchers found that the most important factor in success, more so than any other, was the degree to which teams were psychologically safe. The other factors (dependability, role clarity, meaning, and impact) were all secondary, built on the foundation of safety.
We invest considerable money and effort trying to find and hire exceptional individuals. Yet, very few of us invest the same resources in creating conditions that allow those individuals to actually achieve their exceptional potential. Moreover, psychological safety is just one factor. There are many others, such as recognition, constructive feedback, trust, autonomy, and role clarity, just to name a few.
Employees who have to second-guess priorities, wait days for simple approvals, or are terrified of making small errors spend the bulk of their mental energy protecting themselves rather than doing meaningful work. Good managers work hard to minimize that friction, while bad managers create it.
In short, the management of performance doesn’t just happen in annual performance reviews. It’s influenced every day by the culmination of dozens of seemingly small interactions between a manager and their reports. Eventually, those interactions ripple out beyond individual relationships and shape the team itself.
Layer 3: The Team – Why Great Individuals Can Still Become Average Teams
Consider five of the most exceptionally gifted individuals and gather them together in one room. Common sense would suggest this would inevitably result in an exceptional team. In reality, things get complicated.
We’ve all experienced teams that, while absolutely flush with talented, experienced professionals, somehow stumble from one deadline to the next. Their meetings become an exercise in repetition and good ideas fester in the far corners of their minds, never shared, never discussed. Elsewhere, teams comprised of average employees somehow manage to turn out exceptional results like high-speed conveyor belts.
When the environment that a tight-knit group builds together starts to shape their work experience, performance starts shifting from individual to collective. By the very nature of work in an organization, no team can avoid this, and every one nurtures its culture, willingly or unconsciously. Over time, everyone learns what gets rewarded, what gets ignored, and what gets punished. Most of these lessons don’t make their way into employee handbooks, but they often exert a far stronger influence on behaviour than any formal policies.
Every team has rules, but what’s more interesting is how many were never written down.
- Maybe it quickly becomes apparent that it’s not worth disagreeing with the boss.
- Perhaps people learn that asking for help is interpreted as a sign of weakness.
- Possibly they notice the loudest voice in the room always wins the discussion, regardless of the actual quality of the ideas presented.
- Mayhaps people learn that taking risks is celebrated only when they succeed, but punished harshly when they fail.
- Perchance it becomes obvious that keeping your head down and avoiding difficult conversations is the safest way to get ahead.
None of this has to be codified in an internal policy. People simply observe it, adapt to it, and then, over time, pass it along to new team members. This is why culture can spread like wildfire. Almost nobody changes because someone announced new values at an all-hands meeting, but everyone changes when they watch how behaviour is rewarded or punished.
- Psychologists call this social proof.
People look to those around them to signal how to behave, particularly in times of uncertainty. In workplace settings, that means employees often adopt the norms of their colleagues long before they consider their company’s stated policies.
If everyone in a team talks freely in meetings, then new team members are usually inclined to speak freely as well. If everyone in a team falls silent when something goes wrong, new team members learn that silence is golden.
- Another invisible force comes in what researchers call emotional contagion.
Emotions spread, and that affects team performance. If you’ve ever worked in a team environment, you’ve undoubtedly seen it. A perpetually pessimistic person can single-handedly drain the energy of an entire department. Conversely, an optimistically positive and solution-oriented teammate can boost everyone’s motivation during challenging times.
Managers certainly affect the emotional climate of their teams, but the teammates amplify it day by day. A culture of trust or fear becomes a self-reinforcing loop. This leads into another point taken from Project Aristotle.
- Google’s Project Aristotle identified dependability right after psychological safety in their findings.
Trusting your teammates goes beyond their ability to emotionally support you; it involves relying on their execution. Few things sink a team’s performance faster than unpredictability. When employees are unsure about whether their teammates will come through on their assignments, they start to contingency plan or hoard information just in case. Self-protection, rather than collaboration, becomes the default.
The reverse is also true: when employees are confident their teammates will come through, coordination is smoother, and meetings are more efficient as trust replaces excessive oversight.
This is perhaps the least understood ingredient in the recipe for high-performance teams: they don’t eliminate conflict – they eliminate unhealthy conflict.
High-performing teams do disagree. They do question assumptions, debate ideas, ask uncomfortable questions, and clash in their value systems. However, they do so in a way where disagreement isn’t a personal affront. Disagreement becomes a function of the problem-solving process.
That’s what psychologist Amy Edmondson found over and over again in her studies as well: teams that had a high level of psychological safety didn’t necessarily commit fewer errors than others; they actually reported more errors because they were way more willing to admit they had made a mistake. The result wasn’t decreased performance; it was faster learning.
Ironically, cultures that punish mistakes foster conditions where mistakes grow costly and become harder to fix. Hidden problems are invariably more dangerous than problems in plain sight.
As you might have noticed, by this point, a pattern is emerging.
So, what does all of this lead to?
Individuals matter. ✔️
Managers matter. ✔️
Teams matter. ✔️
Yet there is something bigger. They all exist within something larger – the organization.
Layer 4: The Organization – The Structures Behind the Results
Companies love to measure outcomes: sales, revenue, productivity, customer satisfaction, profit margins. What companies don’t really love to measure is the systems that drive those outcomes.
- Systems
This is an issue because employees don’t operate in isolated moments; they operate within systems, and those are the quiet forces that make succeeding easy or painfully hard.
Think about how many performance issues are actually system issues hiding in plain sight:
- An employee misses deadlines.
- Is it poor time management?
- Or was that employee’s priorities changed three times in a single week?
- A project is dragging.
- Is the team unmotivated?
- Or does every single decision need to go through a four-department approval process?
- Innovation has disappeared.
- Are your people less creative?
- Or have they learned that challenging the status quo is more risky than rewarding?
It’s all too easy to chalk performance problems up to individual accountability because individual behaviour is visible. Systems are much harder to see, but they often exert much more influence.
Management pioneer W. Edwards Deming famously asserted that 95% of organizational problems are systemic in origin. Accountability matters, yes, but he insisted that people cannot perform better than the systems they are asked to work within.
Just think about your local governmental bureaucracy.
It functions chiefly by rulesets. We need rules. Rules are good – they provide consistency, mitigate risk, offer direct A-to-B avenues for solutions, and enable scalability.
However, we reach a tipping point for every added approval, every unnecessary report, every meeting, every administrative layer, every conflicting process. When rules outweigh the necessity for which they exist, they begin creating friction. They shift focus away from delivering value and toward navigating the organization itself. Eventually, the process itself becomes the focus, not the work.
- Role Clarity
Very few things sap performance faster than confusion around what’s expected.
-
Who’s making this decision?
-
What does successful work look like here?
-
Which of the two conflicting priorities should I tackle first?
When expectations are unclear, even talented employees will pause before acting for they fear doing the wrong thing. Studies have shown that clear roles correlate strongly with employee engagement, confidence, and overall performance. Role clarity frees employees to focus energy on solving problems instead of figuring out the answers.
- Politics & Culture
Life is a series of politics at play, and organizations are part of daily life.
With that in mind, however, issues arise when politically motivated behaviour are more rewarded than productive behaviour.
- If a promotion system reliably favors visibility over contribution
- If challenging colleagues’ ideas is riskier than agreeing
- If employees are incentivized to compete with one another instead of solving problems collaboratively
- If protecting your own department is rewarded more than helping the organization as a whole
- The organization trains people that success is a result of politics, not formal policy.
- This leads to a distortion of culture.
- The organization trains people that success is a result of politics, not formal policy.
Culture, much like politics and behaviour, is learned. Despite an army of mission statements, posters, core value initiatives, and well-wishing sticky notes, organizational culture isn’t created by what organizations say they are, but what they do.
Culture is built on what organizations repeatedly tolerate, reward, punish, or ignore. That’s why two companies can claim the exact same values, but have wildly different experiences for their employees. Organizational culture isn’t the motto on the wall; it’s what happens when no one’s watching. These hidden structures influence performance daily, often without managers’ awareness, since they are felt & lived, rather than examined in a performance sheet.
Yet, even organizations with excellent managers, healthy cultures, and efficient systems have one final, insurmountable challenge: people are, at heart, human beings who exist long after clocking out.
Layer 5: The World Outside Work – The Part Performance Reviews Never Measure
There is one last layer to performance, which organizations know conceptually, but often fail to account for realistically: life. It almost seems self-evident, yet, a pervasive, almost subconscious bias exists in the workplace that assumes employees somehow leave their personal lives at the door.
They didn’t – your employees didn’t stop being parents the moment they logged onto Microsoft Teams. They didn’t stop worrying about a sick loved one just because it was Monday morning. Financial worries don’t cease at 9 AM. Anxiety, grief, burnout, sleep deprivation, relationship troubles, and the many other stresses of being human don’t simply fade away as business hours commence.
The point is that people don’t perform in a vacuum; they perform as people. Recent research from places like the Harvard Business Review underscores the impact of external stresses. Studies have demonstrated a direct link between personal stress and difficulties with focus, decision-making, motivation, and engagement.
By the time an employee’s performance visibly dips, mental energy needed for problem-solving, collaboration, and creative thinking may have already been diverted to managing these personal issues for weeks or months. Of course, this doesn’t mean employers need to become therapists or feel personally responsible for their employees’ personal problems. Boundaries are important, and so is recognizing that between 9 and 5, we don’t automatically morph into machines.
Organizations that understand this do a better job of not trying to manage people’s lives, and a much better job of not creating undue stress in the workplace.
- Flexible work schedules.
- Employee assistance programs.
- Access to mental health resources.
- Realistic workloads.
- Predictable schedules.
- Empathetic managers.
These aren’t magic cures or arcane sorceries. They simply remove a potential unnecessary source of pressure at work, and they are incredibly important for one specific reason: performance isn’t a flat line.
No one, not even the highest performer, is running at peak capacity every moment of every day for every year. People have seasons, and there are periods where they have tremendous energy, creativity, and focus. Then there are periods where life’s demands briefly require a greater portion of their attention.
High-performing organizations recognize the difference between a temporary dip in performance and a systemic problem. They don’t treat every deviation as a failure; they ask a much more helpful question: “What has changed?”
Sometimes the change is skills or motivation. Other times, it’s work overload. Lastly, on other occasions, it’s just life, and because each of these changes requires a different solution, differentiating is critical.
Treat every issue as an attitude problem, and you won’t fix very many things. Treat every issue as a systems problem, and you’ll neglect individual responsibility. Effective performance management sits somewhere in between. It acknowledges accountability for an employee’s work, while simultaneously recognizing that no work exists in a void because when you zoom out, you see that every layer impacts the other.
- A talented employee will be limited by poor management.
- A brilliant manager will be hampered by a dysfunctional system.
- A great system will see reduced productivity when the people within it are struggling with overwhelming personal challenges.
No one element creates performance alone, rather it’s the interplay of an entire ecosystem that creates it.
Final Thoughts
Organizations have sought the silver bullet for performance for decades: hire better people, pay more, set big goals, measure everything, and reward the top performers.
All of those things count, but they’re only one part of the picture. Performance isn’t a function of talent alone, nor is it just a product of attitude or effort. Performance emerges from the interaction between an individual and their environment.
- The individual
- The manager
- The team
- The organization
- The outside world
Every one of these levels either builds on an individual’s potential or subtly works to undermine it. This is why explaining poor performance simply as employee error is so incomplete. If a garden doesn’t grow, we don’t just blame the seeds. We look at the soil, the light, the water, the environment.
Organizations should be willing to ask the same questions not because employees shouldn’t be held accountable (they most certainly should be) but because blame without understanding never results in sustained change. The most effective leaders don’t ask, “Who caused this?” They ask, “What conditions created this result?”
Changing your perspective from who did it to what created it changes everything. It shifts performance management from blame to removal of obstacles and turns the manager from an evaluator to a coach. Moreover, it prompts organizations to build systems for employee success instead of relying on individual grit to overcome the odds, and most important of all, it reminds us that performance isn’t usually an individual effort but a collective one at that.
*********
Performance problems rarely have a single cause. Learn to examine the people, managers, teams, and systems behind the results. Build a more complete approach to performance management with Certified Employee Performance Management.
