The People Were Trying. The Work Was Getting in the Way.

One of the things I wanted to do differently with When Performance Stalls was let people actually see a performance problem happening before I started explaining what might be causing it.

Because that’s usually how it happens at work.

Nobody walks into a meeting and announces, “We have a System Cues problem.”

Instead, a customer gets sent to the wrong place. Two employees give different answers. Someone has created their own spreadsheet because the system doesn’t quite work. There’s a process everyone follows even though nobody really thinks it makes sense anymore.

Nothing looks catastrophic.

It just looks harder than it should be.

There’s a scene early in When Performance Stalls where Jenna walks through River & Ridge Outfitters, the company her family built. She doesn’t tell anyone who she is. She just watches what happens.

This is part of what she sees.

From When Performance Stalls

Near the rentals window, a couple in matching windbreakers walked up carrying hiking gear. They looked tired in the specific way people do after spending the whole day trying to handle things correctly.

“We just need to pay for an extra rental day,” the man told the rentals associate.

“Oh, returns go to the front,” the associate said, pointing toward the registers. “They handle all payments.”

The couple carried the gear to the front counter. The clerk there gave a small wince.

“I need the rentals intake sheet before I can check anything in,” he said. “That part goes through the rentals desk.”

“But he said you could,” the woman began, then stopped herself. A second later she smiled the way people do when something simple turns out not to be simple.

“Okay. Back we go.”

“I’m so sorry,” the clerk said. He sounded sincere and slightly embarrassed. “I’ll call the rentals desk.”

He picked up the phone at the front counter and placed the call.

Three feet behind him, the phone at the rentals window rang while no one answered it.

The couple turned back toward rentals, then toward the front again, stuck in a slow loop.

No one was rude.

Everyone was just handling their own piece.

Jenna wrote:

Payment ping-pong. Process handoff has no owner.

A few minutes later, she noticed the whiteboard beside the rentals door. The information on it was several days old, but it was still hanging there where employees were expected to use it.

Then she reached the checkout line.

The card reader beeped, blinked, and displayed an error.

“Sorry,” the clerk said. “She’s got a personality.”

“What’s the trick?” the customer asked.

“Cancel, chip, tap, then we both hold our breath for three seconds.”

They did.

It worked.

Everyone in line exhaled.

By the time Jenna stepped outside, she had filled the sleeve of her coffee cup with notes.

Wrong information.

Different standards.

A handoff nobody owned.

Outdated information still directing the work.

A piece of equipment that worked only because employees had learned its quirks.

Sitting outside the store, she looked over what she had written.

The people were trying.

That was clear.

The work around them was making success harder than it needed to be.

This Is Where I Think We Get Into Trouble

It would be really easy to walk through that store and decide somebody needed to do better.

Maybe the employees need more customer-service training. Maybe somebody needs to take ownership. Maybe the manager needs to communicate expectations more clearly.

And one of those things could be true.

But I’d want to know a lot more before I spent money fixing any of them.

Training won’t fix a process where nobody owns the handoff.

Coaching won’t update information people are being told to use.

Accountability won’t repair a card reader employees have learned to outsmart.

That’s the part I think we miss sometimes. We see the behavior first, so we assume the behavior is the problem.

It may not be.

The People Can Make a Bad System Look Better Than It Is

The employees in this scene are actually doing quite a bit right.

They’re apologizing. They’re trying to help the customer. They’ve learned how to get the equipment to work. They’ve figured out what to do when the formal process doesn’t quite get them there.

In other words, they’re compensating.

And capable people can compensate for a poorly designed system for a long time.

That can make the system look healthier than it really is.

Eventually, though, somebody gets frustrated. A customer has a bad experience. Something gets missed. A good employee leaves and suddenly nobody knows the workaround that lived in her head.

Then what looked like an individual performance problem starts becoming something much bigger.

What Would You Have Diagnosed?

That’s one of the questions I wanted readers to wrestle with while reading When Performance Stalls.

If you had walked into River & Ridge that morning, what would you have thought needed fixing?

The employees?

The manager?

Training?

Communication?

Or would you have looked at what was happening around all of them?

That’s why I wrote the book the way I did. I wanted you to see these kinds of problems happening before I handed you a framework and told you what to look for.

Then, once you’ve seen them, the second half gives you the six JL³ Performance Levers and practical tools you can use to examine a performance problem in your own workplace.

Because sometimes the person struggling with performance isn’t where I’d start.

Sometimes I’d start with the work.

If that sounds like something happening in your organization, When Performance Stalls will help you take a closer look.

Get your copy of When Performance Stalls.