I have never known anyone to wake up in the morning and think to themselves, “Today I want to do a really bad job at work.”
But the reality is sometimes individuals underperform. That’s a problem. But a bigger problem is when a team underperforms.
We tend to look at the individual when performance slips. We ask: what’s wrong with this person? Are they in the right role? Do they need more training? These are fair questions. But they’re often the wrong first questions. They locate the problem in the person when the problem is frequently in the system around them. The clarity of expectations. The quality of collaboration. The degree to which their work connects to something meaningful.
Teams don’t underperform because individuals secretly want to fail. They underperform because the conditions for good work were never built.
So what does it actually take to build those conditions? In my experience leading global learning teams, it comes down to four things.
You have to be grounded in strategy and business outcomes. Creative teams can lose themselves in craft. Great work that doesn’t serve the business isn’t great work. It’s expensive self-expression.
You have to know your people deeply. Not their skills inventory. Who they are, what they’re reaching toward, what they could become with the right encouragement and the right challenge. That knowledge is the foundation of every good leadership decision you’ll make.
You have to build standards and optimized processes. Creativity doesn’t thrive in chaos. It thrives in a well-designed container. Clear processes free people to do their best thinking instead of reinventing the wheel on every project.
You have to demand collaboration between the crafts. The handoffs between disciplines are where quality dies. Breaking down those walls isn’t a culture initiative. It’s a performance strategy.
Your team wants to do great work for you. Your role is to provide the causes and conditions to allow this to happen.
That’s leadership.