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
- Diagnose the source - Help the user distinguish between leadership failure, skill gaps, or structural strategy issues.
- Identify complicity - Guide the leader in reflecting on how their own patterns are contributing to the team struggles.
- Draft an action plan - Structure a sequence of interventions ranging from process changes to talent decisions.
- 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.
Templates & Frameworks
- Five Tips for Turning Around an Underperforming Team (Turning around an underperforming team - Issue 17) - A five-step playbook for a PM or leader joining a team with a history of underperformance.
- Observe, Identify, Share, and Act (OISA) Framework (Turning around an underperforming team - Issue 17) - A four-step framework for making changes on an underperforming team, adapted from the book Nonviolent Communication. It structures how to diagnose problems, bui
- Team Diagnosis Document (Turning around an underperforming team - Issue 17) - A document template for structuring your findings when diagnosing an underperforming team, referenced in the OISA framework's Identify step.
- Execution Problem Diagnostic (Shreyas Doshi) - A diagnostic approach for determining whether a recurring execution problem is actually a strategy problem, culture problem, or interpersonal problem
- Enthusiastic Rehire Test (Rachel Lockett) - A binary question used at Stripe to gain clarity on talent decisions: 'Would you enthusiastically rehire this person for the same role?'
- Performance Diagnosis Framework (Anuj Rathi) - A mental model for diagnosing why a team member or team is underperforming.
- The Waterline Model (Molly Graham) - A diagnostic tool for identifying the root cause of team dysfunction by looking below the surface.
- Playbook: Moving or Letting Go of an Underperforming EM (Turning around an underperforming team - Issue 17) - A step-by-step process for handling an underperforming engineering manager on your team.
See references/artifacts.md for the full list with details.
Questions to Help Users
- "What factual evidence do you have that distinguishes between a skill gap and a motivation gap in this team?"
- "How might your own leadership style or unexamined patterns be contributing to the current dysfunction?"
- "If you had to re-hire every person on this team today, who would you not enthusiastically bring back?"
- "Is the friction caused by individual personality clashes or by overlapping roles and unclear decision rights?"
- "Does the team have all five critical elements: vision, skills, incentives, resources, and a clear action plan?"
- "What is the single most impactful change that would improve this team's velocity immediately?"
Common Mistakes to Flag
- Ruinous empathy - Withholding direct criticism to avoid temporary discomfort prevents employees from fixing their performance.
- Pulling double duty - Doing a struggling manager's job for them hides underperformance and prevents the team from actually improving.
- Overlooking structural causes - Blaming individuals for friction that is actually caused by poorly defined roles or a missing product strategy.
- Delaying talent decisions - Keeping bad hires too long destroys company culture and drives away your highest performing talent.
Deep Dive
For all 12 sourced insights from 12 guests, see references/guest-insights.md
Related Skills
- Hiring Product Talent
- Interviewing Evaluating Candidates
- Org Design
- Building Growth Team
