When was the last time you sat down with the person who isn’t hitting the mark and asked what’s working, what’s not working, and what’s missing, instead of quietly building the case to let them go? Most leaders skip that conversation entirely. They watch the numbers slide for a few more weeks, feel their own patience run out, and start treating the exit as inevitable. I understand the instinct. An employee who isn’t performing drags down everyone working around them, and the rest of the team notices long before a manager admits it out loud. But across 35+ years and 500+ organizations, I’ve found something that surprises most owners the first time they hear it: most underperformance is an accountability gap nobody closed, not the hiring mistake they assume it is. Gallup’s own research on workplace feedback (opens in new tab) backs that up: just one in four employees strongly agree they receive valuable feedback from the people they work with, and the ones who do are five times as likely to be engaged, 57% less likely to be burned out, and 48% less likely to already be job hunting. Flip that finding around, and it says something uncomfortable. Three out of four employees are trying to do their job without ever hearing, clearly, what needs to change before it becomes a firing conversation. For a business with ten employees rather than ten thousand, that gap compounds fast: one underperformer is a bigger share of total output, and the manager and the struggling employee usually sit close enough to see each other’s frustration every single day. Somewhere underneath most struggling employees is a leader who never wrote down what they expected, then acted surprised when a standard nobody stated didn’t get met. Culture defaults to the personality of whoever’s running the business. So does performance. If nobody defined the standard, the employee didn’t fail a test. They failed a test nobody handed them.
Let that person go if they're late to work, if they're not being productive, if they're not following your expectations for weeks. It's time to let them go.
— Gary Henson, Founder of Gary Henson Group
Years ago, I had a general manager working for one of my clients who I told, flatly, to let two underperformers go. “Let that person go if they’re late to work, if they’re not being productive, if they’re not following your expectations for weeks,” I told him. “It’s time to let them go.” He refused. “I can train this person to be the person that I need them to be,” he said. I didn’t expect him to be right, and I told him so directly. But he had a knack most managers don’t have: he could see something in a struggling employee that nobody else could see, including me, and he had the patience to develop it instead of just hoping it would show up on its own. Over time, he trained several people I would have written off into performers who looked, in his own words, almost miraculous. I want to be clear about what this story is not: a case for never firing anyone. That same general manager let people go too, when someone truly couldn’t or wouldn’t adapt to the structure of accountability the role required, and he was right to. Accountability means some people leave, and an owner has to have the stomach for that, or the whole exercise is theater. The difference between the people he coached into strong performers and the people he eventually let go came down to coachability, not talent: whether the person genuinely wanted to improve once someone finally told them the truth, and whether the manager had ever really coached them, sitting down and naming the specific behavior and its impact, instead of telling them once to do better and hoping the message landed on its own.
employees strongly agree they receive valuable feedback from the people they work with, according to Gallup. Gallup →
Before you decide someone can’t be coached, ask yourself three questions honestly. Have you made your expectations clear, in writing, not just implied in a hallway conversation? Is this a skill gap, something training and time can close, or a will gap, someone who’s been told exactly what’s expected and simply isn’t willing to meet it? And have you actually coached them, naming the specific behavior and checking in on progress on a set schedule, or did you tell them once and wait to see if it stuck? One useful opening move, drawn from SHRM’s own reporting on underperformance (opens in new tab): name the specific pattern out loud (missed deadlines, a dropped handoff, whatever it is) and ask the employee directly what’s getting in the way, rather than opening with a warning. That question does two things at once. It states the actual behavior instead of a feeling, and it treats the employee as someone worth asking, not someone already halfway out the door. The same reporting puts a real number on what it costs to skip that work. Managers spend roughly 10 hours a week, according to research from staffing firm Robert Half, coaching or working around an employee who isn’t performing, and replacing that person instead costs an average of $4,129 and 42 days to fill the role, according to SHRM’s own Human Capital Benchmarking data, before the new hire has learned a single thing about how your company actually operates. Coaching first isn’t softness; it’s usually the cheaper option, and usually the faster one too.
This is exactly the discipline built into the Inside-Out Method™: expectations don’t live in your head; they get written down in a real standard everyone can be measured against, so a struggling employee and their manager are working from the same page instead of a guess. A poster on the wall does nothing. A written standard that gets referenced in an actual, regular conversation does. The next time you catch yourself building the mental case to let someone go, ask the coachability question first. It won’t save every employee, and it shouldn’t. But it will tell you, honestly, whether you’re looking at a hiring mistake or a leadership one you still have time to fix.
