Experienced managers among you will likely recognize a situation that frequently occurs in various meetings with underperforming employees:

You, a manager: “Did you do what I asked you to do last week?”
Underperforming Employees: “Unfortunately, no. I didn’t have time.”

What should you do in this situation? And what if this is not a one-time thing but something that haunts all of your weeks? And what if the manager’s nightmare comes true, and not meeting deadlines (or, worse, not doing the tasks at all) becomes a cultural norm in the team? This post provides a prescription on how to bring individuals, and even entire teams, back on the path of productivity, a crucial aspect of successful management. It’s time to take a proactive approach.

Solution 1 with underperforming employees: Do nothing

Doing nothing is the most commonly applied solution. You don’t always have to react when someone doesn’t complete a task, especially if it’s less significant. Even the best of us sometimes drop the ball. If your employee, who hasn’t failed at anything for a year and a half, misses a task—maybe it’s not worth pointing it out. It might even be worth showing support and asking if everything is okay to show that you care about them. Perhaps they have personal issues or are unwell.

A simple act, like bringing someone a cup of tea in a difficult moment, can work wonders for team morale—and besides, it’s just a kind human gesture. I believe that managers should balance their reactions. Extremes are equally harmful, whether nitpicking everyone over everything or ignoring everything.

Solution 2 with underperforming employees: Try to explain

It often happens that when an employee fails, the boss asks:

“You missed the deadline. Why?”

Or, worse:

“You missed the deadline. Are you out of your mind?”

Those kinds of questions usually lead to the employee coming up with a convincing excuse and seemingly objective reasons for not completing the task, especially when this dialogue takes place in front of others. In such a setting, saying, “I failed because I didn’t feel like working” or “I needed two days to recover after a bachelor party,” risks public humiliation, which managers should avoid.

Typically, such conversations end in one of two ways:

Scenario 1:

The manager spends 20 minutes arguing with the employee and “wins the argument”—often at the cost of humiliating the underperforming employee and looking like a jerk in front of the team. Nobody wins, but everyone, including bystanders, has wasted time and will have much less desire to continue working together the next day.

Scenario 2:

The underperforming employee delivers an excuse that wins the argument. The unspoken message that reaches the team is: “You can miss deadlines as long as you come up with a good enough excuse.” As a result, everyone starts practicing their excuse-making skills.

Don’t go down this road. Instead, try the following approaches:

Solution 3 with underperforming employees: A self-assessment

If we have a good team and not slackers avoiding work, missed deadlines are at least partially the manager’s fault. In this situation, it’s worth asking yourself a few questions, such as:

  • Did I make sure that the underperforming employees understood what they were supposed to do?
  • Did I agree on the deadline with the employee, and did we make sure it was realistic? As a manager, it’s crucial to set realistic deadlines considering the employee’s workload and potential obstacles. Does the underperforming employee understand the task’s priority, the context of why it needs to be done, its dependencies, and its impact on other things?
  • Was the underperforming employee equipped with the knowledge and tools to complete the task?
  • Did the employee know whom to turn to in case of problems or obstacles?
  • Should they inform me in advance if the deadline is at risk?

Encouraging open communication about potential issues or delays can help prevent missed deadlines and foster a positive work environment. After a self-assessment, we will know what we could have done better to avoid repeating our mistakes.

Solution 4 with underperforming employees: Taking responsibility for the missed deadline

Surprisingly, it is often worth taking responsibility for the situation yourself, saying something like:

“We missed the deadline. As a manager, I take full responsibility for this screw-up. I am trying to figure out what went wrong. There may have been some objective obstacles. Or I didn’t communicate the deadline and the execution of the task enough. Tell me how I can ensure this doesn’t happen again.”

In this scenario, we’ll get feedback and solve the problem for the future while also setting an excellent example of taking responsibility for everything that happens to us—not just what we did (or didn’t do). This approach can help shape a culture of accountability and responsibility within the team.

In scenarios where it isn’t our fault, and we’re working with a good team, in most cases, we will hear something from the employee like:

“You couldn’t have done anything to help. It’s my responsibility. I missed the deadline; I’m sorry. In the future, I will do X, Y, and Z to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”

Great. Now, we’ve sent a strong message to the bystanders that we take ownership of this team – and we did it in a failure context, which makes it especially hard to own our shortcomings. This is how good cultural norms start forming in a team. In this scenario, all that’s left is to set a very short (but realistic) deadline for completing the task and holding the employee accountable. Notably, the manager doesn’t even have to put this deadline.

The above example shouldn’t apply to trivial matters.

Solution 5 with underperforming employees: Personnel-related decisions

If someone hasn’t done what they’re supposed to at all—meaning they didn’t even start the task—the best solution is usually to remove that task from the person altogether. Typically, we are dealing with someone who procrastinates on this type of task, lacks competence, or doesn’t have room in their calendar to complete it. Maybe they are the right person, but their set of responsibilities needs to change because they can’t handle these kinds of tasks. Or maybe they need more training?

Of course, the above methods are insufficient to handle a team member who regularly fails to meet deadlines, but there shouldn’t be a place in your organization for such people. Moreover, this should be obvious to everyone on board. If you have doubts, effort to figure out what is going on is your responsibility. You can also ask a consultant, like the one writing those words – sometimes it’s difficult to read the label from inside of the bottle.

Some of you may find this text disappointing because I haven’t provided easy hacks for changing other people’s behavior. Exactly. That’s the lesson here. Stop looking for easy and convenient solutions. We usually have much less influence over others than we think—but we have complete control over what we are responsible for.