How to Fix an Underperforming Team

A common mistake leaders make when a team underperforms is going hunting for the weak link, but they often forget to look at the person managing the team.

A few years back, I was looking at our budget versus actuals, and one department immediately stood out.

In January and February, it was doing roughly $186,000 in monthly revenue.

The following month that dropped to around $155,000 and then $138,000.

And then it fell all the way down to roughly $75,000.

When you look at a graph like that, It is really easy to look at the people doing the work and assume that they're the problem.

In this case, we had three people on the team responsible for servicing our clients.

So naturally, you would start asking whether they're doing enough, whether the quality of the work has dropped, or whether the team itself just isn't performing.

But when we actually looked closer, those three team members, they weren't the real problem.

The real problem was with the person leading the team.

The manager responsible for that department, let's just call her Jennifer, wasn't paying close enough attention to the numbers.

She wasn't looking at where revenue was supposed to be compared to where it actually was.

And she wasn't identifying clients whose contracts were coming to an end early enough to be able to replace that business.

So while the team continued to do the work that was happening in front of them, there wasn't enough happening upstream to protect the department from what was coming.

And by the time the revenue hit $75,000 a month, we weren't dealing with one bad month anymore.

We're looking at a pattern that had been developing for months.

Here's what most leaders miss.

In my book, I split every role in a company into two.

There's me work, where you are responsible for producing an outcome yourself.

And then there is we work, not where you work.

This is where you're responsible for leading the people who produce the work.

Those three team members, they were in me roles, and they were doing their me work.

Servicing clients, delivering, staying on top of what was in front of them.

That part didn't fail.

The manager was in a we role, and the we work...