# Episode 230 - Diagnosing Underperformance: Why Good People Underperform

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Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/leadership-today-practical-tips-for-leaders-572049/episode-230-diagnosing-underperformance-why-good-people-underperform.md
Podcast: [Leadership Today - Practical Tips For Leaders](https://stenobird.com/podcast/leadership-today-practical-tips-for-leaders-572049)
Published: 2026-07-03T19:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://leadershiptoday.libsyn.com/episode-230-diagnosing-underperformance-why-good-people-underperform
Audio file: https://op3.dev/e/traffic.libsyn.com/clean/secure/leadershiptoday/Leadership_Today_-_Episode_230.mp3?dest-id=781896
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Duration seconds: 485

## Resource

Summary Underperformance is often treated as a motivation problem when the real issue may be a lack of clarity, capability or confidence. Effective leaders resist the temptation to jump to conclusions and instead focus on understanding what's driving performance. By diagnosing before prescribing, asking better questions and creating clear expectations, leaders can prevent many performance issues before they occur. Transcript Hello and welcome to episode 230 of the Leadership Today Podcast, where each week we share practical tips to improve your leadership. This week we explore four areas that will help you to diagnose likely performance issues before they become a problem. When someone in our team starts underperforming, it's remarkable how quickly we jump to conclusions. We see missed deadlines, lower quality work, reduced initiative or declining engagement and often assume we already know what's going on. They must have lost motivation. They've become complacent. They don't care as much as they used to. Before long, we've developed a story about the cause of the problem, often with very little evidence. One of the biggest mistakes leaders make when managing performance is assuming they know why someone is underperforming. We observe behaviour and immediately start interpreting it. The challenge is that while behaviour is visible, the causes behind that behaviour are often hidden. Two people can display exactly the same performance issue for completely different reasons. I was recently facilitating a workshop on managing underperformance and asked participants to think about someone in their team whose performance wasn't where they wanted it to be. The leaders could easily describe what they were seeing. They talked about missed deadlines, lower quality work, avoidanc…

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## Transcript

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