2.165 What to Fix First When Team Performance Is Holding Growth Back

When team performance drops, it can be tempting to look straight at the individual and assume they are the problem. But in a growing business, performance issues are often a sign that something else is getting in the way, such as unclear priorities, a lack of management rhythm, messy workflows, workload pressure, or accountability being discussed before the foundations are in place. 

In this episode, Karen talks through the order she would generally look at when team performance is not where it needs to be, so you can work out what to fix first without trying to solve everything at once. 

In today’s episode, you will learn about: 

• Why team performance issues are not always individual performance issues 
• Why clarity around roles, priorities and expectations should usually come first 
• How managers can create a simple rhythm for performance conversations 
• Why regular one on one conversations make feedback easier and more useful 
• How messy workflows, rework and unclear approvals can make a good team look like an underperforming team 
• Why accountability only works when expectations are clear, managers follow through and the workload is realistic enough for people to succeed 
• The difference between pressure and accountability, and why that matters for small and medium sized businesses 

This episode is especially useful if your team is working hard, but performance still feels harder than it should. It will help you step back, look at the foundations, and choose a practical place to start. 

If you need support to work through team performance, clarity, management rhythm or accountability in your business, HR consultants like Amplify HR can help. 

Visit Amplify HR for more insights and resources:
https://www.amplifyhr.com.au 

Make sure to subscribe to stay updated with new releases every second Monday! 

Get our free eBook packed with practical strategies to attract, engage, and retain top talent. Perfect for business owners and leaders focused on building a thriving team. Download it at amplifyhr.com.au/downloadable/find-grow-keep

Transcript

Episode 165 Transcript 

Welcome to episode 165. In our last episode, I discussed what your team performance might really be telling you. You know, when performance drops, particularly in a growing business, it's not always about the individual. Sometimes it's actually a symptom of something deeper in the business, like issues with role clarity, leadership, workload, accountability, or just the way the work is flowing through the business. And so it's actually an important mindset shift because once we stop treating every performance issue as potentially a people issue, we can start to get a much clearer view of what might actually be going on. But of course, once we get to that point, the next question is, okay, so now what do I do with that information? Where do I start? And that's where we can get stuck because although we can see things aren't working as well as they should, and we're feeling that drag in the business, you know, we know the team's not at the level that they need to be. 
But we've got multiple things going on. We're pretty busy people. It can just be hard to know what to tackle first. So we don't want to try and fix everything at once. And we don't want to jump straight into performance managing the person, you know, just because they're visible and we said they're not performing the way that they should be. 
If we're not fixing those other things like role clarity, then it's not going to help. Now, of course, sometimes there will be a performance issue with the individual. I'm not saying you don't performance manage, but you just need to check the basics first so that you're solving the right problem. So in this episode, I want to talk about the 
order that we would generally look at when team performance is an issue and when we're starting to look at those things like clarity around priorities. And so that is where I would start if I'm looking at a team and thinking, well, you know, I thought they'd be performing better, they'd be more effective. 
And the first question is, okay, you know, have we actually given them the right clarity around their priorities, the roles and the expectations on their roles? And then once we say, yes, we're comfortable with that, then we could look at the management of that team. Are they leading it effectively? 
And if we're ticking that box, then we look at, okay, how does the work flow through the business? Because sometimes performance is being held back by friction, rework, capacity issues. And if we're good there, then that's where we look at performance and recognition and say, okay, you know, do we have accountability in the business? So let's start with clarity because this should really nearly always be where you should begin. If people aren't clear on what they're responsible for, what matters most, what good looks like and how decisions get made, then everything else just becomes harder. So you can have the right people but still get poor performance if they're not clear on what they think they should be doing. 
You can have really capable managers, but still get frustration if priorities are changing every 5 minutes, if no one's really sure what is the actual priority. You can have really good intentions across a team, but still have things fall over because they're just confused around the ownership. And this is a really common issue in growing businesses because things that worked informally when the business was smaller, often stop working as a team gets bigger. It's easy in the early days, people would just ask the founder, they could work things out of the fly, they fill the gaps as they appear. There's enough of that shared context, so this works. But as the business grows, more people come in, there's more work, more decisions. 
So that informality actually creates a lot of ambiguity. So the first question I would ask is, are people clear on what they're accountable for? And I'm not just talking about, do they have some vague job description? I mean, in a practical day-to-day sense, do they know what success looks like in their role? 
Do they know the outcomes that they are responsible for? Do they know what they can make decisions on their own and what needs to be escalated? Do they know what matters when everything feels urgent? Because if the answer is no, or even maybe, then that's how we need to begin. And the fix may not be huge. It may just be sitting down with the leadership team and agreeing on the top three priorities for the quarter. 
And then making sure that we're communicating that out so that everyone understands what matters most. It might be doing some clarifying work on who owns which responsibilities, where the handovers are, where the tasks are being double-handled or dropped. It might be making sure managers and team members are aligned on what does good look like. Because without that clarity, it's really hard to hold people accountable in a fair way. And that's a point I'd like to emphasize, because if people can't consistently deliver across their expectations, it's because they do not understand them, then pushing harder is not going to change anything. So actually the best performance improvement strategy at that point is less confusion. 
The second area I would look at is management. And as part of that, looking at the management rhythm, because once you've started to improve clarity, the next question is, are our managers able to drive performance in the right way? And this is a common gap in small and medium sized businesses because a lot of managers have been promoted because they're technically strong, they're reliable. 
They're experienced at the job, and they may care really deeply about the business of the team, and they're trying to do their best. But that doesn't mean that they automatically know how to manage people, that they know how to set expectations, give feedback, address underperformance, coach someone through a challenge, or create accountability without micromanaging. 
So what often happens is that managers end up at one of two extremes. They either avoid the issue and just hope things will improve on their own, or they step in too heavily because they feel things slipping and they don't know another way to get the control back. And of course, neither of those approaches works very well. So if performance is holding growth back, I'll be asking, are our managers helping performance lift? 
You know, or are they just reacting when things go wrong? It's not about blaming them, it's just being honest about have we given our managers the support, tools and confidence to lead performance well. You know, we can put huge pressure on our managers without really developing them. And then we get surprised when they're avoiding difficult conversations, when they don't have consistent standards, 
or when good people leave because they're frustrated. So sometimes improving performance is less about trying to push the team harder and more about making the managers stronger. So a practical starting point here is to say, okay, what are our manager rhythms in this business? And just keep it really simple. It doesn't need to be some big corporate process with lots of forms. It is about managers having 
regular conversations with their people about priorities, progress, roadblocks and support. Now, depending on the team and the person, that could be weekly, it could be fortnightly, it could be monthly, it will depend on the role and the pace of the business. But the important thing is that it happens consistently and it's not just discussion about work product. 
So a really useful one-on-one conversation can be as simple as asking, you know, what are your priorities at the moment? What's getting in the way? What support do you need? Is there anything unclear? Is there any feedback that you'd like to talk through? You know, it doesn't need to be complicated, but it's just when we teach our managers to have those conversations and they happen regularly, 
Performance stops being something that's just discussed when there's a problem and it becomes just a normal rhythm of work. And that helps enormously with clarity and accountability. So I would also encourage managers to set a small number of clear goals with each direct report. So not a big list that no one ever looks at again, that's not helpful. Three to five clear goals for 1/4 is more than enough. And the point is that the manager and the team member should both be able to say, this is what matters most and this is how we're going to know if we're on track. And then feedback can happen early, not six months later, not at the annual review, not once everyone's always annoyed. 
It can happen at the time and be specific and really timely and really helpful feedback because that is one of the simplest way to improve performance. But it's also one of the things that managers avoid the most because they haven't done the clarity piece and they're not confident. 
So if you want performance to lift, don't just tell your managers, hey, your team needs to perform better. We need to give them routines and support so that they can lead those outcomes. 
The third area I'd look at is the flow of work, because sometimes performance is not low because people are doing a bad job. Sometimes they are really busy, but it's just the work going through is really messy. There are competing priorities, people are interrupted, decisions are slow, work's bouncing back and forth, might be rework because directions are changing, people aren't sure who's doing what, you know, too much reliance on one or two key people. And all of that creates friction. So from the outside, it can look like the team is underperforming, but from the inside, the team feels like they're working really hard in a system that's making it really hard for them to do good work. So the question I would ask here is, you know, is there one bit of friction that we can remove this month? And then once we've done that, let's repeat that next month. And you know, this is helpful because it stops us trying to fix everything. We can just look for that most obvious point of issue. You know, where does work keep getting stuck? Where are approvals slowing down? Where is work being redone? 
Where are briefs unclear, where are the priorities constantly changing? And once we can start to go through those questions, it'll give us a lot of information. Again, the fix doesn't need to be huge. Sometimes it's just pausing some low value work so people can focus on what is driving growth. It might be agreeing that there's only three priorities that actually matter this quarter. 
It might be clarifying who can approve certain decisions. It might be improving A handover between people. So the key is to remove that point of friction before adding more pressure. Because if people are overloaded, they feel like they're overworked already, and then we say, you know what, we actually need you to lift even more, that's just not helpful, it creates more frustration and actually lowers performance. So what we need to do to make performance better is to make it easier. And that's not about lowering standards, it's just cleaning that path so people can meet those standards that we need. The 4th area I'd look at is making performance and recognition more visible. And this of course means that we need to have accountability in the business. And accountability is a word that sometimes people feel is used a lot and isn't very helpful because sometimes there'll be leaders that will say accountability, but what they mean is those people aren't following that through. 
Those people are letting the whole business down because they're not doing the right thing. But the thing is, accountability problems often sit within the first three things that I just talked about, because if people are unclear, how can they be accountable for their work? If the manager's avoiding conversations, people don't know that they're not doing what they should be doing. 
If the business is overloading and making the team chaotic, how do we have accountability? It's inconsistent because everyone's in reactive mode. So the time we get to accountability, we want to make sure we're not just treating it like a standalone problem. And I've seen so many businesses say, well, you know, our value is accountability, now we need to work on it. 
But the better question is, do we have the foundations in place to make accountability possible? Because accountability only works when expectations are clear, managers follow through, and the workload is realistic enough for people to succeed. And once we have those things, then we can have consistency in what gets recognised and what gets challenged. And so then accountability becomes easier and fairer. So how do we make performance visible in a way that's useful? I would start by choosing simple measures that help people understand progress, not just measures that make them feel watched. You know, that could be things like project delivery, customer outcomes, quality, sales. The right measures are going to depend on the role and the business, but the principle is the same. People should know what matters, how they're tracking, and how they will be recognized. And recognition is important because performance is not just about correcting what's not performing. It's about noticing and reinforcing what's going really well. 
If someone demonstrates behaviours you want more of, you need to name it. You know, if they're showing ownership, we need to recognise it. If a manager has a really good feedback conversation early instead of avoiding it, we should be reinforcing that too, because what we recognise gets repeated. And then when expectations 
that we can follow through consistently. And that doesn't mean being harsh. It's about being clear, fair and steady. And that's the difference between accountability and pressure. So pressure just says, you need to do better. Accountability says, this is what's expected. This is why it matters. This is where we're not meeting the mark. And this is what we need to do next. So this is much more useful and much fairer. 
So if I was to bring all of that together, the reason I recommend this order is because businesses often start in the wrong place. They start with accountability when they should have started with clarity. So in managing performance with an individual, when the real issue is that they haven't had their expectations set properly. So we push the team harder, but the real issue is workload. Or we introduce more reporting when the team is already drowning in multiple unclear priorities. So if team performance is holding growth back in your business, try not to jump straight into fixing everything at once. Go to the foundations. Get clear on what good performance looks like in the roles or the workflows that matters most. Check whether the managers are having regular conversations, setting goals and giving feedback. Look at the way that work is flowing and remove the most obvious friction. And then we can make performance recognition visible so everyone knows what matters, how they're tracking what good looks like. And if you're listening and you're thinking, yes, we need to do all those things, but we just don't know how we're going to do that. We don't have the time to do that. And that is really common in smaller business. So a simple way is just to choose where to start is to ask, you know, what's causing the most confusion right now? Where's the most friction? Where are people wasting their energy? 
Where are managers avoiding the most conversations? Where's the work slowing down the most? And that should give you a starting point. And of course, you know, if you just don't have the capacity to do this within your business and you need some assistance, then that's where HR consultants like Amplify HR can step in and help you to do that. So as we head into this new financial year, it's a really useful time to step back and ask what would actually help performance lift in a practical way. And that's not about creating more activities, it's about really getting into what those issues are and what we can do to help lift performance across the whole business. So if you want some practical support around that, we do have a free guide on our website, which you can find in the free tools and guides section at Amplify HR.com.au. And if you found this episode helpful, I would love it if you could leave a rating or a review over Apple Podcasts or Spotify so another business owner or leader can find the podcast to help with their business too. Thank you so much for joining me. If you have any feedback, questions or ideas for future episodes, head on over to amplifyhr.com.au or connect with me on LinkedIn and we can start a conversation.