How To Coach Up Poor Performance

This is the Unbreakable Business newsletter - created just for COOs and Operations Teams who want to build a company that won’t fall apart.

In this issue, I’m diving into one of the most mishandled aspects of being a leader: Coaching Up Poor Performance. There are a million and one things that can go wrong during this conversation, so I’ve engineered a system that eliminates the risk and leaves you both ready to tackle the hurdle.

Today, we’ll cover:

• 🔎 How to find the root cause of performance gaps

• 📈 How to correct the course

• ✅ How to establish clear commits

Enjoy!!

🤝 Leading People Ain’t Easy

When I first started leading people, I was living in a fantasy land of make-believe 🪄

I thought that it was going to be easy - I’m a pretty personable guy. That means I’d be able to come up with some ideas, explain them real quick, the team would love each and every one, they’d jump on board, do an incredible job, and we’d all live happily ever after.

Sure, that would be cool… right? 😂

➡️ Here is “Leadership Truth #1”:

No matter how long you’re in this game, the way that you lead your people is going to constantly evolve.

People are complex. Every person you lead will teach you a new lesson about skill sets, bandwidth, and communication style, to name a few.

It’s a skill that you need to continuously build - just like doing a sales call, running a marketing campaign, or sourcing a candidate.

➡️ “Leadership Truth #2” is a harder pill to swallow:

No matter how good you get at it, you’re still going to have people who slide off track from time to time. 

They’re probably great people, but their performance may not be hitting the mark for what the business needs. 

It can be crazy stressful when this happens - I know it is for me - so I created a simple cadence for identifying the root cause of performance issues and having those hard conversations about how to correct them.

🖋️Audit Yourself First

If you’re leading a team, there’s a high chance that performance problems are your own fault.

Was that uncomfortable to read?

Not gonna lie… It was uncomfortable for me to write 😂 but it’s the truth.

Most of the time, assuming you’ve hired someone capable, performance issues are simply a gap between your expectations and your systems.

Here’s a quick way to “open your eyes” to the possibility that you might be causing the issues that you say you don’t want:

➡️ List The Training

Write down a list of all the times that you’ve trained this team member on how to do the thing that they’re not doing well.

First off, if the list is blank, you can stop reading right here. This one is on you, my friend.

You’d be surprised at the number of times this exact interaction has happened:

It’s wild that I have to say this, but -

This shit ain’t magic, people - good leaders train their teams.

➡️ Audit The Materials

Alright, you got through part 1. That means you HAVE been training your team member, right? Well, now it’s time to review the training materials - the notes, the SOPs, etc.

Are they up-to-date? Are they high quality? Are there any opportunities for misunderstandings?

It’s such a bad feeling when you go to coach someone’s performance and they show you that they’ve, quite literally, been following a process that YOU created.

Ask me how I know 😂

➡️ Do A Tolerance Assessment

One of the best leadership lessons that I was taught as a fresh-faced Lieutenant in the fire department:

What you tolerate, you endorse.

This step is a bit of reflection for you as a leader - have you been tolerating the issue that you’re about to coach up? For how long? How many times?

As a leader, when you accept something, it becomes the standard - even if it’s not on par with the written process.

Your team looks for approval from YOU - not from some faceless documents in a Notion database somewhere.

This should guide how you approach the conversation. Why? Well, now YOU have ownership over a large part of the performance gap - which you’ll need to acknowledge with your team member as you move forward.

🚀 Reestablish Expectations

When your computer stops working, you turn it off and turn it back on again - the same principle applies here. Sometimes, you need to reset the performance expectations as well.

This one’s not hard to do, but it’s important - I basically run a quick meeting to retrain the team member on the expectations that they’ve been missing.

For individual contributors, it’ll likely be more task-based or process-based, whereas for leaders, it’s almost always going to be outcome-based. But don’t let these differences cause you to overthink it.

No matter who you’re talking to, the principle remains the same:

👉 Examine the deficient area…
👉 Walk through the expectations of how it SHOULD work…
👉 Examine how it HAS been working…
👉 Identify the gap between the two.

The gap is essentially “the problem to solve”.

We’ll get into the details in a sec ⤵️

📊 Make Explicit Commitments

Once you’ve clearly identified the gap, all that’s left is to commit to a solution - and yes, you guessed it, there’s a specific way that I do this for these situations as well. You should know me by now 😂

I want to address a common pitfall - most people stop after they reestablish expectations.

But without actually locking in the commitments…

🔁 you’re gonna do it over and over and over again 🔁

…and then get surprised when nothing changes.

You can measure the quality of a team by the quality of its commitments. Period.

Nailing down the commitments is what will ACTUALLY drive the change - it’s the most important part of the whole thing.

Without carving out a clear plan of action, you’re not setting the team member up for success, and you’re set to re-enter the vortex of “new day, same problems”…and that’s exactly what we’re trying to avoid.

I actually take out my iPad for this part, and I’ll hand-write a list of every agreement that we made during the “reestablish expectations” phase of the meeting when we were finding the gap.

I list them one by one, and ask the team member to agree to each one out loud.

You will be blown away at how much additional dialogue happens in this step - because it’s a very different vibe when the team member is confirming that they’re on board with each step, out loud, while you’re writing it down.

➡️ It’s designed to draw out everything that has still gone unsaid up until this point - to squeeze out any possible miscommunication.

Once we get through the list and wrap up the call, I’ll follow up with an email screenshot of the iPad’s list of commits and a couple of sentences about what we just agreed to

This locks it all in and gives both of you a point of reference once the specifics of the conversation become foggy in your mind.

🔎 What Comes Next?

“What do I do when none of the above makes a difference?”

I’m not going to sugarcoat anything - I hate transitioning people off of my team - but sometimes, it’s a necessary part of the job. You know it in your gut when it’s time.

That being said, the goal for this process is NOT to “document things so you can fire someone” - it’s truly based on improving performance, getting things out in the open, and leading with clear expectations.

9 times out of 10, it solves the problem. People generally care deeply about doing a good job - especially if they feel like you’re in their corner.

That said, in the rare case that you DO need to transition someone off the team for an issue that’s already been discussed and worked through this process…it shouldn’t be a surprise. And running a cadence like this makes sure that it won’t be.

📽️ Go To The Movies

Wanna jam on this in a video format? Check out my latest YouTube video where I go over this coaching process in under four minutes ⌚

Also, make sure you subscribe to my channel so you don’t miss awesome videos like this one.

🎯 Default To Action

Here are the key action steps you can take TODAY to put things in motion:

1️⃣ Look In The Mirror

Find one issue that’s bugging you about your team and run the self-assessment. Even if you don’t need to take action on it right now, it’s a great gut-check for you as a leader.

✅ Leave your ego at the door and grant yourself the opportunity to grow - the opportunity is there for all of us.

2️⃣ Do A Tolerance Assessment

Scan across all of your team members and areas and make a list of the things that you’ve been implicitly endorsing simply by tolerating them. It’s a good way to grade yourself as a leader on whether or not you’re upholding the standards in the business that you say you want.

✅ I repeat: what you tolerate, you endorse. It’s up to you to advocate for the quality your business deserves.

3️⃣ Mentally Run Through This Conversation

If this is a conversation you don’t need to have with anyone right now, that’s a good thing - your team is right on track. But, take 10 minutes and mentally run through the steps on a hypothetical, so you can get a feel for what it might be like when you DO need it. I promise - it will come handy at some point.

✅ Practice makes permanence. Once this process becomes second nature, the conversations are much easier to have when they’re needed.

There you have it! Poor performance isn’t the end of the world, and it doesn’t have to suck when addressing it. Just another opportunity to turn your teams into absolute all-stars 💪

Next week, keep your eyes peeled and get ready to level up with my Leadership Tips for First-Time Managers - even the seasoned pros will be able to take something from this issue.

Always in your corner,

MV

📣 Overheard On The Interwebs

Your Business Is A Math Problem

If you’ve literally ever listened to me talk about business…you’ve probably heard me on this soapbox before 😂 

But the only thing better than me saying it…is Lenny Rachitsky saying it 🔥 

If you haven’t heard of Lenny, he runs basically the most legendary newsletter for product folks that exists - it’s incredible.

But back to equations…check out this awesome thread he posted this week - the illustrations are 😍