Fixing Underperforming Teams

Fixing Underperforming Teams

Diagnose the root cause of dysfunction and take decisive action to restore high performance.

Help the user with fixing underperforming teams using insights from 12 guests and posts across Lenny's Podcast and Newsletter.

How to Help

1. Diagnose the source - Help the user distinguish between leadership failure, skill gaps, or structural strategy issues.
2. Identify complicity - Guide the leader in reflecting on how their own patterns are contributing to the team struggles.
3. Draft an action plan - Structure a sequence of interventions ranging from process changes to talent decisions.
4. Prepare for hard conversations - Provide scripts and frameworks for delivering direct feedback or handling terminations.

Core Principles

Apply the Enthusiastic Rehire Test

Uri Levine: "Every time that you hire someone new, mark your calendars for 30 days down the road and ask yourself one question, knowing what I know today, would I hire this person? If the answer is no, fire them immediately."

Regularly ask if you would still hire an individual today knowing what you know now. Admitting a hiring mistake early prevents cultural decay.

Distinguish Skill from Will

Anuj Rathi: "There are only three reasons why things do not happen the way you want them to happen as a leader. You can look at a person, and you would say either that person can't do, which is a capability issue, or they won't do, which is a motivation or an alignment issue, or they were not set up to do, which is really your problem that you didn't set up the ways of working now design properly."

Systematically determine if underperformance is a lack of ability (can't do) or a lack of motivation (won't do). This determines whether to coach or move the person.

Align the Five Elements of Change

Bangaly Kaba: "I found this framework travels with me. It's got these five components to it, vision, skills, incentives, resources, action plan, and you need all of those to have change. And then within those buckets you've got to figure out what are the right levers that you need to pull? What are the things that are missing?"

Audit failing initiatives against vision, skills, incentives, resources, and action plans. If any one of these is missing, the turnaround will fail.

Use Goals as Diagnostics

Christina Wodtke: "So, I say OKRs are more of a vitamin, they're not a medicine. So, if you take OKRs and you're like, 'Oh, this will fix everything that's wrong with you.' No, that's not going to happen. It's just going to reveal everything that's wrong with your company."

Treat failed OKRs or goals as signals of underlying strategy or safety issues rather than the root problem itself. Verify strategy before blaming the goal-setting process.

Stop Masking Manager Failures

From "Five principles for successfully managing managers": "Even though the skip leader subconsciously (or even explicitly) knows that the line manager is struggling, confronting the issue head-on is hard—especially as a new skip. So the natural inclination is to quietly solve the issue themselves, pull double duty by taking on part of the line manager’s job, and then provide cover for the direct-report manager’s performance with others."

Resist the urge to do the work of a struggling manager. Covering for them prevents organizational visibility and stops you from fixing the actual leadership gap.