The Secret Service brought a drone detection system to the July 2024 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. But when they needed to get it working, they had to borrow an Ethernet cable from the Trump campaign’s audiovisual team.
That was one of those details from John Oliver’s October 4 episode of Last Week Tonight that almost sounds like it was written for the joke. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. Watch “The Secret Service: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver”
I started watching the episode because I like John Oliver. Somewhere along the way, though, I realized I was mentally diagnosing performance problems. Oliver would bring up another issue with the Secret Service and I’d think, There’s one. That sure sounds like Tool Support. Then another example would come along and I’d recognize a different lever.
I wasn’t trying to think about the performance levers. It just kept happening.
When I developed the JL³ Performance Levers, I was thinking about problems I’d seen inside corporate organizations. The framework looks at six conditions that affect whether people can actually perform: Shared Capacity, Skill Readiness, Peer Norms, System Cues, Tool Support, and Mindset Alignment.
Let me give you a rundown of my thoughts as I continued to watch the show.
An Ethernet cable? Seriously?
Oliver spent part of the episode walking through what happened at the Butler rally where Donald Trump was shot in July 2024. One of the problems involved the Secret Service’s counter-drone system.
The Senate investigation documented that the shooter flew a drone near the rally site earlier that afternoon. The Secret Service system wasn’t operational during that flight, and troubleshooting eventually included replacing an Ethernet cable with one borrowed from Trump campaign audiovisual personnel. Read the Senate investigation of the Butler security failures
My reaction while watching was immediate: Well, there’s Tool Support.
An organization can buy sophisticated equipment and still fail to create the conditions people need to use it reliably. Having the tool isn’t the same as having a working tool, the necessary components, access to it when it matters, or support when something goes wrong.
That distinction matters because when performance breaks down, we tend to look at the person closest to the failure. Sometimes the more useful question is much more basic: Did we actually give them what they needed to do the job?
Then Oliver got to the training
This may have been the point where I really started thinking about the episode through the levers.
Oliver talked about the conditions Secret Service agents had been using to prepare for protecting the White House. In a congressional hearing, a member described visiting the agency’s training facility and being taken to an open field where they were told to imagine that a distant tree line was the White House and the road was Pennsylvania Avenue.
He compared the setup to kids playing football and deciding that a pine tree marks the end zone. Except this was training people to respond to attacks on the White House. Read the congressional hearing record describing the training facility
Wow. Sure sounded like Skill Readiness to me.
There’s a huge difference between telling people what to do and giving them an opportunity to practice doing it under conditions that resemble the real job. You can explain procedures perfectly and still send someone into an environment they’ve never actually experienced.
That got me thinking about training in our own organizations. How often do we teach the process but remove all the complications that make the real work difficult? People practice with clean examples, perfect information and plenty of time, then enter a job where none of those things exist.
Later, if they struggle, we say they were trained.
But were they? Or did they learn something in a classroom that only vaguely resembled the performance we eventually expected from them?
The workload was harder to ignore
As the episode continued, Oliver moved into staffing and workload. That’s where Shared Capacity became impossible for me to miss.
A 2026 Department of Homeland Security Inspector General report found the Secret Service averaged 21.4% understaffing during fiscal years 2023 and 2024. Agents reported approximately 1.2 million overtime hours, including consecutive shifts with little recuperative rest. The report connected those conditions with burnout and rising attrition. Read the DHS Inspector General staffing report
That’s more than a staffing number.
Shared Capacity is about whether people have enough time, energy and available attention to meet the demands of the work. We tend to reduce capacity to a scheduling question: Did we find somebody to cover it?
But a name on the schedule doesn’t tell you whether that person is rested, prepared or carrying the cognitive load needed to make good decisions. You can technically staff every position and still have a serious capacity problem.
That matters in any workplace. It matters considerably more when a momentary lapse could have catastrophic consequences.
“Doing more with less” made my ears perk up
Oliver also talked about the Secret Service’s long-running tendency to pride itself on doing more with less. That sounds admirable at first. Most organizations want people who are resourceful and willing to solve problems.
But there’s another side to it.
An independent review following the Butler shooting found repeated evidence of what it called an informal “do more with less” mindset inside the Secret Service. The panel warned that the attitude had affected decisions involving staffing, training, travel, resources and other parts of the protective mission. Read the Independent Review Panel report
When successfully working around inadequate conditions becomes part of the culture, eventually the workaround stops looking like a warning sign. It starts looking like what good employees are supposed to do.
That’s where I started thinking about Peer Norms.
Peer Norms are the informal expectations people absorb from the people around them. Nobody necessarily has to write them in a policy. People learn pretty quickly what earns respect, what good employees are expected to tolerate and which problems they’re supposed to quietly solve themselves.
There’s nothing wrong with being resourceful. The problem comes when resourcefulness masks a condition leaders should be fixing.
If employees repeatedly compensate for too few people, inadequate tools or unrealistic demands, the organization can start treating their ability to cope as evidence that the system works.
It doesn’t. The people are making it work.
That’s an important difference.
Then I started thinking about what matters most
Most of us associate the Secret Service with protecting the president, but that’s only part of its mission. The agency also protects other national leaders while continuing to protect the nation’s financial infrastructure and investigate financial crimes. Its own strategic plan identifies both responsibilities as part of the mission. Read the U.S. Secret Service 2025 Strategic Plan
Listening to Oliver describe the breadth of the work made me think about Mindset Alignment, but not because I think the agency should simply stop doing one side of its mission.
The question I kept coming back to was: When demands compete, how do people know what matters most?
That’s a leadership question.
Organizations routinely have several legitimate priorities. The trouble starts when those priorities collide and employees have to figure out for themselves which one should win.
You can tell people safety comes first, but if every decision rewards speed, they know speed really comes first. You can say employee development matters, but if nobody is ever given time to learn, people understand the actual priority.
Mindset Alignment isn’t about putting the right words on a wall. It’s whether employees understand what leaders value because the organization’s decisions consistently reinforce it.
That distinction felt especially important as I watched the episode. The Secret Service’s missions are both real. Its workload is real. Its resource constraints are real. When all of those things collide, somebody has to decide what gets attention first.
That’s why the episode stayed with me
What interested me most wasn’t simply learning that the Secret Service has performance problems. Every organization has performance problems.
It was how familiar the conditions were.
A sophisticated piece of equipment couldn’t do its job because something much more basic wasn’t in place. People were preparing for incredibly complex work in an environment that barely resembled the real one. Employees were working extraordinary hours with limited recovery time. Resourcefulness had become part of the culture. Multiple legitimate priorities were competing for the same limited capacity.
Take away the Secret Service uniforms and the presidential motorcade and I’ve seen versions of every one of those problems at work.
That’s exactly why I don’t think leaders should jump straight from poor performance to What’s wrong with this person?
A better place to start is: What conditions are we asking this person to perform in?
Look at the tools. Look at the preparation. Look at capacity. Pay attention to what people around them have learned to tolerate and what leadership decisions tell them actually matters.
You might still discover that the individual needs coaching, training or accountability. But at least you’ll be solving the problem you actually have.
And every once in a while, you may discover that what looked like a complicated performance failure started with something as simple as an Ethernet cable.