In an organization, leaders have two responsibilities. The first is to the people they lead and the second is to the organization itself. To individual followers, the leader is responsible for doing anything possible to help them succeed. This means being curious about their personality, communication preferences, and perspectives, and personalizing leadership for them appropriately. The leader’s responsibility to the organization is to achieve its goals while upholding its expectations or standards. Every organization has a purpose, and that purpose is the reason why a leader strives to help people perform at their best. More importantly, the leader is responsible to act in alignment with the organization’s values while achieving that purpose. If an organization espouses a priority for work-life balance, the leader must achieve high performance while still guarding their followers’ time off.
When everything is going well and people are performing at a high level, the leader’s two responsibilities are aligned. The leadership actions good for the employees are the same actions that are good for the organization. However, things do not always go well. Sometimes individuals fail to meet the performance standards of the organization.
A struggling follower presents a challenge
When individuals fail to meet performance expectations, a leader’s two responsibilities suggest contradictory actions. The responsibility to an individual drives a leader to keep working to resolve the performance problem even if it means the organization’s performance continues to suffer. Conversely, the organizational responsibility would prompt a leader to quickly cut ties with an underperforming worker in order to keep the overall group performance where it needs to be.
A leader’s approach to finding the resolution of this conflict has a huge impact on the employee and the climate of the organization. A leader who quickly abandons struggling followers in the name of organizational performance will create an expectation of perfectionism. Followers will try to hide problems rather than address them, and they’ll work in fear of making any mistakes. Fear is not a leadership strategy.
Conversely, a leader who always backs a follower even if they act in conflict with the standards of the organization destroys those standards. That is likely to discourage the higher performing employees. Organizational performance will suffer if substandard behavior is tolerated.
Leadership in an organization is a quest for balance
The negative outcomes on either end of the spectrum mean that leaders must find a point of balance somewhere in the middle. With any struggling performer, finding the right balance between the individual and organizational responsibilities is critical to improving individual performance, guarding the organization’s values, and communicating the importance of both to everyone else.
The right strategy to find the point of balance is to start with the leader’s responsibility to the individual. Upon identifying that someone is underperforming, a leader should craft a plan to improve that person’s performance. There is always leadership work that can be done to help someone improve.
As a leader works with a follower, it is very important that the follower be clear about the situation. Being identified as an underperformer can be a traumatic event. It will be important for the leader to deliberately remind the follower that they’re committed to the follower’s success. The follower needs to be clear that the leader’s action has the goal of helping them improve, not of sending them out of the organization.
In an inclusive organization living with a lead everyone mindset, a leader should also be working to bring other leaders into the effort. A traditional organization always attributes follower underperformance to the follower, but an inclusive organization knows it’s possible the leader hasn’t found the right approach for the follower yet. The only way to guard against the misattribution of the performance problem is to deliberately expose the follower to other leaders. Perhaps another person in the organization can find the key to unlock the follower’s performance. It is in everyone’s best interest to bring other leaders into the effort, to give the follower the best chance of success and to rule out poor individual leadership as the source of the performance problem. Part of a leaders’ responsibility to the follower is to find out if they are the problem.
If the struggling follower is improving, the leader should continue to allow their responsibility to the follower to guide their actions.
However, if after a period of effort from several leaders in the organization, the individual’s performance continues to miss the mark, the balance of the leader’s responsibility begins to shift towards the organization. The leader should continue to make the maximum effort to help the follower, even at the cost of some organizational performance, but only until the follower reaches one of several possible leadership responsibility inflection points.
The follower reaches the first inflection point if they disengage from the improvement effort. The leader’s responsibility to the follower comes with an equal responsibility on the part of the follower. The follower needs to actively engage in the performance improvement as well. If the follower doesn’t take responsibility for necessary improvement or denies the performance problem exists in the first place, the leader cannot continue trying to develop them.
The follower reaches the second possible inflection point when it becomes apparent that despite effort on the follower’s part, they just aren’t going to be able to perform. This situation probably means that the organization put the wrong follower on the team or gave the follower the wrong role. Both of those errors belong to the leader, not the follower. For that reason, this inflection point is farther down the timeline than the first. A follower in this situation deserves a lengthy period of leadership engagement & personal development to see if they can grow into the role they’ve been assigned.
What happens when a leader’s responsibility shifts?
Whatever the reason, eventually a leader of an underperforming follower that isn’t improving will reach one of the responsibility inflection points. The inflection means that the leader’s responsibility priority has completed the shift from individual to the organization. The leader needs to act on behalf of the organization, even if it is contrary to the wishes of the follower. The exact action is likely to be determined by human resources policy or standard procedure. The leader’s goal must be to take that action in the manner that preserves or restores the greatest measure of dignity to the follower. The leader should strive for the follower to make a soft landing and find their new way ahead, even if it is in a new role or in a new organization.
The decision to shift leadership focus from developing a follower to guarding the performance of the organization is never easy. It may be the most emotionally draining decision a leader can make. However, the consequences of hiding from that decision are bad for the follower and organization alike. A leader’s best strategy to avoid needing to make that kind of decision is to fully engage the responsibility they have to every follower and to take vigorous leadership action to ensure that everyone is performing at the top of their potential.