Why Your Employees Are Failing
By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter
For you who manage teams or lead organizations, there are reasons why your employees are not performing to your expectations
This is JobSearchTV on YouTube. Every day, millions of people look for work, and countless managers try to hire them. But a familiar frustration happens when a new hire comes on board, struggles to meet expectations, and inevitably quits or gets fired.
When that happens, you usually hear the same complaints from leadership. They claim the new employee lacked the necessary skills, they were lazy, or they were simply a bad fit for the company culture. But if you look closely at these failures, you find a consistent pattern.
With very few exceptions, the reason an employee fails rests entirely with the manager and the institution, not the person who was hired. People generally fail in a new role for two distinct reasons before they even sit at their desk. Either the hiring manager did not actually know how to evaluate the candidates they were interviewing, or they actively misrepresented the reality of the work environment.
If you manage a team and notice a constant cycle of underperformance and turnover, the talent pool isn’t the problem. The evaluation and management processes you rely on are broken. Let’s examine the first common defense a manager uses when a hire goes wrong, the claim that the employee lacks the particular skills needed for the job.
This diagram illustrates a standard hiring pipeline, showing how a candidate passes through multiple approval stages. It usually starts with a resume that gets screened by a talent acquisition team. Then the candidate meets with people from your specific department.
After that, they meet with you, the hiring manager. And finally, someone in a more senior position approves the hire. If a person meets with at least four different evaluators who all approve their hire, their lack of requisite skills cannot be entirely their own fault.
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The individual didn’t trick the company. The evaluators made a collective mistake. The second defense you often hear is that the employee simply lacks motivation.
Few people join an organization actually wanting to be incompetent or problematic. Usually, they arrive excited, having performed well at their previous jobs. But over time, they encounter severe institutional friction, co-workers with negative attitudes, a lack of tools to do the job, and heavy workloads that push them until they break.
Managers do not accidentally recruit unmotivated people. They take capable, excited individuals and fail to disclose the reality of the working environment, ultimately creating the lack of motivation they later complain about. In 1998, Jean-Francois Manzoni and Jean-Louis Barceau published an article in the Harvard Business Review detailing the set-up-to-fail syndrome.
The Harvard Business Review is a prominent management magazine published by Harvard University. Their research pointed out that an employee’s poor performance is often directly caused by their boss. This flowchart maps out the behavioral cycle they describe.
It typically begins with a good working relationship that fractures when the employee makes a minor mistake, like missing a single deadline. In response, the boss suddenly increases their level of supervision and scrutiny. The employee immediately senses this lack of confidence.
They might pick up their pace out of panic, but they also withdraw emotionally from the boss. They take on too much work to prove themselves, which leads to more failure and a habit of hiding or hoarding problems. The manager observes these new issues and adds even more controls and pressure.
This closed loop actively creates the exact hostile conditions that force the subordinate to leave the organization entirely. This dynamic often leads to a third excuse from leadership, blaming the failure on poor communication. An employee might receive completely incoherent instructions from a manager and say nothing.
But what looks like a failure to understand expectations is often a logical response to a history of being criticized. They stay quiet because the manager has built a culture where staff are terrified of asking for clarity and facing their boss’s scorn. When employees are perceived to be weak performers, they live down to the low expectations their managers hold for them.
It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, dictated by heavy-handed micromanagement. We can see the converse of this reality by looking at chef Gordon Ramsay on the reality television show Hell’s Kitchen. While throwing things and insulting staff should never be replicated in your workplace, Ramsay demands absolute excellence from the average cooks he brings onto his show.
By holding intensely high expectations, the contestants end up competing at a vastly higher level than they ever did at their home restaurants. Lance Secretan, a leading executive coach, outlines the mechanical difference between forceful management and true leadership. He separates it into two distinct concepts, motivation and inspiration.
According to Secretan, motivation operates as a push mechanism. It is the act of lighting a fire underneath someone to force them to move forward. Inspiration is a pull mechanism. It is the act of lighting a fire within someone, giving them the internal drive to push themselves toward a shared goal. If you are leading a team and struggling with constant turnover, it is possible that years of institutional friction have tempered your own internal fire, leaving you burned out and cynical. True leadership requires you to refuse to drag your team down into that same burnout.
You have to take accountability for your own environment, rekindle that internal fire, and learn how to inspire your staff to greatness, instead of blaming them for failing in a broken system. So that’s today’s show. I hope you found it helpful.
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ABOUT JEFF ALTMAN, THE BIG GAME HUNTER
People hire Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter to provide No BS Career Advice globally because he makes many things in peoples’ careers
easier. Those things can involve job search, hiring more effectively, managing and leading better, career transition, as well as advice about resolving workplace issues. He is the host of “No BS Job Search Advice Radio,” the #1 podcast in iTunes for job search with over 3000 episodes.
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