Why your best people aren't performing

Every task you assign to someone lands in one of four places.

They either have the skills and the motivation to do it - in which case you can delegate it and walk away.

Or they have the motivation but not the skills - they want to do it, they just don't know how yet.

Or they have the skills but not the motivation - they know exactly how to do it, they just don't care enough right now to do it well.

Or they have neither, and you're in real trouble.

Most managers only have one mode. They delegate everything regardless of where the person is on that grid, and then get frustrated when things don't come back right. Or they micromanage everything, which burns them out and makes the employee feel suffocated. Either way, the result is the same: the manager ends up doing work that doesn't belong to them, the employee doesn't grow, and the whole thing grinds to a halt.

The move is to diagnose before you prescribe.

If someone has the motivation but is missing the skills, you support them. You show them how. You pair them up with SOPs and walkthroughs and examples of what good looks like, and you let their enthusiasm carry them through the learning curve. These people are a gift. They want to be great. They just need the map.

If someone has the skills but is missing the motivation, you coach them. And coaching doesn't mean giving a pep talk or telling them to try harder. It means connecting the dots for them - why does this task matter? How does it tie into their role, their goals, the bigger picture of what they're trying to build for themselves? People aren't unmotivated in a vacuum. They're unmotivated because they can't see how the thing you're asking them to do connects to anything they care about. Show them the connection and watch what happens.

If someone has neither the skills nor the motivation, you have to micromanage temporarily - and there's a specific way to do it that works instead of just creating resentment. You do the first 10% of the task with them so they can see how it starts. They do the middle 80%. You come back and do the last 10% together, reviewing their work and showing them how to close the gap. It's intensive. It's time-consuming. But it's the only way to get someone from that quadrant into a place where you can eventually delegate to them.

90% of the tasks your direct reports are doing need to be in that delegation quadrant. If you're below that, your entire day is going to be consumed by supporting, coaching, and micromanaging work that should be running without you. You'll feel busy. You'll feel essential. And you'll be completely stuck, because you're doing your team's job instead of your own.

Those three circles - what the role requires, where the employee is today, and what the employee personally wants - all three have to overlap. The role requirements are basically immovable. That's the job. But where the person is today and where they want to go? Those are the levers. Your job as a manager is to bring those three circles together, one conversation at a time, until the overlap is big enough that the person is performing at a high level.

When you get this right - when your team is mostly in the delegation quadrant, when people are self-driven because the work connects to something they care about, when your managers know which tool to use for which situation - you stop being the bottleneck. Delegation gets clean. Performance compounds. And you get your time back.

Tomorrow, I’m hosting a workshop about how I find where profit is hiding, how I increase team capacity when everyone says they're full, which clients I upsell and which I fire, and how I build the dashboards that let me run my agency on data instead of guesswork.

Full details here →

Last chance to grab a seat.

Nick

P.S.

I break this down this emails topic in more detail in my recent YouTube video below 👇